Re: [redacted] Amazon
Actually, I support @Brenda McViking - I'm a small time indie author with an indie publisher.
There are a lot of people trying to game the Amazon system to get cash from it. The readers and genuine authors are the ones who are suffering.
No one trusts a corporation whether Amazon or other publisher, who has a vested interest in their own wares. The corporates put wonga on the table to devour the social sites, like Amazon did with GoodReads, so the reader faces a massive haystack to find a tiny needle; that fabled thing called, "a good read." Very rare beast these days.
The system, as a whole, doesn't help authors either. Loads of snake-oil peddlers offering their own books on tips and tricks to become better authors and a load of it is utter rubbish which is of no help to anyone, other than to make an impoverished author even more impoverished.
The Amazon book loaning system is reported to be a waste of time due to the system gaming that is going on; all those short works that people are throwing together deliberately to fleece the consumer (waste their precious time) and grab a share of the pot.
While Amazon are right to be attempting to sort this out, they are going about it in completely the wrong way. They're just trying to fix something at as little cost to them as possible when, with a bit of oomph behind it, they could actually do something better for the world at large and make themselves in to the good guy rather than the company that we all have to suffer. But .. oh ... shareholders. I forgot about them. That's buggered that idea then.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
