If you wonder what the deal is on the pricing of the new book on Amazon—it’s this. Penguin, which distributes DAW, wants to set the price of its e-book offerings. Penguin apparently pulled its e-titles from Amazon. Now Amazon has retaliated by selling Penguin-distributed books, including mine, at below half price. I don’t know how this will affect what I get paid, but this isn’t going to help the already-shaky finance of the book industry, which is already unable to deal properly with new writers and is being run by oil companies who don’t know beans about books or readers. Amazon, which sells everything in the universe, isn’t going to be hurt that badly if the whole book industry collapses.

Readers and writers and of course publishers will get hurt. The world of books and literature will be hurt. This is getting ugly. And may get worse. What happens when publishers close their doors and sell off all their rights to Amazon?

What happens when the people who sell everything and anything begin publishing all the books in the English language—read, publishing everything, no matter what its quality or origin, or copyright status? We’ve got Google on one side asserting they’ve got the right to publish everything, copyrighted or not, paying nobody, Amazon on the other, asserting they’ll publishing anything no matter the quality, with no care or guidance to the authors at all, and pay what they want—and I don’t think it’ll be good.

Support your local writer. We’re going to need all the help we can get to stay alive.