This is Capitalism
by JS
I think creative people ought to avoid getting bent out of shape the second the sturm und drang of capitalism interferes with their cash flow. In many ways, the attacks on Amazon are getting so much purchase because many authors have sandboxes and and are not afraid of using them.
But here is another view. Amazon is facing serious competition in almost every business unit. Macmillan, on the other hand, is a constitutionally mandated and congressionally protected monopolist in the sense that they have the exclusive right to sell certain content.
Yet Jane Smith, Amazon engineer is not taking to the internet to whine about how her livelihood is imperiled because Macmillan is charging too much for e-books in an environment where fewer people are reading paid content, even though her personal security is possibly in greater jeopardy (iPad anyone?). Instead all we hear is John Smith, mid-list Macmillan author, describing how evil and anti-competitive Amazon is.
Look, the authors will be fine (at least modulo any future societal decline in reading), and if they turn out not to be, it won’t be because of Amazon.
Update: Consider.
