Stephen Colbert

lately Amazon has become the Goofus of publishing news, the surly, inconsiderate and gauche kid who never seems to get anything right. This is not to say that Amazon is any less powerful in the marketplace or less likely to triumph in its ongoing war against book publishers. But on the P.R. front, in its most recent battle against the Hachette Book Group, the online retailer has stumbled again and again.

Six weeks after enlisting Edan Lepucki into his show's "war" with Amazon, Stephen Colbert is moving on, and taking the Colbert Nation with him. On Tuesday night, Colbert invited the California author onto The Colbert Report to talk about becoming a New York Times bestseller, thank the Colbert Nation for their support, and pass the baton to a new author. Alexandra Alter at The New York Times gives the backstory:

Mr. Colbert first brought attention to Ms. Lepucki's book in June when he had another Hachette author, Sherman Alexie, on the show to talk about

I try not to be a proponent for or against Amazon. But I have to say, I was a bit worried after reading David Streitfeld's article in The New York Times a few days ago, "Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It's Fed." If the title wasn't ominous enough, the sentiment of one of Amazon's authors, Vincent Zandri, was.

Amazon calls Edan Lepucki's new book California one of the "best books of July," but the highly anticipated novel about a post-apocalyptic world has been caught in a real-life battle.

Lepucki finds herself in the cross fire between Amazon and her publishing house Hachette, which have been in a contract dispute for months now. As a bargaining tactic, Amazon has been delaying shipments of some books, and in the case of Lepucki, refusing to make the title available for pre-order.

"In the space of one generation, [new] print books will be as rare as vinyl LPs. You'll still be able to find them in artsy hipster stores, but that's about it." - Jason Merkoski, author of Burning the Page: The eBook Revolution and the Future of Reading. Merkoski's opinion, which is not just melodramatic, but probably also wrong, nevertheless speaks to the future of the place where we buy our books. Many bookshops have gone the way of pharmacies, selling in categories far distant from their core products.

More Amazon/Hachette news bites: Stephen Colbert has apparently been taken in by the Hachette hype; he did a couple of segments on his show lambasting Amazon for making it harder for people to buy his books, including an interview with author Sherman Alexie. J.A. Konrath was not amused, firing back with a post intended to […]

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