I
t is most important that discovery continues as it happened in the past. Some stuff is better bought in person because of the touch factor. That’s why Jobs started the Apple Stores even though he faced a lot of opposition from peoople who thought it was backward looking. Need bookstore for that experience, in children’s books, for example. You also use a bookstore to be surprised. That serendipity should be protected but we are not headed there because of unfair competitive practives.
The Justice Department is weighing in on the side of unfair practices. The Justice Department’s weighing in against Apple, et al, is a key event in publishing history. The Department misapprehended the book market. 15 years ago the book industry was divided in front list and back list. (Back list can be subdivided into core backlist – traditional best sellers – and non-core backlist.) Bookstores handled front list and core back list. Other back list available by special order.
Come Amazon the non-core backlist became available Amazon took 75% of the online market and so, because on the non-core back list, Amazon came to own 90% of the market. 10% faced real competition. Amazon introduced the Kindle and used it, to the shock of the publishers, to sell part of the front list on it at low cost. Selling them at a loss undermining the brick and mortar stores for those books that were most important to them. Amazon captured 90% of the ebook market by selling a predatory devices. Barnes & Noble entered the market and then Apple started shipping the iPad. B&N didn’t have the money to match Amazon’s losses. Apple brought along the agency model. 5 publishers jumped at it because they had to because didn’t want to have a monopolist run the market and B&N didn’t have the money compete. Random House didn’t sign on to agency model because Stieg Laarson books were selling so well.
Surprise winner was B&N and quickly moved to a 20% share of the ebook market and Apple was a distant third. Agency model allowed B&N to get a tablet out a year before Amazon because they didn’t have to lower prices so much. Ended up lowering prices in the end.
Right now is the key thing is what happens next. Public comments now going on. Settlement has to public interest test and it is not in the public interest. Settlement says that Amazon will be allowed to resume predatory pricing so long as over a 12 month period Amazon doesn’t loose money over the publisher’s entire list. Not good for the government to sanction predatory behavior. This will prevent a thriving book market.
I’m so glad that somebody took the time to explain this to me.
Wow! And I thought Apple and the big six publishers were being selfish and self-serving, unilaterally raising e-book prices. While it turns out, all the time, they were really sacrificing themselves to protect me from Amazon’s fiendish plan to take over the literary world.
I just feel bad, how could I have misjudged them so badly, and more important ..how can I make it up to them?
Maybe we should all consider paying 16.99 for e-books just to help with them with the defense fund. After all ..they would do it for us.
It would be nice if the Authors Guild started representing the interests of authors rather than the interests of big publishers and big box chain stores. There’s almost no acknowledgement of the increasing opportunities for authors opened up by the changes wrought by ebooks, largely spearheaded by Amazon, but not limited to them. If anything, this DOJ action has revealed exactly how incestuous the relationships in big publishing between publishers, agents and supposed author groups really has become. That system rarely benefits consumers and only the very narrowest number of writers. You’d think that a new paradigm that creates increased opportunities, increased creative control, enables retention of rights, increases financial possibilities, provides added leverage in negotiations, and shaved away layers of the money sucking barnacles that have attached themselves to creative works over the years, all to the benefit of writers, might be something a group called the Authors Guild could get behind. But I guess they’re just another barnacle in advocates clothing.