Writers Battle Amazon

[Druidic]

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/bu...ttom-well&_r=0

[tartarusrussell]

Quote Originally Posted by Druidic

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/bu...ttom-well&_r=0

A couple of days ago Amazon wrote to all publishers who sell ebooks through Kindle, asking them to put pressure on Hachette to reduce their ebook prices. It strikes me that a publisher should be able to charge what they like (and if the price is right they ought to succeed.) Hachette simply have a business model that Amazon doesn't like, so Amazon is using it's immense power to force Hachette to do their bidding. It doesn't look to me to be the free market in operation...

[symbolique]

nil

[tartarusrussell]

Quote Originally Posted by symbolique

Total example of free market. More power to Amazon.

Fair enough - a complete free market without any checks and balances means that monopolies run everything...

[symbolique]

nil

[Fenris Technique]

Clay Shirkey makes the argument that Amazon is furthering the cause of readers and writers while Hachette and other traditional publishing houses are acting against the literary interests of the masses. It's a long piece, but an interesting read. Not sure where I come down on this one, as I don't necessarily buy the premise that maximum book access for maximum people is the primary issue upon which the dispute should be decided.

A sample of his larger argument:

Quote

. . . The traditional industry belief — if you don’t live in a big city and have a lot of money, you deserve second-class access to books — is being challenged by a company trying to say “If you have ten bucks, there’s not a book in the world you can’t read.” If the current industry can’t keep their prices high while competing with instant distribution of a vastly expanded literature — and that seems to be their only assertion worth taking at face value — then it’s time for them to figure out how to make a business out of improved access. They can drop DRM, sell ebooks directly to readers, add or improve their subscription services, offer print-on-demand—any strategy, really, except continuing to insist that readers must accept high prices and restricted access. Culture is a funny thing, transforming even people with otherwise democratic sensibilities into haughty patricians. Coll ran the New America Foundation, Packer wrote “The Unwinding”, the most sensitive portrayal of American hard times since Michael Harrington, yet the thought of Amazon improving the availability of books horrifies them. The tension between their ordinary sympathies for the general public and their withholding of that support in this particular case stems from the duality of authorship as an open marketplace and a closed cultural arena. To criticize Amazon, the publishers and their defenders must simultaneously insist that literature is essential for society, and that a sudden increase in its availability would be a catastrophe. This tension was best dissected by Pierre Bourdieu in his masterwork, “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste.” . . Publishing and Reading — Medium

[miguel1984]

In a fight between monsters, the biggest monster is always the uglier and meanest. I hope Amazon gets it's ass kicked.

I appreciate how they make a lot of stuff available, but to pressure other publishers to pressure Hachette (or any other) is not free market at play. It is bullying. If Hachette puts a higher prize on their e-books and sell less because of it, then that would be the free market at play, with readers seeking a cheaper option.

[qcrisp]

Amazon have managed to cast themselves as representatives of democracy rather than ruthless monopolists. I expect this is because of the prevalence in the world now of the American free market creed. Anything slower, more complex, requiring more patience, is seen as elitist. Oddly enough, there's a crossover here with certain aspects of communism. The Cultural Revolution - tear down anything to do with the bad old days. Yeah, there was bad stuff in the bad old days, but it was better than a world of rubble where people fight over the ruins.

Anyway, I hope that what finally emerges from all this struggle will be better than what there was before, and not something founded on the resentment and hatefulness that is so prevalent in the rhetoric aimed at the older publishers.

[qcrisp]

Won't post at length, as I am working, etc.

I read Clay Shirkey's article. Amazon are good for availability. Yes, this is true. I write this as someone who does editing work for a publisher who might not exist without Amazon, and which was set up in the hope of making otherwise hard to obtain writing more available.

I also write this as someone who doesn't belong to the Ivy League elite that Shirkey confesses he belongs to and which he says he wishes to betray.

But somehow his article - unless I have missed it - seems to entirely side-step two important points: Why should the biggest book retailer on the planet still be wanting to drive the big five publishers out of business? (Is Amazon a publisher or a bookstore? If the former, then Shirkey is wrong to say it's not an issue that Bezos doesn't care about books, and if the latter then a bookstore has no business trying to put publishers out of business.) And: when they are out of business, will there be any other publisher left that have their exact combination of concern for books and professional reach?

There will, hopefully, at least be lots of micro-publishers hanging on like limpets, as long as new tax legislation doesn't completely eradicate them, but a real cultural ecosystem needs the bigger ones, too, even if they are more conservative. Yes, if we value books, then we should want to preserve the largest companies who still retain a vestige of the staff and ethos of valuing books for their own sake, even if they have achieved their largeness partly by what we come to expect from corporations. No one who only cares about money would join the staff of one of those publishers; their strength can, indeed, be used for cultural ends.

[Fenris Technique]

It's worth mentioning to those who fear Amazon will be a monolithic one-stop monopoly for all things publishing that five of the six big publishers colluded with Apple in a price fixing scheme. What is the real difference between one big company calling all the shots and five big companies colluding among each other to call the shots?

This is not to say that there are not problems with letting Amazon get 'too big' in the publishing world (aka big enough to crowd out any real competition). To that end I like to see multiple large publishing houses having to compete with each other. I like, at least, the appearance of choice between different companies and their offerings. Yet how much of this perceived 'choice' is reality and how much is simply a well-orchestrated illusion?

I like the idea of gatekeepers, for controlling the quality and flow of the product. I also like the idea of books being available to whoever is interested in reading them. Each side brings something valuable to the table.

We’re a few years down the path of eReaders and eBooks now, and I don’t know that the future of publishing is any less murky than when the journey began. Clay Sharkey notes that there's nothing preventing the publishing houses from changing up their methods of production and distribution.

Quote

. . .The fact that any bookseller ever “runs out” of a book is now ridiculous. In the twenty-first century, not being able to correctly stock or distribute a product whose main ingredient is information suggests a degree of technical and managerial incompetence indistinguishable from active malice. . .

Perhaps traditional publishers need to change up the way they're doing things in order to meet the demand of readers as well as their competitor. I see nothing indicating there isn't room for both Amazon and the traditional publishers in the literary marketplace of the future. But 'maintaining control supply and demand through limited print runs' game is over. That ship has sailed.