This is an oddly "poor publishing cartel!" story, which has echoes of our friends at the MPAA and the RIAA without the venom, but a good helping of the cynicism

This is an oddly "poor publishing cartel!" story, which has echoes of our friends at the MPAA and the RIAA without the venom, but a good helping of the cynicism. Let's see if I have this straight: The long and short of the article is that everyone's scared of Amazon, because Amazon is actually selling what consumers want, and are leveraging their consumer power to cut out the publishers completely. This has the appearance of a big win for consumers and for writers, but the publishers worry that they can't "mold talent" any more, and have finally realized that the middleman loses when he forgets to provide what people want. It's a complete play-by-play of the Kill Hollywood models we've been talking about recently. NYT paints the publishers as a poor industry who are getting swirlies from the school bully, so they really hope that Barnes & Noble will save them. As always with the cartels, they want to hold on to the past and their print books (even when they that put the ridiculous, onerous DRM on their e-books and people are still buying them). What they won't do is acknowledge that Amazon has changed the game on them, and fight Amazon toe-to-toe: ie. actually merge with Barnes and Noble. They want a proxy battle, and if B&N eats it, then they don't lose anything. Personal prediction: without a merger with one or two publishing companies, B&N as we know it dies within 5 years. Renting that floor space and paying those employees is just too much overhead. The last play will be to shutter their big stores, and cut themselves right down to small boutique stores on highly foot-trafficked areas, that focus entirely on pushing Nooks and eBooks.