I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.
Amazon is such a big player in publishing, but a lot of authors feel this connection to their publishing house and their editors who helped them get their books out there, so their loyalties tend to go that way.
I sell a lot of ebooks from my website and encourage authors to set up their own stores.
As we have seen again and again, when Amazon doesn't get the economic conditions from suppliers that it seeks, it simply goes its own way. In the book business, that has meant publishing its own titles under the various Kindle imprints. Now it's making diapers.
I use Amazon for books. I use Amazon for loads of other things. I regard Amazon as a source, as I think a lot of other people do.
I think I'm more marketing- and sales-oriented than others, and the notion of selling books continues to interest me.
Amazon is a marvelous conglomeration and delivery system for products of every imaginable function. But the book 'business' is really not the same as the sale of lawn rakes or adapters for telephones.