It is fantastic to see signs of a fight back against Amazon with the news that Barnes & Noble and several other North American booksellers are refusing to stock Amazon published books. Of course the fact that the blows have been struck by retailers and not by any publishers is hardly surprising.

What will be interesting to see is what, if anything, publishers do about it? Will they lend any support or will they pull up their skirts, jump on a chair and scream while the cat and mouse game plays out around them?

No prizes for guessing that one right.

But it’s cheering to see a long predicted storm begin to break – I just wish there was a Barnes & Noble in the UK capable of striking a similar blow, because if things are bad in the US, they are infinitely worse here.

No one really knows what percentage of the UK e-book market Amazon controls – except for Amazon. But I don’t know anyone who thinks it is less than eighty five per cent. Colonial levels of domination. I’ve blogged about this before.

So you’d have thought that Amazon would have a special place in their heart for the market in which they have such a degree of domination (the greatest in the world?). It’s like their little fiefdom – an opportunity for the happy people of Britain to show the rest of the world just how good life is under the rule of good Queen Amazon.

Right? Wrong. The fact is that Amazon treats the people of Britain with contempt: the fate of cheap dates the world over. We are little more than a sideshow. The main event is of course America. That’s not surprising, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it.

It is outrageous that Amazon appears (from everything I have been able to discover about it – and boy are they secretive) to simply have disabled the ability of UK Kindles to use the Kindle Development Kit.

There may be a good reason, but unless they trouble to explain it would seem that Amazon just isn’t bothered to nurture the development of great content from the UK. It’s not even as if they are treating us as a kind of 51st state, it’s worse. We’re the Philippines.

That attitude is even more apparent given the utter disdain the Amazon publishing wing shows to British authors. There has been no attempt to find and publish any British talent – again as far as Amazon is concerned we are an entirely irrelevant off shoot of US culture.

After all, it’s not as if this country has ever produced any writers of real international stature is it?