A new competitor for Amazon?

Amazon is the 100-pound gorilla of booksellers. The gorilla gets all sorts of people’s noses out of joint — See this piece by Scott Thurow for a recent example.

So what’s a publisher to do? Iguana is way too small to do much of anything but try to find the best deal for distribution through Amazon. The process is … challenging.

Spanish publishing analyst Javier Celaya has proposed an intriguing alternative: that the publishers co-operate to create an alternative bookseller to counter Amazon’s growing power. It’s an intriguing notion, one that I think would appeal to any publisher who has ever tried to negotiate a contract with Amazon.