I sympathize with authors that are hurt by this battle, but it just shows that Amazon's marketplace is becoming more important to their sales than their publisher is.
No one has said that they are. Likewise, the affected publisher, and the news media, are not obligated to fail to inform the public of Amazon's tactics so that they are aware that Amazon having smaller-than-usual discounts, "not available" notices, and long shipping times may well be a sign not of any issue with the availability of the book, but of Amazon's disputes with the publisher, and that therefore if they are encountered when looking for a particular book, a consumer would be well advised to look at other online retailers, who, while their usual discounts may be lower, may have better discounts for the book at issue or have it available when Amazon says its unavailable, or have it with a more reasonable shipping time when Amazon does not.
Amazon is essentially leveraging the trust that consumers have in them as presenting a seemingly comprehensive catalog and best terms in the online book retailing business to selectively pressure publishers, and its completely fair to inform consumers that, in the particular case of these kinds of disputes, that trust may, however well earned it was previously, not be warranted -- and what the particular symptoms are that such a dispute is affecting the book you are looking for.
(General note: Please at least somewhat carefully read over that before arguing. First, I'm only saying that it's suggestive, not proof, and secondly, there's a lot of misconceptions about what exactly is forbidden w.r.t. monopolies.)
The book publishers have done a great job painting this as a David vs. Goliath story, but it's really two Goliaths battling over a shift in publishing and distribution.
Talking about "hurt a publisher" is broadening the scope too far of what a monopoly is. A large retailer taking your products off of its shelves will hurt you in the sense that you'll make fewer sales, but that doesn't mean they have monopoly power. All it means is they have non-zero negotiating leverage with you. If you don't like it, go sell your books on Barnes and Noble or eBay or direct to customers on your own website.
Think for a moment about why we hear all this wailing about Amazon in the book market but not in the market for e.g. AWS, even though Amazon has a large market share there as well. It's because in the book market the publishers are also Amazon's competitors and they're the ones wailing. Because Amazon wants everybody to buy eBooks, the vibrant success of which gives authors significant leverage over publishers once it becomes viable to forgo a print edition entirely unless publishers provide sufficiently attractive terms.
That puts the squeeze on print publishers from both ends. Amazon is demanding lower prices from them and authors are given leverage to demand higher royalties. That's the natural state of the market when your product requires you to operate an industrial scale printing facility and have a significant unit reproduction cost for your product and competitors are providing similar customer value by copying bits. The print publishers are screwed and they're trying to figure out how not to be, but they're already dead and they just haven't hit the ground yet.
If customers in practice had easy and significant choices, they'd just go elsewhere easily and the publisher would feel no pain.
They kind of are. You can get into the whole bit where it's an antitrust violation for a group of companies that should be competing to instead get together and collude with each other, but that doesn't have any relevance to Amazon. Nobody is accusing them of colluding with anybody.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with the Wikipedia article. Are you reading the list of conduct which is prohibited for monopolies (and cartels) as something you expect to be prohibited in general?
> If customers in practice had easy and significant choices, they'd just go elsewhere easily and the publisher would feel no pain.
That's not how it works. If Macy's stops carrying your clothing line, you're going to lose a nontrivial amount of sales even though they have a hundred other competitors. All profitable companies have a little bit of market power or customers and suppliers would squeeze their margins to zero and put them out of business.
> They kind of are.
Not in US antitrust law, where market power and monopoly power are mostly defined in relation to empirically demonstrated effective power to raise prices or exclude competitors. [1] The existence of effective competition would deny these abilities (by definition), but actually having other competitors exist in the market at issue doesn't. So, the statement that they are not strictly about "not having any other options" is precisely correct.
[1] See, e.g., http://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-an...
What they're doing is actually a demonstration of their lack of monopoly power. When they raise the price they charge for a book, any customers doing comparison shopping who want that book in particular will get it from a different retailer. If Amazon had monopoly power you would instead expect substantially all customers to either pay the higher price to Amazon or not buy the book from anyone.
The market characteristic that Amazon is taking advantage of is that if they raise the price for books from one publisher, it shifts impulse purchases from that publisher to another for customers looking through Amazon's website to find a new book to read. It's essentially the same strategy as putting the product of the publisher you don't like at the back of the store, or replacing mention of it in your promotional materials with mention of a competing product you also sell. The publisher cares a lot more than Amazon about which publisher's books Amazon sells more of, which provides Amazon with negotiating leverage against the publisher. All retailers have that leverage over their suppliers. It doesn't require monopoly power. Obviously being bigger gives you more leverage, but being big and having a monopoly are not the same thing.
There is a difference between what something is and what you can use as evidence of it. There is this whole issue in antitrust law about how you define the market. For example, is MacOS in the same "market" as Windows? The accused monopolist always wants to paint the market as broad. Microsoft says it doesn't have a monopoly because Apple is competing with it. If Microsoft claims the market is that broad, but they can still do all the things you would expect a monopolist to be able to do and customers don't abandon them, it's evidence that the supposedly competing company isn't actually providing competition and they do actually have a monopoly.
> The existence of effective competition would deny these abilities (by definition), but actually having other competitors exist in the market at issue doesn't.
That's just a language trick. Effective competition comes from having competitors. If you don't have effective competition it's because your "competitors" aren't actually competing with you, either because they're cooperating or because they're not actually offering the same product in the same market (i.e. in either case they aren't actually competitors).
If Walmart has enough local monopolies, this is a self-reinforcing strategy, since it's unlikely all of the monopolies will be challenged at once, and Walmart can thus have a few of them with unusually low prices while the rest sustain that one during the conflict (since they're guaranteed to have business, being the only store in town).
So take Walmart. Do they have a local monopoly? First, question, on what? If you want to buy a television then they almost certainly don't, because they have strong competition from Amazon and six dozen other Internet retailers, and on top of that customers tend to be willing to drive out of town to save real money on a big ticket item.
But what about, say, groceries? That pretty much puts the Internet out of the running, because you can't ship a single gallon of milk in a refrigerated truck for anything resembling a competitive price. So then the question is, how far away is the nearest local competitor? If it's only a five minute drive, maybe that's enough competition. If Walmart's prices get out of hand people will start to make the drive. But what if it's 15 minutes? 30 minutes? 45 minutes? What if a substantial portion of the local population doesn't own a vehicle and that "15 minute" drive is a two hour walk? So maybe some Walmart stores have a local monopoly on groceries.
But wait, there's more. If Walmart's local prices start to get out of hand, how hard is it for a competitor to open up? It turns out the answer is, not very hard. A small grocery store is a one person operation. Low barrier to entry. If new competitors spring up six hours after Walmart raises their prices, they can't actually raise their prices very much no matter how far away the nearest existing competitor is. Which is why, even in towns with only that one Walmart, it still doesn't cost $20 for a gallon of milk.
It would only take a local wage initiative, for instance, to likely bother the closest Walmart. So there's an inherent incentive not to let prices rise so much that people are angry enough to get the government involved because they can no longer buy milk (or food).
Amazon's big cachet was always "Earth's biggest selection". If they are going to behave like cable companies and refuse to sell books from major customers, they are really failing their customers.
If I want to buy a book, I shouldn't need to know or care about who publishes it, and whether or not they are in a pissing match with Amazon. The first time I run into that situation will be the last time I use Amazon.