Keeping Score

I’ve been reading (and participating in) discussion about the US DoJ’s recent antitrust suit against Apple and book publishers. In one particularly vocal crowd–mainly self-publishers like me–there’s an opinion about the whole mess that goes something like this:

• Apple is wrong.
• Smashwords (Mark Coker) is wrong.
• Scott Turow (president of the Author’s Guild) is wrong.
• The Independent Publisher’s Group is wrong.
• Cory Doctorow is wrong. Twice.
• The New York Times is wrong.
• The Atlantic is wrong.
• Wired Magazine is wrong.
• Forbes Magazine is wrong.
• The Seattle Times is wrong.
• The Wall Street Journal is wrong.
• Charles Stross is wrong.
• John Sargent (Macmillian) is wrong.
• Computerworld is wrong.
• Thousands of writers who successfully publish through the “Big Six” (like, say, JK Rowling) are wrong.

As far as I can tell, only Amazon, the DoJ, and Joe Konrath are right (and for those not in the US, it’s standard practice for state governments to pile on to antitrust suits).

Update: Apple has told the DoJ it wants a formal trial to defend against the DoJ’s accusations of price fixing. For those unfamiliar with this kind of thing, it’s almost unheard of for a company to demand an antitrust trial–that is, unless it feels almost certain of winning. My guess? A trial will make many people (including Amazon) very uncomfortable, because it offers a golden opportunity to make public what’s really going on in ebook publishing.

Luckily, Amazon’s never been sued in an antitrust suit. By the way, did you know the law firm leading the charge in the antitrust suit is in the same building as Amazon, and has done business with Amazon?

It makes for good link bait and website traffic to couch the struggles of publishing in two-dimensional, epic archetypes; a battle of “good” vs. “evil”, of “big” vs. “independent”, and so on.

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