[girvo]

I'm as pro-tech and pro-disruption as the next entrepreneur, but come on. Amazon is an 800lb gorilla, not a start-up struggling to find traction, and if the acusations in this piece are true (and what I can find suggests they are), then that's anti-consumer behaviour: Amazon own 1/3 the entire market for books. This affects us, the consumers, and hurts authors, all because Amazon pushed for better terms and Hachette didn't want to give them.

Regardless of the company, I dislike it when tactics like this are used. Comcast's net neutrality issues are another great example.

[revelation]

This seems to be a very positive interpretation for Hachette, which is incidentally exactly what the article seems to push for, while claiming Amazon is acting maliciously.

The interest of authors is very clear: sell as many books as possible. They are paid a meagre sum per book (a dollar, maybe?) so they really don't care about the price other than that it is as low as possible to stimulate sales, but they have no control over pricing regardless.

Hachette, meanwhile, needs to keep prices up since any reduction would come directly from their margin, given that they pay authors a very low and fixed sum.

Amazon of course, as any other distributor, wants to get better conditions from Hachette and naturally uses its customer base to put weight behind what they are asking for. When the deal failed, they presumably had to continue buying books under, to them, unacceptable conditions, so they did two things to consolidate their losses:

1) slash discounts from Hachette books 2) buy less Hachette books

I'm not including the recommendations for other books, because if you have used Amazon at all in the last 10 years, this is just how their website functions regardless if the product at hand is a book from Hachette or a sponge.

If you want to blame someone here, blame Hachette or the relationship between traditional publishers and authors. As I've pointed out above, the interests of the two parties are not well aligned at all. Maybe it is true that Amazon pushes for deals hard to swallow for publishers, but if they are paying authors a dollar on a $10 book sale, that is hard to believe. If their overhead is that large, capitalism demands they are put out of business, and this time it is just Amazon picking up the slack, when it could have been any distributor.

[cstross]

They are paid a meagre sum per book (a dollar, maybe?) so they really don't care about the price other than that it is as low as possible to stimulate sales

Wrong.

We are paid a royalty which is a percentage cut of the sale price. Often a percentage of the net receipts the publisher gets for the books. So amazon's tactics come directly out of our pockets.

Hachette do not pay authors "a very low and fixed sum". We're in a profit-sharing arrangement with them. No profits for Hachette? No profits for the authors, either.

Please refrain from disseminating information on HN about a business you aren't actively involved in without first engaging in some fact-checking.

(Disclaimer: I am a full-time professional author and Hachette is one of my publishers in the UK.)