The Seattle Times‘ series about Amazon.com’s corporate culture continued on Monday with a long recounting of the company’s often prickly relations with book publishers large and small; especially small.

I’ve written in the past that the six U.S. mega-publishers could sure use a “creative disruption” (to use a hoary techno-Libertarian cliché), to sweep away their hidebound old ways and become more nimble, more competitive, and more profitable.

These same new rules, once everybody’s figured out what they are, could also help out smaller imprints.

But in the meantime (which could seem like an eternity in dot-com years but the blink of an eye in book-biz years), Amazon should not push too far against the “long tail” publishers and distributors who make its “World’s Largest Selection” slogan possible.

It’s bad for the publishers and their authors.

It’s bad for the industry as a whole.

And it’s bad for Amazon.

The e-tail giant had better realize, and soon, that it doesn’t have the market muscle to push its suppliers around like Walmart does.

Except to owners of Kindle machines (which are hardwired to only download commercial ebooks if they’re from Amazon), everything its core media business sells can be bought from other sources, just a mouse click or a search-engine hunt away.

Also, many of these smaller publishers have loyal niche clienteles.

All they have to do is offer lower prices or “customer loyalty” incentives to folks buying books on the publishers’ own sites.

Or, the small pubishers could offer all sorts of “customer loyalty” incentives to their direct buyers.

It’s to Amazon’s own fiscal interest to not appear like a bully here.