E-book author Victoria Hudson doesn’t like Amazon or the power it seems to wield with independent writers. She didn’t want to sell her book and short stories on its Kindle Direct Publishing Select program, something she calls “too restrictive to authors.” Instead she chose an alternative book distributor based in the San Francisco Bay Area called Smashwords.
Plenty of people are upset at Amazon these days, but it took a small publishing company whose best-known volume is a toilet-training tome to give the mighty Internet store the boot.
When the digital dust settles from the battle over e-book pricing between Amazon, Apple (AAPL), publishers and the Justice Department, much of it will end up in the aisles of small independent booksellers like Green Apple Books in San Francisco.
Looming over this whole discussion is, of course, which I consider the Darth Vader of the literary world. I admire its success in creating a new, wildly successful business model, but it has a deserved reputation as a frequently unscrupulous competitor.
In the world of publishing, Amazon is Godzilla. It’s one of the largest book retailers in the country. It owns at least 60% of the eBook market, thanks to the Kindle. It’s known to breath fire at uncooperative publishers. When it moves, the ground beneath the industry shakes, and sometimes there’s collateral damage.
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