I watched the video (rather than just relying on the transcript) and while I am inclined to agree that books are commodities, I think the only failing in her sp

I watched the video (rather than just relying on the transcript) and while I am inclined to agree that books are commodities, I think the only failing in her speech was the conflation of concerns that produced an incoherent thesis. On the one hand, she had a call to action for authors (and perhaps others in the publishing industry) to respect quality, to produce quality and to seek quality. But she ended up out of her depth by entering the Amazon/Hachette dispute with a poor understanding of the forces at play, and a lack of awareness of how Amazon has enabled new outsider authors to find broader recognition that she started her talk complaining about how it took her and her peers a half-century to find. The lamenting call for quality was inspiring. But the lack of awareness of how the industry has changed, and perhaps suffering from what JA Konrath calls the "Bookholm Syndrome" of being inside the publishing world too long that you start to empathize irrationally with your exploitative publishing company--that was bad. Or at least some kind of cognitive dissonance at work.