It’s no secret that the decision by most of the Big Six US publishers to delay the release of new books in ebook formats the way they delay publication of paperback formats has angered Amazon.com. As Amazon now sells an expensive e-reading device, the Kindle, they want hot books available immediately, and so have been pressuring publishers to deliver. Conglomerate publishers, meanwhile, see the long accepted practice of putting higher-profit hardcovers out first as more logical for their companies and their authors, and, well, nobody likes to be dictated to. Plus, they feel Amazon’s severe discounting of ebooks (to $9.99) is just too drastic, and takes control of pricing away from the manufacturers, which doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense — they should be free to respond to the market, not a lone but thuggish middle-man running a brutish monopoly.

But, in a move being discussed over many a New York watercooler as secretly instigated by Amazon, a group of literary tea-partiers has begun attacking New York publishers via Amazon’s reader reviews — as Eric Engleman reports in a TechFlash story, the Amazon page for the hot new book Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin “has been deluged with one-star, negative reviews from people who are protesting publisher HarperCollins‘ decision to delay the Kindle version” of the book.

Other than devaluing whatever value Amazon reader reviews have as sincere feedback about a book, what’s the upshot in this instance? The book is Amazon’s number one bestseller as of this writing, and has been pretty much since its release.