About the current dispute between Hachette and Amazon: We know there are two sides to every story. We have always had a great relationship with Amazon. Ok, that might be going too far, but they have been a great partner over the years and have performed wondrous, jaw dropping feats. Over the last few weeks, Amazon has chosen to disrupt the relationship between the supplier and the end customer. Fair enough, in a struggle over terms it’s not so strange a tactic for a retailer.
But Amazon’s stance doesn’t just affect a product. These are books. Books are written by authors, not publishers. They are the work of single individuals realizing their ideas into the world. As publishers, we are no doubt overly passionate about our small corner of that world, but controlling the flow of ideas is different from controlling the flow of consumer goods. In this dispute it is the flow of those ideas and the individual books that will suffer.
So we are going to do what we can to help. Tor.com is a community devoted to science fiction and fantasy, to those who read it and those who write it. Over the coming weeks we will be featuring titles on Tor.com by writers who are affected by the dispute. Tor.com doesn’t sell books, but hopefully we can build up some extra buzz. Doing our Torbit.
