Yeah, like I said, I'm not very sympathetic to Hachette's position. Especially with the revelation that a large part of its ebook margins come not just from cos

Yeah, like I said, I'm not very sympathetic to Hachette's position. Especially with the revelation that a large part of its ebook margins come not just from cost savings over print, but from disproportionately higher cuts of what could be authors' royalties. This certainly isn't a case of David vs. Goliath. This is a case of an elderly, infirm Goliath having its lunch eaten by a younger, hungrier, smarter Goliath. The reason I'm not completely sympathetic to Amazon, either, is that, as a writer, I'm not in favor of any Goliath's controlling the market. Trading one master for another is progress of a sort, and it's necessary progress. But time will tell if Amazon's new world order is indeed better for writers. Many writers are being held hostage in this battle, especially those in Hachette's fold. It's one thing for folks like Patterson and Preston to take up Hachette's call to arms from their ivory towers, but the vast majority of writers are struggling to get by. Even the majority of successfully published writers. For every James Patterson, making tens of millions of dollars a year, you have thousands of midlisters who are lucky to make $50k. You even have "bestsellers" who are struggling to get by. (Indeed, the concept of "bestseller" differs remarkably from genre to genre, and category to category. Let us not assume that anyone who's earned the title "NYT Bestselling Author" is making James Patterson scratch.) As a group, authors have never held a lot of influence over their own fates. That just seems to be the way the market forces work. I can tell you that a lot of writers would rather take their chances in a crowded field with a 70% cut than in a beauty contest with a 10-15% cut. At the same time, they're scared about the prospect of monopoly over distribution. For them, this is sort of like a choice between the devil they know and the devil they don't.