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By Chris Meadows

PBS’s MediaShift blog looks at whether Amazon’s self-publishing operations might be short-changing authors, but doesn’t really seem to do a whole lot by way of saying yes or no apart from simply posing the question. The article discusses Amazon’s direct publishing pricing practices, and takes a look at a couple of authors who publish through Amazon, but doesn’t really seem to draw any conclusions.

Though it doesn’t really come right out and say it explicitly, the article seems to be taking the tone that Amazon is bigger than everyone else, therefore it must be evil. Some of its examples leave a bit to be desired, such as the author whose books didn’t sell well at $9.99, so she went straight to 99 cents and sold 3,000 copies a month. There are a whole lot of price points in between the two, after all.

And then there’s the bit toward the end where author Liz Funk complains that Amazon is simply too darned big: "in similar ethical dilemmas, you can say, ‘Oh, I don’t shop at Wal-Mart,’ but especially for indie authors, you can’t say that you won’t make your titles available on Amazon because it’s essentially cutting off your nose to spite your face when no one has come up with a way to sell lots of books without Amazon."

Say what? You’re comparing apples and oranges, Liz. Perhaps you should be comparing instead the plight of the manufacturers who supply Wal-Mart, given that they face pretty much the same dilemma: meet Wal-Mart’s demands (which are, I gather, considerably more burdensome than those Amazon imposes on self-publishing authors) or lose a huge marketplace of their own.

Or perhaps you should be comparing not shopping at Amazon. There are plenty of people out there who do that, too, for similar ethical reasons, and I gather they find it just as easy to do as they would not to shop at Wal-Mart.

And finally the article flaunts the tired old bogeyman of self-publishing as slushpile.

Anyone can contribute to the site, making separating the good from the bad difficult. Bloggers have recently complained that spam is popping up in the Kindle marketplace — making it unclear what is a book and what is a flashy cover containing no content.

And, gosh, Amazon has created its own publishing imprints, which could (gasp) price e-books lower than traditional publishers! Horrors! Amazon might end up displacing traditional publishers as some kind of e-book gatekeeper.

I mean, seriously. Amazon does plenty of obnoxious things, but this article doesn’t really deal in specific things. Instead it traffics in speculation and opinion. It’s like they think Amazon is evil only because it’s successful.

 
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