Richard Russo doesn’t like the fact that Amazon encouraged people to price shop at bookstores to get credit on Amazon.com:
>Like just about everybody I’ve talked to about it, I first attributed Amazon’s price-comparison app to arrogance and malevolence, but there’s also something bizarrely clumsy and wrong-footed about it. Critics may appear weak today, but they may not be tomorrow, and if the wind shifts, Amazon’s ham-fisted strategy has the potential to morph into a genuine Occupy Amazon movement.
I get the argument, but it is incredibly one sided. Yes buying solely from Amazon and using local bookstores to gain insight into what you may like is shady at best. But with the increasing amount of Kindle readers out there — what are these people to do? Should they buy a physical book and ditch their beloved Kindles, iPads, Nooks, Android XX?
There’s no doubt that Amazon sells books cheaper than bookstores and that they can probably get those books to you the next day (sometimes the same day) for a very low cost. Certainly you can make the argument to support and buy local, but that idea completely fails once you start talking about ebooks.
Barnes & Noble knows this.
Your local bookstore? They’ve stuck their head in the sand proclaiming: paper is better.
Paper is dead — you just don’t know it yet.
And I haven’t even mentioned the self-published authors that Amazon is helping to launch…