This is censorship that has nothing to do with social or cultural bias’s or fears. This censorship is the result of an attempt to stop competition. If Amazon publishes a book then you may only be able to buy it at Amazon, at least according to Barnes & Noble – the last (and dying?) of the great bookstores.
In this morning’s GigaOm newsletter I was guided to an article “Barnes & Noble reportedly instructs local stores to pull Amazon titles” by Laura Hazard Owen (Oct. 2, 2012). This brings back to mind a similar incident regarding Seth Godin and his manifesto “Stop Stealing Dreams”. In Seth Godin’s case it was Apple who pulled the book because of several links that would send someone to the Amazon store to buy a book. You can read Seth’s response at “Who decides what gets sold in a bookstore”.
I seriously would expect that the same would prevail at Apple Books regarding Amazon published books. I wonder how long it will take before Google gets involved in the same lack of concern for the consumer experience? Now the titans of the book industry will try to control what you read.
Perhaps many new and good writers show go to self-publishing and then we can buy direct from the publisher and not have to deal with the middle-person. That would work as long as I could read it as an eBook.
At the moment my choice would be Amazon, even though Barnes & Noble has a good café with Starbucks coffee. Since I have an account at the three major ones; Amazon, Apple, Google (alphabetically), I can, and will, read reviews and then go where I can get the book. This will all be dependent, again, upon being an eBook.
I just remembered I have a Kindle and Kindle Fire, hmmm….
Incidentally the same author at Paid Content had published a different story the day before (Oct 1, 2012). There is a link to that story below.
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