As far as the bookstores and ebooks– the bookstores needed to move on this a lot earlier (3-5 years ago) to try to find a way to sell ebooks in the bookstores, though the big publishers likely wouldn’t have participated, and won’t until Amazon has them over a barrel, too. We’re offering our ebooks in bookstores (we offer the same discount as for paper, a really simple display and checkout process, and some nice incentives) and bookstores tend to look at us and act like we’re space aliens when we say “ebooks in bookstores”.

Personally, I’m skeptical that the 60% share that the complaint assigns to Amazon is monopoly-level to begin with. And Amazon isn’t using its proprietary DRM to drive its biggest e-book competitor, B&N, out of the market. If the current indies are forced to abandon the e-book market, prospective new entrants will find very few barriers to selling e-books — except for having to compete against Amazon, but of late the courts have seen fit to ignore the chilling effects of a “not a monopoly” company having obliterated its competition and being quite ready to do it again. Finally, I think it’ll be impossible to show that consumers would have benefited if indies could have sold DRMed e-books for Kindles.

This particular lawsuit strikes me as ill-advised, but that’s because of the specific circumstances.

Jeff Bezos has decided that he is going to make money off his customers, not his suppliers, employees and competitors, and hence he does everything to make the customers happy (unlike Paypal, who have decided that they will scam their customers whenever they feel they get away with it). But for publishers, Amazon squeezes margins without mercy, to the point where they kill small indie publishing houses. Amazon also messes badly with professional sellers on its market place, and is has been known to intentionally ruin IT startups to hire their talent after they go bankrupt. And I am sure that you are aware of the working conditions of people working in Amazon’s fulfillment centers, too.

That being said, Amazon is probably one of the most visionary companies on that little planet of ours, right there with Google. No-one plans so far ahead and executes so well.

The booksellers that are upset have the following options:
1) Build their own infrastructure. (Late to the game, but still…)
2) Sell through someone else, like B&N. (Good luck on that one, indies.)
3) Sell non-DRM books, like Baen did, making pot-loads of money. This has the added benefits of allowing you to sell anywhere and of not p*ss*ng off your customers. It unfortunately meant that, up until lately, you couldn’t sell bestsellers, but see 1) above.

Amazon is not required to be nice to competitors. In addition, DRM was initially driven by publisher requirements as much as Amazon. Amazon was pleased as punch to offer this service to publishers, to make them ‘safer’, but they didn’t require it. I suspect Jeff Bezos, who recall had a very clear, publicly espoused plan (see his 2007 article), was more than happy that the publishers demanded he jump into the briar patch, of course.

The fact that some independent booksellers haven’t established a viable infrastructure isn’t Amazon’s (or the big six’s) fault. Fictionwise had a good long run, which only ended when they sold out to B&N for a nice sum of money. I just checked, Powell’s is still in business.

Regards,
Jack Tingle