The battle between Amazon and the Big Five publishers is complicated by the fact that neither "side" is exactly easy for authors and readers to be on. No one who cares about a diverse and healthy literary marketplace, where new ideas and writers can reach a wide audience - and even non-blockbuster authors are paid enough for their work so that they can continue doing it - can reasonably side with Amazon.
But the publishers have botched so many opportunities in recent years, and have been so maddeningly slow to adapt to the digital marketplace, that it's hard not to feel that they deserve some kind of comeuppance. So when Matt Yglesias writes a Vox explainer about how we shouldn't feel sorry for publishers, who are "superfluous" and "terrible at marketing" and deserve to go out of business, it's excruciating to read not because it's so off-base - which, for the most part, it is - but because it's not entirely wrong.