The dispute is about money, but the outcome—whether Hachette gives up on pricing and pays a little more for marketing, or not—is about so much more. Amazon equated Hachette with its other suppliers in its statement: "At Amazon, we do business with more than 70,000 suppliers, including thousands of publishers. One of our important suppliers is Hachette...." Hachette doesn't feel the same way, according to its response to the Amazon statement: "By preventing its customers from connecting with these authors’ books, Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer good."
But, it added, "They are not."