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The Boston Review has a fairly good overview of recent changes in the books industry vis a vis the new industry titan, Amazon. I didn’t see a whole lot of new information here, but it does bring together a lot of what has been said and is a stimulating read for that reason.
I’d be interested to hear from publishers on this practice, supposed meddling by Target, Barnes & Noble, and other large retailers in the editorial process:
As the focus shifted to the bottom line throughout the industry, the ABA and many others in the publishing community worried about the effect of revenue-obsession on what would get published, and with good reason. It has become common practice for representatives of large retailers to weigh in on everything from book covers to sample chapters of manuscripts. In some cases, retailers even demand changes. One editor at a major publishing house, who agreed to speak on condition of anonymity for fear of employer sanctions, told me that agents of Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Target are frequent participants in meetings about potential books. Without their buy-in, the publisher is unlikely to go forward with a book. Ideas that excite independents might be scrapped if they don’t get a chain’s stamp of approval.
And this story, along with recent efforts by Hachette and others to beat back Amazon’s demands, gives some evidence that it isn’t quite game over for the books industry, even though Amazon has captured 70% of the books market:
Ten Speed’s books then disappeared from the Web site. For about a week, Wood fielded panicked calls from his authors, wondering where their books had gone. Never a fan of computers or email, Wood sat down to pen a letter to Bezos. “I described what his company had done, and I said this was not the way gentlemen treat gentlemen,” Wood told me. He informed Bezos that his next letter would be to The New York Times. After a week Wood received another call from Amazon, further pressuring him to agree to the new terms. When Wood again refused, Amazon relented, and agreed to continue doing business with Ten Speed on the original terms.
And this gives me much reason to believe that Amazon will always be a huge seller of books, but will have a small role in the publishing of books:
Jeffrey Lependorf, Executive Director of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses and of Small Press Distribution, suggests that the difference between Amazon and brick-and-mortar bookstores is most evident in how they market books: “I think even people at Amazon would say that it’s essentially a widget seller that happens to have begun by focusing on books. Many people, like me, will say you can’t sell a book the same way you sell a can of soup.”
As I was arguing with a friend yesterday, Amazon is essentially a technology company. It knows technology about as well as Andrew Wylie knows rights and talent. But as we have seen with Wylie’s Odyssey Editions, efforts to meld the kind of knowledge Amazon has with the kind of knowledge industry professionals like Wylie have have been mixed, to say the least.
It’s clear that Amazon wants to be more of a publisher, and it has plenty of business reasons to be interested in being one, but I’m far from certain that the transition would be a smooth one, to say nothing of a successful or even profitable one.
Anyone who cares about the future of books should of course keep a close eye on what Amazon is doing. That fact is that it could be a threat to various sectors of the industry, but I think that oftentimes the “threat” Amazon represents to publishing is overstated. I don’t want to sound like a defender of Amazon, as it has obviously thrown its weight around when it felt like doing so. And I certainly believe in the importance of my local independent bookstores, which is why I spend one night a month hosting a reading group at one and buy the vast majority of my books from various local indies. But on the other hand, Amazon has opened a lot of doors for a lot of people, and I haven’t seen it do anything that isn’t commonly engaged in in other industries by large players.
But go ahead and read the article and judge for yourself. In the end, this is something that everyone who loves books should be informed about.
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“even though Amazon has captured 70% of the books market”
That seems high. The article claims that Amazon has 75% of the *online* market, meaning that online would have to account for something like 94% of all book sales to make the 70 number work.
Padraic: You’re correct–I wrote that from memory and obviously remembered wrong.
Glad you picked this up! Thought you’d be interested.
From my admittedly limited experience, the real problem with Amazon seems to be the issue of discounts and margins. Bullying and questionable tactics aside, Amazon pushes the industry standard on discounts up little by little. Many publishers operate on the hair-thin edge between the red and the black, and have such small cash reserves (if any), that the margin for error is creeping toward nil.
Now, opinions about the solution to this do indeed vary.
Dan: That’s a good point, and obvious you have some practical experience here. It seems to me, though, that Amazon’s end goal can’t be the elimination of the publishers that it makes its money off of, so at some point wouldn’t publishers be able to fight for terms that keep them in the black?
And also, since publishers have “a monopoly on their books,” it seems to me that they still have quite a bit of ground to bite Amazon back with.
I think conversations about Amazon would be much richer if we considered questions such as these rather than demonized Amazon for doing things that big businesses tend to do in our culture.