Amazon shot itself in the foot:
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Orwell then went on to undermine Amazon’s argument much more effectively than Hachette ever has. “It is of course a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote. “Actually it is just the other way about … The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.”
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The real problem, the writer argued in an essay a decade later, “Books v. Cigarettes,” was with the books themselves. They had a hard time competing against other media — a point people are still making in 2014.
“If our book consumption remains as low as it has been,” he wrote, “at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.”
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http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...inst-hachette/