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Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.

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.

Amazon is certainly not a perfect company. However, doctors, teachers, engineers, journalists, politicians, and labor unions are also on a continuum of consciousness, and none are perfect either. It is easy to judge and find fault with any company if that is what one's ideological biases wish to see.

Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.

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 can't be all good or all bad. I don't think that everything they do is evil; they've given a lot of authors access.

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 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.

The difference between Amazon and us is Amazon is more like an empire - everything they control themselves, buy and sell.