Amazon offers Blighty's publishing industry 'assisted suicide' Amazon wants to dictate book prices, and even print copies of publishers' books itself, a report in trade mag Bookseller suggests. UK publishers are, we're told, none too happy. Over in the US, Amazon is already locked in battle with Hachette, the first publisher whose terms with Amazon are coming up for renegotiation: Amazon …
Not really unless...
The publishers all get together and sign up for a website just for the sale of books, printed or otherwise. In effect all books would be available but only directly from the publisher, no third parties involved.
Ok so delivery wouldn't be as slick but at least profits would be in house.
Amazon did this so why not someone else?
Maybe the publishing industry should grow a pair and just pull out from Amazon altogether, after all it is their product and Amazon will suffer if a product is not available on their site. Hachette may have to ride out a storm and take a significant hit, but I am sure that rival retailers will be more than grateful and if other publishers follow suit it will be Amazon's loss. If not, they may as well just hand over complete control of Amazon so that it can squeeze them unto death.
It's not their product it's the authors product.
At least in the textbook world the publishers commision is about 2x the authors.
300 years the booksellers (stationers guild) had a monopoly on printing and deal with authors directly. Publishers only appeared, as in the music industry, when it was industrialised and you needed somebody to "own the means of production" - today they are just an extra layer of market inefficency
No, most of the words are the author's, but the books are the publisher's. If you're using an editor provided by the publishing company all the words aren't even the author's, the order in which the words appear is only partially the author's work.
You're just deluded if you think publishers are just a money layer. Guilds collapsed because they couldn't scale past a certain point and those impediments to scale have only gotten larger. What are you going to do when a single retailer preorders 500,000 copies of a book? Elevate 1st year apprentices to journeymen, build new printing facilities and completely rework your supply chain? To print one book? Don't forget, you'll have to front the costs yourself, everything is done 180-365 days out so you won't even begin to get paid for six months.
What about translations? You're going to handle that yourself? If they don't read English you're going to ignore them? (Here's a hint, England tried that and it gave the US fabulous opportunity to steal the stolen copyrighted works from them, translate them and ship them round the world).
Cultural incompatibilities? Fanny and that English favorite 'cunt' are two really easy examples. Those words have vastly different connotations depending on which side of the ocean you're on. You plan on being the arbiter of acceptable?
Publishers are every single part of a book beyond most of the text. Go try your hand a making money as an author without either dozens of middlemen or a publisher. I'll be impressed if you can come up with enough money to print enough to get into the library review process in one country. You're simply way out of your league. Your publisher will make you rich, they are not your enemy.
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> What are you going to do when a single retailer preorders 500,000 copies of a book?
If I'm selling an ebook - nothing
If I'm selling a physical book - let Amazon worry about it
At the moment - nothing I can do. Springer won't sell to them unless they are also buying and stocking a whole set of other Springer titles. They make my library buy 'packages' of journals nobody wants in order to get the few I and my colleagues need and write/review/edit for free.
Somehow "the internet" makes people's brains to stop functioning.
What the FCUK is what companies do not get about the internet that let them to think they need shops like Amazon to sell online?
Aaaah they do not want the complication of having to do the marketing & on-line work themselves...
Then learn that there is no such free lunch.
About eight years ago, Carrefour was squeezing the Mexican farmers' margins as all superstores do. They went too far, and within a few days, all farmers stopped their contracts with Carrefour. Result? Half empty stores, and Carrefour Mexico closed down.
When a larger corporation uses its power to squeeze smaller companies, it is time the smaller companies join forces and counter react. Let's face it, the printing industry is in a complete metamorphosis, your resellers become your competitors, authors can auto publish, ...
Today is a perfect moment to evaluate and decide what an author gets for his work, and what is to be shared for selling the book (in any form). Enjoy the endless discussions
Amazon's reported demand to control the right to copy, when it wants, is regarded as the equivalent of coming for your first-born.
