Finally: much hullabaloo is being made of the fact that, at an “ebook summit” staged by Mediabistro, someone said what MobyLives has been saying since we started, which is that Amazon.com is breaking the law. Okay, Bob Livolsi, founder of the ebookstore Books on Board, was a tad more equivocal than that, but only a tad. Here’s what he said:

At the end of the day, people need to have the courage to speak out. The predatory pricing practice by Amazon has pulled the industry along, and the Federal Trade Commission should have paid attention. Ultimately the authors will pay out of their income. This is an attack on literature so Amazon can capture control of the industry. They think they will be the iTunes of literature.

It’s a monopolistic play that has nothing to do with value for the consumer. It’s an interesting scam by a very large corporation and I think we should wake up. It hasn’t helped grow the market; it has concentrated the market in Amazon . . . It’s been seventy years since people got away with [such actions] because the anti-trust laws used to be enforced, but we didn’t have enforcement for eight years.

The comments have gotten widespread attention. In a Bookseller story, Gayle Feldman reports that Livolsi “woke up every single soul in attendance.” A report by Jason Boog at GalleyCat (owned by summit sponsor MediaBistro) says Livolsi “received a rousing ovation” for what might have been “the conference’s most dramatic comment.” And in a Publishers Weekly report, Calvin Reid — who moderated the panel from which Livolsi made his comments — said, “LiVolsi received a rousing ovation from the audience,” and that he was also

outspoken in his criticism of Amazon’s e-book pricing practices, noting that the “mathematics of its pricing just don’t hold up.”  LiVolsi also charged that Amazon’s pricing policy would eventually hurt authors by bringing down book prices and author royalties and destroying the ability of writers to earn a living from their works.

Here at MobyLives we can only say what we’ve said again and again — that Amazon should not be allowed to operate above the law, as it has been — and report that it seems more and more people are finding the courage to says so in public.