Amazon and its publishing partners now occupied entirely different worlds. The e-book business didn’t exist in any meaningful way, so publishers couldn’t understand why they were being berated and punished for not embracing it. Amazon executives saw themselves as racing toward the future and fulfilling Bezos’s vision of making every book ever printed available for instant digital delivery, but at the same time they were trying desperately to beat Apple and Google to the next vital phase in the evolution of digital media.
