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Amazon responded to an investigative piece in Sunday's New York Times about rampant book counterfeiting ("What Happens After Amazon's Domination Is Complete? Its Bookstore Offers Clues") with a blog post defending its current practices.
"We invest substantial amounts of time and resources to protect our customers from counterfeit products, including books," Amazon wrote. "We also stand behind every product sold in our stores with our A-to-z Guarantee.... We provided many of these details to the Times and they chose not to include these facts in their story."
One curious aspect of Amazon's defense strategy was to bring independent booksellers into the discussion. "The Times also makes inaccurate claims about competition among booksellers (a claim the Midwest Independent Booksellers disputed with the Times last year)," Amazon contended. "There is widespread competition among booksellers, from major retailers to independent booksellers to grocery and drug stores. In fact, according to the American Booksellers Association (a trade group representing independent booksellers), the number of independent booksellers in the U.S. has grown over 50% over the last 10 years."