i spoke with mark coker. president of an book distributor and hugh howey, a self-published author. i started by asking hugh who has been a supporter of amazon throughout this dispute what he thought of the company's latest response. >> i'm happy that amazon is finally talking about what their negotiation terms are. it confirms everything i suspected just from watching the company over the years and dealing with them as an author and publisher. they went through this in 2010, fighting for reasonable e-book prices. back then the response from publishers was to form a cartel and collude with their supposed competitors in order to artificially raise the prices of e-books on readers in order to protect their legacy print industry, or to make as much money as they possibly could off of readers. i think it has been to the great detriment to the authors at hachette that they are fighting for these higher e-book prices. i'm glad amazon is finally talking. we're in a situation where you say hachette has not returned yo