New publishing policy at Amazon angers authors

A power struggle has erupted between several national writers groups and Amazon.com Inc. over the company's new publishing policy, which some charge gives Amazon a monopoly on book printing. The new policy, announced March 31, says that "on-demand" publishers who don't use Amazon subsidiary BookSurge would not be allowed to sell their books directly on Amazon.com. On-demand printing allows publishers to print books as they are ordered, without the risk of having to predict public interest. "If they succeed in doing this, they'll have basically seized the supply chain, and they can pretty much call the shots and pay less to publishers for the books, which means less money going to the authors in many cases," said Paul Aiken, executive director of The Authors Guild, based in New York. The authors are fighting back with petitions to Amazon, the U.S. Justice Department and the Washington state Attorney General's Office.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/358465_amazon10.html

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