That approach is all the more awkward now that Jeffrey Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is also the owner of The Washington Post, which he bought last summer. The Post has covered the dispute, but gotten no further than the rest of us in its search for comment. “Amazon, whose chief executive, Jeffrey P. Bezos, owns The Washington Post, would not comment for this article,” read one paragraph in a report. So much for the free flow of information.

Writing for Reuters, Jack Shafer said: “If Amazon thinks I don’t care about its silence, it’s wrong. I take it personally that the company doesn’t think it owes me even a half-baked explanation for why I can’t buy some books from it.” He’s so put off by Amazon’s taciturn approach that he will boycott the company. (Mr. Shafer wrote his column before Amazon issued its statement, but he said via email that he was underwhelmed by that gesture.)

I’d do anything I could to support Mr. Shafer — except what he is doing. When I am finished with this column, I will press a button and a wireless printer will kick out a copy. I recently got that printer for under $100 including delivery — two days after I ordered it — because I am a member of Amazon Prime. It wasn’t delivered by drone, but it may as well have been. It seemed to appear like magic.

And there’s the rub. Amazon’s messaging to the public depends not on what it says, but on what it does so well. Will consumers hooked on pricing and convenience care that it will take them weeks to receive a copy of “The Skin Collector,” a Hachette title by Jeffery Deaver? Mr. Deaver, a best-selling author, certainly does.

“The book industry is fragile, and Amazon has so much power,” Mr. Deaver said after an appearance at BookExpo. “I will be probably be fine because I have a fan base, but what about authors on Hachette who have a first book coming out and this is their one chance?”

Sitting against a wall at the Javits Center after his own appearances, Hugh Howey wasn’t so sure. A self-published author who has found big sales on Amazon for his “Wool” series, he had spent time in a booth with 11 other self-published authors who had sold 20 million books among them. (When you think about it, they may be a bigger threat to the publishers than Amazon’s pricing, but I digress.)