Guest-blogged by Mike Wolfe, an Authors Alliance member and copyright research fellow at UC Berkeley. Parts of this post have been adapted from an earlier post on Berkeley’s Public Interest Authorship Blog.

The Authors Alliance knows that most authors write in order to be read, and that many—Authors Alliance members in particular—write primarily to make their works available to the broadest possible audience. There are many possible paths that connect writers to readers, and often many authors find the best path to be the most traditional: retail sales after publication with a major publishing house.

But while partnering with publishers and retailers can create opportunities, it can also create pitfalls. And so it is that Amazon.com, one of the largest book retailers in the U.S., has made many Hachette titles scarce through a variety of tactics including delaying shipments and refusing to take preorders.

This tactic is bad news for authors. These authors are not party to the dispute, they cannot resolve it, and are not even privy to its details. But they are profoundly affected by Amazon’s actions in that they have seen the constriction of an important channel for reaching readers. Losing readers means more than just losing dollars, though it does certainly mean that. It also means losing visibility and reputation, losing one’s voice in public debates, losing the opportunity to build communities, and losing the satisfaction of entertaining and educating audiences.

In short, hindering the availability of books as a negotiation tactic is bad for authors, bad for their readers, and should be roundly condemned.

The dispute also highlights a problem that is bigger than either Amazon or Hachette. That is, when you assign all rights in your work to a commercial entity, you hitch your star to the vagaries of the market. As is the case now, your publisher might find itself embattled with Amazon, or it might find it most expedient not to market or print your work. Retaining some rights to make your own work available despite circumstances far outside your control, helps to ensure that, whatever happens, your work won’t be disappeared. So even though Amazon is delaying Authors Alliance Advisory Board member Lawrence Lessig’s Republic, Lost—a Hachette title—you can still always get it right from the source under a CC license. This would be true even if Amazon did control the market such that the book didn’t remain available from other sellers.

That last point is an important one. As callous as Amazon has been, the effects of its actions are limited by its market power. Despite the publishers’ clamoring to the contrary, Amazon is not yet the only shop in town. So long as it continues to disregard authors’ vital interest in being read, readers would do well to take their business elsewhere.