The Seattle P-I is the first mainstream news outlet to pick up on a story that illustrates some crucial issues about communication policy.

Amazon.com recently announced that it was going to disable the "buy" buttons on books in its catalog offered by print-on-demand (POD) publishers who fail to contract with Amazon's in-house POD service.

It takes a bit of explaining to get the details in order, but basically this is the dead tree version of the debate over net neutrality. Amazon is open to dealing with any number of outside POD publishers--but if you want to actually sell books on their platform, you'll need to use their services and agree to their contract terms.

In the Internet world, the issue of net neutrality is not so much that Verizon or Comcast would completely block web sites it didn't like--although that potential is always there. The fear is that Verizon or Comcast might sign business deals with deep-pocketed competitors and deliver bits from those sources faster than bits that originating from garage-level startups or budget-starved independent content sources.

In the dead tree version of this game, Amazon is telling independent POD publishers: agree to our terms, print your books in our warehouses, or you can't come onto our platform at all.

As a first-time, would-be author with a niche book on a little-understood topic, I know I can't demand the same shelf space at Barnes & Noble that Stephen King or Joanne Rowling gets. What I believe I should have is the right to choose my own publisher and bargain for the best terms I can get without being told that if I want to list my book in the dominant online retailer's catalog, my publisher or I have one and only one choice for printing services. And, oh, by the way, please sign here to give away your right to sell your books to anyone else at a discount.

For more details, see Writer's Weekly here or a summary by a leading self-publishing consultant here. Amazon's statement is here and a response from the WA Attorney General is here.