On Wed, Dec 01, 2010 at 06:27:50PM -0500, Bowerbird@aol.com wrote:
.... it's important to note that neither amazon nor barnes&noble are the rogue parties here. they are merely _selling_ e-books being provided to them by the real rogues -- rogue publishers. yes, the booksellers take a cut, and thus they do profit, a bit, but they also suffer more when the public turns bitter on them, so i'm sure they don't particularly _like_ this thorny situation...
Incorrect, at least in the case of the book the WashPost article was about. The imprint publisher is Amazon Digital Press. I'm quite certain this is simply Amazon Inc. THEY are the publisher. When interviewed for the article, their PR rep wanted to hide behind the fact that they hired someone or otherwise outsourced some of the harvesting. This is a partial excuse for making a mistake, but does not remove responsibility. It's like a newspaper hiring a freelancer to write an article: it's contracted work for hire. There is no question about who is responsible: it's the people who specified and paid for the work. (We're only speculating that Amazon outsourced this particular book. Who knows how it got onto their site? All we know from primary evidence, the Amazon sales/catalog page, is who the publisher is: Amazon.) Amazon does have facilities for rogues (or any other individual or business) to sell through their site. [Yes, this is something I'm looking into again (and something I encouraged people to volunteer to do previously -- the fact that I don't have time to do it myself doesn't mean I'm against it. To the contrary.)] But the book in question is clearly published by Amazon. -- Greg