[darryl]

The OP quotes Hachette as wanting a contract "whose terms allow Hachette to continue to invest in writers, marketing, and innovation."

What does this even mean? Continued investments imply investments that Hachette are already engaged in. Is this a plea for more money for Hachette. It's authors, with the exception of a very few, would seem to receive better terms from Amazon. As for marketing, I would say that Amazon's marketing of it's products is certainly not second to Hachette's. Anyway, would not Hachette have terms in at least some of it's author's contracts allowing recovery of such marketing costs? Is Hachette expecting Amazon to subsidise the continuation of it's old business method's by contibuting to Hachette's marketing costs of books which do not sell. And the only recent innovation I can think of which Hachette participated in was agency pricing!

Long live Amazon. Yes, it may later obtain and abuse monopoly status, but it is far from that position at the moment, and certainly a far preferable choice to dominate the market than our wonderful traditional large publishers.