In a combative editorial, the Financial Times‘ “chief business commentator,” John Gapper, takes it to critics of publishers for their stance against Amazon, starting with hacker collective NYC Resistor co-founder Nick Bilton for complaining in the New York Times that “publishers seem to be picking a fight with the wrong team: their customer. They are punishing the people who buy their content instead of making it simple for those customers to hand over their money, instantly, from any location in the world.”

Says Gapper,

This is painfully naive. It is not the consumer about whom Simon & Schuster and others are picking a fight but a distributor with market power in a nascent digital industry.

The idea that book publishers are failing to act in their own interests because they somehow do not want to serve their customers, or because they do not “get” electronic distribution ignores the business reality they face.

… why is it illogical for publishers to defend their own business interests against those of Amazon, which is a public company trying to extend leverage over them to benefit its own shareholders?