Ugh. Amazon’s letter to Kindle authors makes me physically ill. So much wrong there I don’t know where to begin. Well, for starters a single bookseller should not demand nor have the power to set book prices in the industry, and this is the primary argument authors have with Amazon. The authors, as manufacturers of the work, must be the ultimate arbiter of the value of their words. Authors overwhelmingly choose to have publishers, rather than booksellers, determine what that cost should be, since they are the compositors of the work. To intentionally devalue a book to something below a ham sandwich or even a pack of gum not only harms authors but the expression of ideas in general, since it says those ideas are worth less and less. That is what Amazon is doing: devaluing books.

Second, Amazon presents itself as the victim, as if it has offered gracious terms to Hachette and its authors. But those terms only serve to grant Amazon more power than it already has. And seeing that Amazon is basically lying to its customers by delaying books and suggesting other books instead of those from Hachette, should we trust them with even more power?

Thirdly, Amazon says, “With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.” But this is a fallacy that plays into the public’s overwhelming belief that just because something is digital that it must be worth only the electrons used to store it, in other words, cheap and/or free. With an e-book there is the WRITING, and more WRITING, and months and months of WRITING, and this labor should NEVER, EVER be taken out of the equation when factoring price. And then there is the editing and the copy-editing and the graphic design and the layout, and the distribution (even ebooks need distribution) and you have to factor accounting time into that, not to mention publicity. To say that just because something is digital it must therefore be cheaper is to say that the source digitized information is worth less too. The value of a book lies in its content and not in the method the book is delivered to its readers. Amazon would do well to learn this soon.