Quote:
Originally Posted by cfrizz
When Amazon decides to break the law, govt agencies will start scrutinizing and punishing them as well.
As for Amazons dominance in the market it is dominant because WE THE PEOPLE gave it to them because of their excellent prices and service! When those two facts change, we the people will stop giving them our money.
This is not rocket science or any great conspiracy, so either remove your tin foil hat and stick to the point of this thread or retreat to your bunker and wait out the apocalypse!
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BS. Whether or not a company that has a dominant market position is considered to have abused this position depends on a decision within the relevant authorities. These authorities have huge discretion in how they judge the situation. If you believe that this is a simple and objective result of an evaluation of "has broken the law"/"has not broken the law", then you are the one who is wearing the tinfoil hat.
As to the "point of this thread", it's difficult to see that point, not least because the piece that forms the basis of this thread is such a twisted mess.
What exactly is the supposed problem of these "elites"?
That people in Podunk can obtain the same books as those in Brooklyn now?
That anyone may publish any junk without quality control?
Those aren't serious arguments, are they?
No, the cause of his and other Amazon apologists' ire seems to be that the publishers aren't willing to bow to Amazon's demands and flog their books at bargain prices at Amazon.
I wonder why that should be a problem. If self-published books are just as good as those published by publishers, then why doesn't Amazon simply wait until the publishers have culled themselves?
The simple truth is that people are willing to spend more money on books that have been published by publishers because they have some trust as regards their quality control. If that's "elitism", then the author of that piece is happy with very low quality standards indeed.
What's never being mentioned is that publishers in the past also had the role to publish controversial books. Books that might result in litigation and that required a more robust defense than what can usually be mustered by an author on his own. With profits being squeezed and publishers being incorporated into ever bigger media companies, we can hardly expect this role to be fulfilled by the publishers any more, but can you expect Amazon ever taking over that role?