My Books Cannot be Found on Amazon

January 31st 2010 at 9:01 am

If you are a fan and want a copy, try indie bookstores.  I know you can order through a number of them.  Powell’s.com is one example.

I plan to strip links when I have time and re-point them to other stores or to Indie-bound.

In the meantime, I’m seriously saddened that the easiest place to find my books at this moment is not available to readers.

In general, the argument is about control of pricing (not about a particular price point for ebooks). It is between one of the largest publisher’s of physical books and one of the largest sellers of physical and electronic books.  It was probably prompted by Apple and the iPad.

For those of you who are interested in understanding the current kerfuffle, here are a few good links:

Tobias Buckell’s “Why my Books are No Longer for Sale Via Amazon.”

Charlie Stross also did an excellent job, in his post titled  “Amazon, Macmillan:  an outsider’s guide to the fight.”

My own simpler version is in the post below.

The longest discussion anywhere is surely the one at Whatever, which is John Scalzi’s blog. It’s up to about 274 comments at the moment.

Of interest, many people were already mad at Amazon for the ability to take books away (remember the removal of the book 1984 in what can’t have been an accidental statement that they can be big brother?) and for Amazon’s “mistake” regarding GLBT books.  In spite of those things, I’ve been really loyal to Amazon for a long time.  I like their recommendation engine.  I like the convenience of being a Prime customer and I like it that I can order books with my food via Amazon Fresh.  I live close to their headquarters and I spend a lot of money with them.  I like my Kindle (and yes, I want an iPad too – but I’m a tech geek and an early adopter with a Kindle, an iPhone, a fitbit and two iPods, not to mention numerous computers).

I’m reading two books on the Kindle right now and went to sleep reading it even though I’m furious with Amazon for this move.  This might be the straw that breaks my loyalty.  I woke up dreaming of smashing my Kindle on the sidewalk and talking a picture of it and posting that on YouTube.  If I do that, I will be greatly saddened by the act.

Filed in News. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use this URL to trackback.