Our Clip of the Week comes to you in the form of two back-to-back segments from Wednesday night's "The Colbert Report," in which Stephen Colbert first outlines the ongoing battle between Amazon and the Hachette Book Group over e-book pricing, and then, together with his guest, National Book Award-winner Sherman Alexi, joins the fray. As it happens, Colbert is a Hachette author, which means his books have been subject to Amazon's hardball tactics in its deadlocked negotiations with Hachette, which have entailed the e-commerce giant delaying shipments and blocking pre-orders of the publisher's titles.
To take on Amazon, Colbert announces that colbertnation.com has partnered with Powell's Books to take pre-orders of an upcoming Hachette book, "California," by Edan Lepucki (an Alexi recommendation), that Amazon is currently blocking. "We're going to prove that I can sell more books than Amazon," Colbert says. He also encourages you to download, again through colbertnation.com, a sheet of "I Didn't Buy It On Amazon" stickers [a PDF will load in your browser when you click this link] -- ready to be printed on sticker paper and slapped on "any book that you're reading."
Simon Dumenco is the "Media Guy" columnist for Advertising Age. You can follow him on Twitter @simondumenco.