[fjtorres]

Well, the dam broke and now it is a flood. Gotta hand it to the NEW REPUBLIC, their idiot pieces draw a lot of broad attention:

From The Boston Globe: Is Jeff Bezos really the bad guy?

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2...vhK/story.html

Here are the latest developments in the ongoing morality play called “Hand-Wringing Writers Fulminate Against Seattle-based Book Monopoly Bent on World Domination.” When we last tuned in, a small group of authors angered by Amazon’s roughhouse tactics against the publisher Hachette had mushroomed into a movement a thousand strong. Literary superagent Andrew Wylie has jawboned many of his successful clients, including Philip Roth and Orhan Pamuk, into calling for a Justice Department investigation of Amazon.


“If Amazon is not stopped, we are facing the end of literary culture in America,” Wylie told The New York Times. Ungraciously, the Times reminded us that as recently as 2010, Wylie himself was negotiating sweetheart e-book deals with Amazon. How times do change.

Now comes author and New Republic editor Franklin Foer with the stirring philippic, “Amazon Must Be Stopped.” The breathing is heavy, (“a new golden age of monopoly;” “a trail of destruction;” “There seems to be no limit to Amazon’s demands’’), but the logic is light. I’m not the first to point out that, with 41 percent of the consumer book market, Amazon isn’t a monopoly.

I’m also not the first to point out that, in battling the French conglomerate Hachette over e-book pricing, Amazon isn’t exactly kicking sand in the face of a 96-pound weakling. Hachette has profit margins of over 10 percent on $2.6 billion of annual sales. It’s not exactly running a writers’ cooperative, if you gather my drift. How did it get to be the good guy?

Much more at the source, snark and all.
(Nice to see I'm not the only one who sees the gold-plated Au(rum) gang as mock-worthy.)

And then there is this thoughtful followup to yesterday's WP column:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/v...lace-of-ideas/

But the debate over Foer’s article has largely neglected one even more important benefit of Amazon’s efforts at cost-cutting. By reducing the price of new books, it facilitates the spread of ideas. Thanks to Amazon and its various imitators, books can now be bought more cheaply and quickly than at any time in human history so far. Moreover, the search technologies developed by Amazon greatly reduce the costs of finding new books that might interest readers. That, too, expands our access to the marketplace for ideas.

One of the nightmare scenarios posited by Foer is that Amazon might push prices so low that it will end up “deflating Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Egan novels to the price of a Diet Coke.” I for one would be thrilled to see that happen. It would mean more people can read more good books than ever before. I will be very happy if someday it becomes economical to sell my books, for the price of a Diet Coke too. That means a lot more readers for my ideas.

So... lower prices leads to more readers leads to better dissemination of ideas.
(Kinda like blogs help news travel much faster than newspapers could. )

Oh, and as a bonus, from the UK, the Bookseller reports that ebook readers buy and read more books:
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/e-...re-says-mintel

E-book fans are upping their reading habit because e-books are cheaper than print copies, according to new research from Mintel.

The consumer research firm's latest study, Books and e-Books UK 2014, shows that 26% of consumers who have bought an e-book in the last year are reading more than they used to because e-books cost less than paperbacks, a figure that rises to 38% of 16 to 24-year-olds.

Altogether, 31% of e-book buyers say they would prefer to read print books, but choose to buy e-books because they cost less. While 23% of book buyers said they felt that print books cost too much, only 16% of people felt the same about e-books. 36% of book buyers buy both e-books and print books, with 42% of those saying they always buy the cheapest version available.

Good golly miss Molly. Yes, Amazon must be stopped.

Your move Messrs Preston, Patterson, and Child.... time to put those riches to work. Going the cheapie astroturf way ain't working...the facts keep getting in the way of the fear-mongering.