- Out here in the woods, at the end of not one but two dirt roads, in a shack equipped with a picture of the Dalai Lama, a high-speed data line and a copy of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience,” Amazon’s dream of dominating the publishing world has run into some trouble.
Douglas Preston, who summers in this coastal hamlet, is a best-selling writer — or was, until Amazon decided to discourage readers from buying books from his publisher, Hachette, as a way of pressuring it into giving Amazon a better deal on e-books. So he wrote an open letter to his readers asking them to contact Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, demanding that Amazon stop using writers as hostages in its negotiations.
The letter, composed in the shack, spread through the literary community. As of earlier this week 909 writers had signed on, including household names like John Grisham and Stephen King. It is scheduled to run as a full-page ad in The New York Times this Sunday.
I don't really get all the fuss around this, Amazon has a right to it's own business model and if you don't like it, tell your publisher not to put your books on their site. Yes, Amazon is the #1 bookstore, but they aren't the only one and as a writer you enter into a contract with the publisher, knowing that the publisher will have to work out deals with retail outlets, it's not always going to be rainbows and puppies. Although, I don't necessarily like the tactics of Amazon, as a book reader it sucks seeing some of these tactics.