It'll take a miracle

Or: the general inadvisability of burning one's bridges while one remains on them.

I should probably start with a general apology: work remains insanely busy, and every time I think I might be getting back to more or less normal loads, a new pile lands. I feel like the victims of the Foo bird (long story, based on spoonerism and "if the shoe fits". If you still want to know, say so in the comments). At any rate, I've got a fair idea what I want to say, but what happens along the way could get interesting.

So. Back to the approximate topic. You've probably guessed, it relates to Amazon vs Macmillan and the hordes of related issues that are even now merrily spawning tribes of issues of their own. Given the situation, those tribes of issues are probably already at war with each other. It's also got a rather sideways relationship to Sun Tzu's Art of War.

He - and probably many others - advised burning the bridges after crossing them, so that there was no retreat for the troops: once you burned the bridge, you could defeat the enemy or die trying. If you won, you could always rebuild the bridge.

Right now, it looks to me like the publishing industry is on the bridge. Behind them is the way things have been for ever and ever amen, and in front is the 'enemy' - readers, Amazon and its ilk (oh, heck, might as well just go for the internet, since I think some of these places are still trying to get a handle on pocket calculators, having reluctantly abandoned the abacus and quill and ink some time in the last 20 years or so).

Except, "I do not think it means what you think it means".

Amazon also acts as though it's on that bridge, and the enemy ahead is publishers. The territory is where all those nice fat peasa...er... readers live, and Amazon wants to be the new overlord and control everything they've got access to.

Readers and writers? We're actually the bridge.

And that's where it gets fun, because Amazon and Macmillan just set fire to the bridge, while they were still on it. The likely result is that both of them will take a bath, but we'll all get burned.

And there won't be any kissy stuff.