Dog fight

We all want to side with the underdog. When there's a clash of overdog vs uberdog I suppose the overdog's position is still relatively under, so that's why I say "excelsior!" to Macmillan and "ha ha" to Amazon.

In the space of 48 hours Macmillan and Amazon went from minor border skirmishes to all-out war, declared by Amazon and lost by same a short while later. Ultimately it all came down to Amazon's vastly inflated idea of its rightful place in the affairs of man, finally clashing with a publisher big enough to say "no". Amazon tried to impose terms on Macmillan, Macmillan weren't having it and so Amazon withdrew its listings for every single Macmillan title.

Macmillan controls a lot of imprints. Suddenly, with no warning or reason given, a very large part of the global book supply was unavailable through the world's largest book supplier.

To save you crawling all over the interwebs for further details, Charles Stross has written a useful guide to the battlefield: Amazon, Macmillan: an outsider’s guide to the fight.

If you're more a bottom line sort of person, John Scalzi has written an entertaining analysis of Amazon's kamikaze strategy: All the Many Ways Amazon So Very Failed This Weekend.

As you may have gathered by now, Amazon lost.

I'm not published by Macmillan or any of its imprints: other than general principle, I have no declarable interest in this. But I am still smarting, nearly 10 years later, from the punitive discounts Amazon imposed on Big Engine in return for the privilege of receiving a basic competent service from them: one that listed my titles accurately, didn't unilaterally declare them out of print and so on. Now I feel those wounds healing. A little.

The links effect

Links have started breeding on my blog.

A couple of days ago I got an nice email from Amazon inviting me to add a bit of HTML to the source code. I read it several times, I even looked at their demo page, and I still couldn't quite understand what it did. So I added it anyway out of curiosity.

Oh right, now I get it. Scroll down and look at the reading or read list at the bottom of the sidebar on the left. None of the links there are my own doing. Amazon cleverly scans my content for phrases it can identify with and makes its own links. Hover the cursor over one of them and a little preview window pops up. Neat. Note that it's not actually rewriting my own code to add these links - a quick check on View Page Source tells me that. Somehow these links are overlaid on top of what I've already written. If you follow through and actually buy the thing, I get a cut of your money. Apparently.

And they change. Yesterday, Vice Versa had a link to the 1988 movie of that title, but today it's gone. Maybe someone bought their last copy. This leads to the second unavoidable observation which is that they use guesswork. Amazon had no way of knowing that I was reading the 1880s original of a pompous father and wayward son accidentally swapping bodies, which is still very funny. Likewise the Good Shepherd link is to the Matt Damon movie of that name, not C.S. Forester's harrowing tale of the Atlantic convoys in WW2. Not seen the movie but I'm prepared to hazard a guess as to which is better.

If the pounds start rolling in, I may keep it; if not I'll drop it. Let's see.