Daniel D'Addario's interview with Neil Gaiman naturally ventured over to Amazon's ongoing dispute with Hachette. Gaiman, who has previously raved about Kindles, has some pretty harsh words:

In light of Amazon’s tactics against publishers, notably Hachette, have your feelings about Amazon changed in recent months?

I’m a weird mixture right now, because on the one hand, I’m obviously pissed at Amazon. I’m a Hachette author in the U.K., my wife is a Hachette author now, and I’m very aware that Hachette is the first of these publishers that negotiations are going to happen with, and that HarperCollins [Gaiman's U.S. publisher] will be coming up in six months’ time or whatever.

It's more nuanced than that—Gaiman isn't ready to declare Amazon the Evil Empire or anything like that—but he does offer an excellent explanation of why this Hachette affair is pissing people off on a very personal level:

I think that books are special. Books are sacred. And I think that when you are selling books, you have to remember that in all the profits and loss, in all of that, you are treading on sacred ground.

That Neil Gaiman's got a way with words.