A friend, on her blog, compared Amazon's decision to Safeway or Kroger deciding not to carry Hershey products.
No, it's more like Safeway or Kroger not carrying any meat, or any dairy products, or any fruit and veg—or maybe all Kraft products, since we're talking about giant conglomerates. And neither Safeway nor Kroger nor the two of them together gets at the dominance of Amazon in the American book market: Walmart is, in fact, the largest grocery chain in the U.S. (as well as the largest retail chain overall). Imagine Walmart decided to stop selling Kraft. Well, OK, other giant conglomerates sell similar products, right?
But that argument takes books as interchangeable products and recognizes no difference between them. Imagine your library decided that, to save money, they would stop buying any book whose author's name started with letters A through E.
Amazon's entire premise as a business is that they carry everything and can ship it to you anywhere. That universal access is how they've stolen business from brick and mortar stores, both chain and independent. And now they've reneged on that deal, for the sole purpose of ensuring future profit.
I've got no problem with either side taking extreme positions about the pricing of ebooks, restricting access, whatever: I ain't got no dog in that fight. But Amazon has also removed all print books published by Macmillan and all its subsidiaries, which represents about 15% of the books published in the U.S. (depending on how you measure). Amazon in turn probably represents a third to a half of Macmillan's sales, and they're counting on that pressure to force Macmillan's hand. Amazon expects consumers to follow blindly in the ruts it has trained them to, not give a fuck about the actual product, and only care about getting it delivered to them at home as cheaply as possible.
Readers are not the target of Amazon's attack. Readers are their armies and their ammunition. If you choose to participate by remaining an Amazon customer, you are signing up to serve in their army—and, either now or later, you will be sacrificed to their profit goals.
Update 31 Jan: Amazon has caved.
6 comments:
Eek that's ugly.
But also... in my opinion, being a consumer of anything at all, we are at the mercy of companies trying to make profit. When it comes to companies, it's a little like politics: you can choose between "less evil" or "more evil", but it's all evil. I'm not deluded that any company working for profit is looking out for my interest.
I think the argument fails when you claim that books are not a commodity like any other commodity, because they are. My point was that decisions were made by TWO business to do what THEY decided was best.
Every business (including chain and independent booksellers) has their own rubrick for determining what products they will carry. Libraries DO have to make decisions about what they'll carry and they all use their own litmus for making those choices. Amazon's decision not to carry the books doesn't make them less obtainable than any other.
@Boo: It's the way the market works, yes—but normally parts this ugly are hidden from the consumer.
@Sarah: Books are not commodities, unless you consider authors interchangeable. Fresh out of John Grisham, so here's Stephen King instead? Libraries make their decisions by intelligent consideration based on community interests and values, not based on caving in to arbitrary corporate blackmail.
Amazon's decision not to carry the books does make them less obtainable. Laredo, Texas—a city of 250,000 people—no longer has a single bookstore: no indies, no Barnes and Noble, nada. Amazon dominates online bookselling by whatever measure. Effectively, if Amazon doesn't carry it, Laredo can't buy it.
Amazon—an anonymous, for-profit corporation—ends up censoring people's reading choices. The only possible defense is some bogus capitalist "right" for a corporation to make and spend their money however the fuck they please. Preventing this kind of ass-fuck is why corporate charters were originally limited to only those special cases not addressable by government or by individual enterprise.
What may save Amazon's ass is that they haven't removed the books' listings entirely—you can still order them from third parties (new or used) via the Amazon site. Amazon still profits from that, of course, but probably not as much as they would from selling the book themselves. So maybe the right response is to order as many Macmillan titles as possible from third parties, via Amazon? Go ahead, vote with your wallet.
*shrug*
This is how the "free market" works. When Walmart decided they wanted to sell electronics and sell them cheap, they absolutely negotiated lower costs from their manufacturers. Can you buy every manufacturer from them? No. Did the price - marketwide - of electronics drop? Hell yes.
As I said before, both companies are within their rights to stick to their guns. Amazon, like Walmart, BECAME huge because of their 'low price' insistence.
What you call corporate blackmail I call business. The goal is for the company to make money. Macmillan is no less guilty than Amazon for causing this particular bottleneck. To pay a hardcover price for an e-book is preposterous given the amount of money it DOESN'T cost to produce. Their insistence is no different from Amazon's, but Amazon gets painted with the bully brush?
TVs made by different manufacturers are functionally interchangeable. Books written by different authors are not. Because of copyright and the exclusive right of publishers to produce the works they have under contract, the market for selling books is not governed by the same rules as the market for selling electronics.
(Let it go on the record that I am not a fan of Walmart and the unrestricted free market. But this is not about Walmart or the market in general: this is about selling books.)
Macmillan does not expect anyone to pay hardcover price for e-books. What it expects is for consumers to pay a fair, competitive price. If you have to read it when it's brand new, $15. If you can wait six months, maybe $10. If you can wait longer, maybe $5.
(Or you can get it for free at your public library.)
Amazon has used its pricing scheme for Kindle books—in which it may have lost money on most sales—in order to build the (closed, exclusive-to-Amazon) Kindle market. Now that the Kindle has a viable competitor in the iPad/iBookstore, the publishers are forcing Amazon to abandon its closed pricing scheme and accept a new model, where Apple—and everyone else—can compete fairly with Amazon as a seller of e-books.
The book market is different from the market for most other things, not just because books are cultural and intellectual property subject to copyright, but because, while product is distributed on a wholesale model, the profits are distributed on a royalty model, so that the more aggressively retailers discount the product, the less goes to the people who actually create the product. It's been a fucking mess, and people in the book business have hated it for years.
The physical cost of printing and distributing books is not the major expense. The major expenses are editing, designing, typesetting, proofreading and—yes—writing the things. The physical costs, however, can't be adjusted (they've been pushed as low as they can go), so when publishers make less money, that means that the people who do all that brain work make less money. Electronic books—since they do away with the expensive and heavy-to-ship-back physical product—offer the opportunity to establish a new model. That's what Macmillan is doing. In some ways, it's like what happened with MP3s and recorded music a decade or so ago.
The restructuring is far from over. Personally, I can't stand most e-books because their platforms don't display text well (see today's post for a complaint about the iPad). If someone gave me a Kindle today, I could not find a single book I would want to spend money on. That may change, and if it does, I will happily spend money on the platform (for display and distribution technology) and on the product (for the words and their arrangement on the screen)—but I want those two costs to be clearly separated.
Sorry, I mean that (physical) books are (currently) sold on a consignment model, while they are priced on a wholesale model.
Or something. In short: the current way of doing things definitely sucks, what Amazon tried to force sucked even more, and what Macmillan is forcing in return has the potential to at least suck differently.
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