Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
If the article did warrant a political rant, it would have been nice if it had more than marginal relevance. The thread had moved to some discussion on accessibility of books. Not to a discussion of greedy billionaires and work practices and allegedly "parasitic" business models. Nor of the taxi industry in your particular part of the world.
Finally, it is interesting to note that you avoid any discussion of the conduct of the traditional publishers but actually praise them!
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Don't I love people who appoint themselves arbiters of the discussion. You are at liberty to discuss what you want but you don't own the discussion.
Anyway, I don't have an issue with the publishers. I don't complain about people who provide me with a valuable service wanting to make a decent profit.
The publishers have brought us the wide choice and quality of books that we enjoy today. The publishers aren't easily expendable, but Amazon is.
If Amazon were to collapse tomorrow, the reading habits of most people in the Western world wouldn't change a bit, let alone anywhere else.
Those who are supporting Amazon on MR seem to have a huge sense of entitlement. They want to read the books that are published by the publishers, but they believe that they are entitled to dictate the prices of those books. The ranting against "the elites" is basically not much more than the demand that others should offer you their work at bargain prices.
If indie publishing and Amazon's publishing are so great, then why don't you stick to those books and ignore the ones published by the major publishers?
We have heard plenty of pundits declare all sorts of business models as obsolete in the past, which are still going strong today. I don't believe in unlimited growth of ebooks to the detriment of paper books. Publishers will be around for a long time.