Is Hachette Playing Dirty Tricks in Their Contract Dispute With Amazon?

It has been a week since news broke that Amazon and Hachette were in the middle of a nasty contract negotiation, and much ink has been spilled about Amazon's dirty tricks. The NYTimes has cited instances of Amazon running out of stock on Hachette titles, Publishers Weekly has posted a behind the scenes view of what's at stake, and yesterday GigaOm posted a roundup of responses to the negotiation.

But in spite of all this coverage I think there's an aspect of this story which no one has covered yet, and that is the possibility that