Getting the license to print (even with arm-twisting involved) is not "control the right to copy".
Publishers not happy? Then they should get their shit together. Lazy buggers couldn't set up an independent venture if their profit depended on it. And it does.
The problem is that if all the publishers act together then they'll breach competition rules. If one independently decided to boycott and others independently chose to follow that might be okay, but they'd likely be in big trouble if they acted as a group.
Still, there are other outlets for their books on both sides of the Atlantic, be it Barnes and Noble in the US or Waterstones in the UK. I'm sure either would happily take the business if one or more publishers wanted to abandon Amazon.
If publishers decide to stop supplying Amazon, would that be anti-competitive? Or, could the publisher be penalised for that? Surely that's a B2B transaction, customers would still be able to get the books from Waterstones or WHSmith or [name your poison]. It just wouldn't be available through the Amazon channel.
Sure, if publishers acted in concert and it impacted consumers (e.g., price-fixing) then they should be done, but if they all, en masse, stopped supplying Amazon, could they be done for that?
And that's obviously unfair. If it's legally permissible for Amazon to virtually monopolize the bookselling business (regardless of how they did that), it should of course be legal for the publishers to present a united front against Amazon.
Publishers are now reluctant even to be seen in the same room together following the rulings on price fixing. Acting in a way that maintains prices is lawful under US antitrust law if ultimately it can be shown to help maintain choice and competition in products and suppliers. But the US courts completely disregarded this important detail in its rulings on the publishing industry, and consider low prices as the only measure of a fair market. In this hostile legal context, publishers would be right to be cautious about even being thought to be thinking about the possibility of acting jointly against a retailer who pushes down prices, even though the letter of the law suggests such activity can be justified in some important jurisdictions.
Retailers without content are nothing, be they books or music. Publishers call the shots, but they don't seem to realise it.
"Oh noes, we can't be on YouTube or Amazon." Well go elsewhere then. It's as if HMV got upperty and the labels were cowering because they might have to sell music in another shop, as if the public were incapable of finding other music shops or even comprehending that other music shops exist.
That Dan, appears to be exactly what is being said.
It is an interesting development, if it is true. The web wasn't supposed to work this way, there was supposed to be a New Kid on the Block, every other day.
But, apparently, punters are happy just to go to one big shop and buy whatever they have in stock ... No shopping around.
When you think about it ... That's weird.
Once up on a time you might have gone to Tesco, because it was the only choice of supermarket in your town - Now sixteen different supermarkets have opened, in your little town, but everyone is insisting Tescos is the only place to shop.
Strange ...
I read something else, very similar, the other day about Youtube ... Internet Theory is broken (apparently)
It's not just "Internet Theory" that's broken: it's modern economics. It's based on a series of absurd and obviously artificial oversimplifications of reality, including a complete failure to allow for human psychology. Economists assume (to make their own lives simpler) that all people act like "rational economic agents", meaning that they will go to any lengths to get more for less. That is ridiculous, as it assumes money and value for money are the only things we care about. When I look at my Amazon basket (currently over 200 items that I just like to keep an eye on), I get shown a list of dozens of recent price changes. A certain book has been reduced from £34.18 to £34.17, and I'm supposed to care? The practical convenience of buying everything from Amazon outweighs the possibility of occasionally saving a small amount of money. Moreover, I have high confidence that Amazon (and its merchants) will deliver what is promised on time.
"Amazon has stopped taking preorders for Hachette titles, citing delivery times of weeks or months"
Isn't that always the case with a pre-order? Buying something before it's published. (Amazon UK is offering Terry Pratchett's next which is due in September)
How big a problem is it really, are there many instances where a book was delayed (for no good reason) and people had to hang around for it to come out, or where it appeared on supermarket shelves first?
I like the idea of print to order. It would save a lot of space for books in the warehouse, cutting out costs of transport, storage etc, kinda how I wished many moons ago when stores actually sold CDs that they'd do a kiosk which was basically iTunes connected to a CD writer, so rather than buying an album, you could buy the tracks you wanted and put them on a custom disk.
