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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 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.

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

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.

My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.

Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.

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.

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