Given that publishers, authors, printers, bookstore and basically the entire publishing chain has done pretty much fuck all in the 20(!) years that Amazon has b

Given that publishers, authors, printers, bookstore and basically the entire publishing chain has done pretty much fuck all in the 20(!) years that Amazon has been active to even remotely innovate their industry, I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. Crying on the sideline about how evil Amazon is whilst doing nothing to service readers doesn't get any sympathy votes from me. And that includes Charlie Stross, who's work I love. I have money and e-reader, but if I want to buy his books, he sends me to... Amazon. To buy DRM-ed vendor-locked Kindle-only copies. Okay, Accelerando is an exception, but we're talking pretty much the most tech-savvy, open source minded fiction author out there. You can pretty much imagine the state of the rest of the industry. Amazon is the only party that innovates and tries to provide for the needs of the reader. They've earned their monopoly the hard way. Hachette is not the little guy. Hachette is a multinational that sat on its fat ass counting money for two decades.