An anonymous reader writes: As author of several (averagely successful) books, I decided to self-publish through Amazon's KDP initiative. Today I get an email (more like a novel) urging me to spam Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch, to complain about the price of their eBooks. They've given me his email, what I should say (quotes like "We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks.", and "They can and should be less expensive.
Lowering e-book prices will help — not hurt — the reading culture, just like paperbacks did." and "Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon's offers to take them out of the middle.") ... this is despite the fact none of the KDP books I've published are (by definition) published through Hachette. i.e. they've used an email exclusive for KDP, for propaganda against an unrelated company.
They also complain that Hachette are 'part of a $10 billion media conglomerate' when Amazon market cap is $146 billion.
They complain that ebooks should be cheaper because there's no printing etc... ignoring the fact that authors, editors, and _people_ need to get paid. (While Amazon invest in drones, and pay peanuts for their staff.)
And they continually reference George Orwell as being 'the other guy' ignoring their own practises of tracking ('who also bought...') and patent abuse.
When I found they've setup a web site claiming about 'readers united'.. when realizing it was their corporate shill site, I screamed and posted this.
Am I being too angry about this? Are they abusing their position?