Wow. I'm surprised Amazon didn't leave the hurt on longer, find some way to ensure used stock of the most important Macmillan titles to block revenue to Macmillan, go all out tactical maneuvers on this one. Their not-even two week old impressively ambitious strategy is already cracking and I suspect once one publisher has stiff-armed them, their ability to reel-in the others will be nullified.
I don't really have a team I'm rooting for here, but this is as close as I get to watching sports and the quarterback for one team just got taken off the field in a stretcher 2 minutes into the game. Man, and I thought the final bit of this was going to be Bezos vs. Jobs slugging it out over the future of publishing, now it's looking like it'll underwhelm.
Going nuclear on Macmillan was a mistake. It made Amazon look like the bully, and I wouldn't be surprised if it scared the other major publishers into standing behind Macmillan.
That's believable. But Amazon basically declared war on book publishers two weeks ago anyway. It's disappointing that when the publishers (predictably) pushed back that Amazon didn't have something more nuanced than this worked out.
I figured going nuclear was part of a scorched earth strategy, "You can die now or later..." sort of thing. From the (admittedly, little) that I understand of the publishing industry, it's fragile enough that there was at least uncertainty in what the result of such would be.
I don't really have a team I'm rooting for here, but this is as close as I get to watching sports and the quarterback for one team just got taken off the field in a stretcher 2 minutes into the game. Man, and I thought the final bit of this was going to be Bezos vs. Jobs slugging it out over the future of publishing, now it's looking like it'll underwhelm.