Is Amazon Evil?

Excerpts:

Today an estimated 75 percent of online book purchases in the United States are made through Amazon, and its overall market share in book sales is astonishingly high. Some publishers make more than half of their sales through Amazon. So when Bezos rang the death knell for the physical book, people paid attention. Even before the Kindle, Amazon wielded enormous influence in the industry. Now it is positioned to control the e-book market and thereby the future of the publishing industry.

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Nonetheless, cases of disappearance continue. Amazon doesn’t always go as far as delisting books entirely. Sometimes it just makes them impossible to purchase by taking the “buy” button off a title’s page. In 2008 two huge British publishers—Bloomsbury and Hachette—had their buttons pulled. That same year, Amazon also removed buy buttons from any printon-demand publisher that didn’t use Amazon’s on demand printer, Book-Surge, a move that led to an antitrust lawsuit in which Amazon agreed to pay a settlement to a competitor, though it admitted no wrongdoing. The Author’s Guild recently launched WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com in order to keep track of buy buttons.

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Is Amazon Evil? via Alternet