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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

It is neither predatory nor gouging, with TFA serving as perfect evidence. No one is compelled to agree to these terms.

When you own such a large portion of the ebook sales market, it very much could be considered predatory (bordering on monopolistic).

Larger authors are not compelled to agree to these terms sure, but if you’re a smaller publisher or author trying to get your work out there and noticed, it can be hard to gain ground without selling via Amazon.

As a "smaller author" who used Leanpub (not affiliated with them, just a satisfied customer – both reader and writer) to publish my Emacs Lisp book I can say that I don't care about putting it on Amazon, and I don't think I lost a lot (or anything) because of that.

OTOH, I published this book after about 7 years of weekly blogging, mostly about Emacs, so I think that everyone who might be interested in my book could easily know about it. And an intermediate Elisp textbook is rather a niche thing.

your niche is exactly the reason why you can get away without using Amazon.

Isn't that a great reason to not publish on Amazon?, you'd only increase their market share.

It's not as if Amazon is unaware, they'll fix their pricing system if enough people reject it.

Well, yes, it’s a great reason not to publish there, but only if you can afford not to do so. Amazon dominates the e-book market.

HN loves monopolies except when it's fashionable to hate them :)

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