Amazon vs. Hachette... I've commented on this briefly before. To me, the whole kerfuffle seems grossly overblown. Amazon's efforts are entirely consistent with the disintermediation that the web brought to many industries. Hachette is acting like the buggy whip manufacturers when cars first came out. Hachette will lose in the end – it's just a matter of when – and consumers and authors will win, along with Amazon.
I've felt a little lonely in this opinion. The lamestream media absolutely delighted in the “feud”, and coverage has been overwhelmingly pro-Hachette. Yesterday, though, I ran across a couple of articles by people who share my perspective, and have some interesting points to make: CoyoteBlog and Megan McArdle. Reason has been taking the same position since the news broke. You might note a pattern there: all three sources lean libertarian (Reason rather overtly so). The dominant ideologies (progressive and conservative) tend to support Hachette's position, for different reasons, with a few exceptions on the conservative side. There really aren't all that many issues where the libertarians stick out quite so much (drug legalization is another), so it's interesting to see that this is one. Probably it just boils down to the libertarian notion that it's best to keep government out of things, whereas both progressives and conservatives (these days) seem to agree that BIG BAD GOVERNMENT is a good thing...
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