But the rest of this stuff, wanting to dictate the prices etc. Isn't this pretty much the reason Amazon took Apple to court before?
IIRC, IBM suggested something like this before iTunes was a gleam in someone's eye. The music industry back then was no smarter than they are now. Turned up their noses as walked (ran) the other way. Book publishers should NOT have entered into the iMonopoly and they wouldn't be in the current sad state. They gave up whatever high ground they had when they slipped into the gutter with Apple holding their heads under.
In times gone by, the "Net Book Agreement" allowed UK publishers and booksellers to collude and fix prices. It lasted in some form or other till the 90's! Look it up.
So when the bigger bully comes along and beats up the flabby old bully, it's hard to feel sympathy for either side. And remember that W H Smugg is known for putting the screws on publishers and authors, so not much changes.
And when the Net Book Agreement collapsed, 500 independent UK publishers went out of business, and cross-subsidy of specialists works ended, meaning there is now dearth of quality-controlled publishing outlets and marketing expertise for anything except high volume novels and text books. Books are not a simple uniform commodity, and price is not the only important factor in this particular market. Even the rather crude US anti-trust laws recognise these subtleties.
For decades, publishers have been the ones dictating copyright law changes. They've been the gatekeepers to getting your book onto shelves and shops. Now Amazon is turning their own weapons against them.
Good for Amazon. (Although I'm slightly surprised they got there before Google.)
Bad for publishers, mind you, and probably bad for most authors - and readers. But I find it really hard to weep for publishers, of all people. The revolution is here, and as prophesied here's the wall with their names on it.
When it comes to book publishers, in this modern digital era I actually wonder sometimes how they can warrant getting paid at all. What amazon are proposing with the 'print to order' books almost feels like they're trying to provide more authors a way to self publish while pushing the publishers out to pasture. Authors would then get a larger slice of the pie per book sold, Amazon would undoubtedly also get a larger slice of the pie (since they often sell below cost) and publishers would... well.
I do understand that there are additional costs involved for the publisher, proof readings, edits, QQ. But an author is just as able to do those things (and the amount of books I've bought in the last few years with glaringly obvious spelling mistakes, blank / faded pages from low ink, or blotched pages from too much ink somehow it makes you wonder if they're even doing those jobs)
The only downside I see is the number of book stores who would suffer from this model, unless they can somehow get a reseller rate from Amazon.
Amazon can live without any given publisher longer than that publisher can live without Amazon; I know of one that tried not shipping to Amazon for some months after Amazon imposed its terms--"all the traffic will bear", as the railroad guy says in The Octopus. After drastically reduced sales, it had to climb down.
Even assuming that a few big publishers walked, then what? In cities large enough, the bookstores will be there. But this is a very big country, and many people live a long way from a town large enough to support a bookstore.The publishers will still be hurting.
I reckon publishers are in this situation in part because they've refused to modernise to faster paced retail demands. Printing presses might be the most cost-efficient system for mass production, but some smaller publishers have been doing print on demand for over a decade at a decent profit (IIRC ~$5 for a 300 page technical manual is a decent going rate). No doubt an insane amount of labour goes into running traditional presses, but if printing and supplier logistics are the biggest business issues faced by publishers (review, editorial, marketing etc. will probably always be human processes), then they should be collectively adapting to make that more agile.
I also imagine the terms imposed by Amazon aren't hitting them hard enough to make book sales in any way unprofitable, otherwise they really would tell them to get stuffed and sell through the many other online alternatives.
this is the publishers fault after all, they attempted to break amazon's stranglehold, but they went about it so badly: if they'd done it properly they could have created their own rival marketplace, instead they just got greedy and attempted to force a price hike industry wide. now amazon knows they only have a few years before the publishers try again, so bezos needs to lock the market up as soon as possible.
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