[fjtorres]

Publishing apologists arguing that they can't stop doing business through Amazon because too much of their business depends on Amazon are being disingenuous (some say intellectually dishonest) because the only reason Amazon is such a big part of their business is because their actions and policies make everybody else a smaller player.

Do we need to rehash the list of trade publishing's "crimes" against retailers and consumers yet again?

If Amazon has "too much power" over that subset of the publishing world it is because those publishers keep hurting and killing off their competitors.

Witness the latest fiasco: BPH ebook revenues dropped by 15% over 2015 (and since Agency Deux came on staggered, the full effects will only be felt this year) and since ebooks provided 30% of their revenues, that corresponds to a ~5% drop. The goal was to help B&M, but all the B&M retailers combined saw was a 2.3% increase on what is maybe half of the BPHs total business; they shifted (maybe) 1.7% of their revenue to run through B&M channels!! Applause all over! B&M bookselling is back! The ebook fad is over!
(No mention of how much of that 2.3% is is sales of toys, pillows, and markers for the coloring books.)

Uh...
So where did the other 3% of BPH sales revenue go?
Not Apple--they don't sell pbooks.
Not Google--ditto.
Kobo? Nope. (Rakuten just took a write-off becsuse of their declining book value.)
Nook? Riighhhttt...

Anybody care to guess where those revenues that used to flow though Amazon competitors went? (B&N online? No growth there: they're still cleaning up their new website. They should be done by 2020. Maybe.)

So far, the tally of Agency Part Deux (with apologies to the HOT SHOTS) is big growth by Indie, Inc, decent growth for Amazon in both digital and print, measurable losses at Amazon's ebook competitors, and maybe a few crumbs to the B&M retailers forced to go distributirs becsuse they're too small for tradpub to bother with. (Some of which get better prices and service restocking from Amazon than Ingram.)

With enemies like those Amazon barely needs friends.

Reminds me of the rise of MS Office in the late 80's.
Gates went out, hat in hand, begging Word Perfect and Lotus to support Windows 3.
No dice. They were supporting Unix. NextStep. OS/2. Even Amiga and Atari.
"You have too much of our business!We need alternatives Let them run the DOS version!"

So MS Word became Word for Windows,MS did Excel for Mac and Windows, they bought PowerPoint, and Office was born. And then Dell asked to bundle a copy of office with their Windows PCs...

This has happened before.
It will happen again.
Railing against successful companies hurts them none but often helps them by misleading their competitors.

Print is back. Digital is fading.
Yup, keep repeating that, tradpubbers.
Windows is fading too.
So is Google.
Facebook.
iPhone...

Even them newfangled automobile carriages...

Keep on railing against the future.
(And the present.)