An author whom I’ve never read, Ursula Le Guin, had a blog post at the Book View Café Blog. Titled “Up the Amazon with the BS Machine”, the title is an obvious play on words, BS in this case not meaning what everyone would first think, but rather “bestseller.” The post is interesting to read, and not terribly long. The gist of it: She doesn’t like the way bestseller lists are developed, thinks the books that make it on the bestseller list are garbage, and blames Amazon for the situation while at the same time exonerating the publishers.

She seems to forget that Amazon is primarily a bookstore, not a publisher. Sure, they do some publishing functions, such as Kindle Direct Publishing and CreateSpace for self-publishing, and they have a couple of publishing imprints that currently are small. Le Guin doesn’t like any of it. Read the article and you’ll leave thinking she says “bring back the good old days.”

There must be a logical fallacy in this. A behaves. Environmental conditions change and A behaves differently. B doesn’t like A’s new behavior, and blames C for it—C being not the environmental conditions but another entity who is also behaving based on changing environmental conditions but who has no effect on A’s behavior.

I suspect Le Guin is having trouble selling books. I’ve never read anything she’s written, and don’t know what she writes. I’ve heard her name, but her books haven’t popped up on my radar. I take it she’s fairly popular. She’s probably been on bestseller lists multiple times.

So what’s her beef? It’s that the books that make the bestseller lists aren’t of very good quality. Yet these books make the list, not because people want to read them, but because Amazon is pushing them, and because of this push they get even more sales and climb even higher on the bestseller list. Meanwhile, books of better quality (which I presume includes her books, though she doesn’t say that) languish farther down the lists or don’t appear at all.

This push that she bemoans is what the Big 5 publishers do all the time. They call it “velocity,” and woe to the book that doesn’t have it.  They buy “co-op” from bookstores to get a couple of titles on featured displays at the front of bookstores. They buy ads to push the books they think will sell best. They sponsor links on search engines, links that masquerade as search results and fool people. Thus, the publishers, in cahoots with bookstores, are manufacturing bestseller lists by pushing books to create velocity. Personally, I don’t know there’s anything wrong with that. It’s a business practice, not a conspiracy.

So the evil she bemoans really isn’t Amazon. It’s the very publishers she champions. Just another example of top-tier authors not liking the changes in bookselling, and blaming Amazon instead of the party that is really at fault. The madness continues, madness that has been called Amazon Derangement Syndrome.