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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Amazon: king of the books

Have you ever ordered a book from Amazon? Of course you have. Especially if you’re a college student digging around for change in the couch cushions to buy your next meal.

Amazon will sell you ?textbooks much cheaper than most bookstores.

It’s great for anyone on a budget.

What’s not to love about Amazon?

Well, the superstore of online shopping sites can be a corporate dictatorship.

Amazon is currently ?waging a war with Hachette, one of the country’s largest publishing houses.

After contract disputes, Amazon has resorted to ?underhanded tactics to ?apply pressure. These range from taking the “Buy” ?button off Hachette’s books to deliberately delaying ?shipping for weeks.

Now, I can’t really blame Amazon for wanting to win this legal battle. But these particular tactics have ?repercussions for both ?authors and customers alike.

Unless we are talking about best sellers, authors do not make much money. Writing is a labor of love, and nobody goes in planning on making millions of dollars in the course of his or her ?career.

By refusing to sell ?Hachette books, Amazon is cutting into the already slim profit margins of these ?authors.

They are the unfortunate casualties of a corporate war.

But even customers are affected by this battle. ?Barring a few exceptions, you cannot buy a Hachette book from Amazon.

There goes the next James Patterson novel you were planning to read. That new Stephen Colbert book? Yeah, you’ll have to order it from Barnes and Noble or, better yet, support a local ?bookstore.

Be proactive in this ?battle of books. Order yours from somewhere else. Yes, once this is all resolved and ?Hachette books go back on sale on Amazon, they might be cheaper. But publishing houses don’t have as large of a profit margin as one might think.

That extra 20 percent off might push publishing houses closer and closer to going out of business. In this worst case scenario, Amazon will have complete control of book sales. It is already ?halfway there with 50 ?percent of total books sales completed through Amazon.

Do you really want your choice of books determined entirely by Amazon?

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