Amazon.com has a long history (well, as long as the company's existence, anyway) of rather nasty, back-stabbing anti-competitive practices. Their legal interactions with the Amazon Bookstore (a much older and well-known-within-certain-circles feminist bookstore in Minneapolis) leave a bad taste. I once heard an interview with amazon.com's founder where he was boasting about the shady tricks he pulled in the early days to get around publishers' minimum wholesale order requirements in order to avoid having amazon.com carry any actual inventory. And then there was the April 2009 event where amazon.com "accidentally" (but extremely systematically) removed all indexing and sales-ranking data from gay/lesbian/queer-related books -- except, mysteriously enough, from anti-gay polemics -- such that if you tried to search on any of those topics the only books that would turn up would be of the "How to Cure Yourself of teh Gay" variety.
And separately from the specific issues with amazon.com, I believe that the only way to preserve a wide range of consumer options is to preserve a wide range of competing commercial venues. A vendor like amazon.com will offer to sell you everything today in order to establish a virtual monopoly, but once they have that monopoly, you're stuck buying only what they choose to sell you. And what if they don't choose to sell you queer-positive books ... or books from publishers who refuse to give amazon a bigger discount than they give everyone else ... or print-on-demand books from any publisher other than amazon's in-house POD division. (Oops, they already tried that last one, too.)
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Date: 2010-05-07 05:56 am (UTC)And separately from the specific issues with amazon.com, I believe that the only way to preserve a wide range of consumer options is to preserve a wide range of competing commercial venues. A vendor like amazon.com will offer to sell you everything today in order to establish a virtual monopoly, but once they have that monopoly, you're stuck buying only what they choose to sell you. And what if they don't choose to sell you queer-positive books ... or books from publishers who refuse to give amazon a bigger discount than they give everyone else ... or print-on-demand books from any publisher other than amazon's in-house POD division. (Oops, they already tried that last one, too.)