In the meantime my investment in rooting for the Albertosaurus over the Allosaurus or vice versa remains somewhat limited.
Best analysis of the entire "battle" I've seen all weekend.
Ultimately, it’s not a moral question but a math problem.
Well, a math problem by way of economics.
Ultimately MacMillan and Amazon are fighting over which monopoly interest gets to have the power to exert their monopolistic pricing mechanism. Each of them wants it to be them. And in the end I expect the publishers will prevail unless a new model for publishing emerges out of this new technology. The publishers really have more leverage because as the content provider their monopoly is more important (you'd think that the authors would have more leverage still but their influence is diffused through the entire catalog that MacMillan owns the rights to, so MacMillan has the leverage). MacMillan did the exact thing that needed to be done to break Amazon's back. I actually think it's all over now - there's no way that Amazon is going to be able to force anything on any publisher now that the publisher doesn't want to do anyway. Amazon bluffed with a bad set of cards. Or, and I suspect this is more likely, someone high up in the organization (*cough* Bezos *cough*) threw a temper tantrum because he wasn't getting his way and did something without thinking it through.
Best analysis of the entire "battle" I've seen all weekend.
Ultimately, it’s not a moral question but a math problem.
Well, a math problem by way of economics.
Ultimately MacMillan and Amazon are fighting over which monopoly interest gets to have the power to exert their monopolistic pricing mechanism. Each of them wants it to be them. And in the end I expect the publishers will prevail unless a new model for publishing emerges out of this new technology. The publishers really have more leverage because as the content provider their monopoly is more important (you'd think that the authors would have more leverage still but their influence is diffused through the entire catalog that MacMillan owns the rights to, so MacMillan has the leverage). MacMillan did the exact thing that needed to be done to break Amazon's back. I actually think it's all over now - there's no way that Amazon is going to be able to force anything on any publisher now that the publisher doesn't want to do anyway. Amazon bluffed with a bad set of cards. Or, and I suspect this is more likely, someone high up in the organization (*cough* Bezos *cough*) threw a temper tantrum because he wasn't getting his way and did something without thinking it through.
Jer
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