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'Increasing demands'

4 August 2008

'Amazon has been removing the 'buy button' from some of our books and removing some of our titles from promotional positions... to apply pressure on us to give Amazon even better commercial terms than it presently receives. There are important strategic reasons for us to resist completely Amazon's demands...

Despite these advantageous terms (the most generous in the English language world from publishers) Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours... If this continued, it would not be long before Amazon got virtually all of the revenue that is presently shared between author, publisher, retailer, printer and other parties.'

From a letter to authors sent by Tim Hely-Hutchinson, Group CEO of Hachette, quoted in The Times