Lest anyone think that Amazon’s encroachment into the UK book world is a wee little thing, we have Seni Glaister, CEO of UK online book retailer The Book People, to put us straight, as she did at The Bookseller’s London Futurebook Conference a short time ago. “It’s a dystopian disaster,” she insisted, of the potential for Amazon to translate its ebook dominance into a physical book sales monopoly as well – unless the UK government steps in.
Last time I read English prose, a dystopian disaster was something like George Orwell’s 1984, or J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World. But obviously Amazonian domination is in the same league, in Glaister’s eyes. Never mind that she runs a similar company herself. It’s worth remembering that The Book People is an online direct book sales platform that seems to make great play of the fact that it is a family business (“The businesswoman in me wants to admire Amazon, but as a parent this dominance worries me,” says Glaister), and homegrown British, to gloss over the fact that it is exactly the same kind of threat to traditional bricks-and-mortar bookstores that Amazon is. Only less successful.
All this was in the context of industry calls for the UK to push Amazon to unlock its DRM system. But hold on: Is Amazon a walled garden as the conference delegates insisted? Yes, it’s true that anyone who wants to go through the Kindle Store has to use its own Kindle DRM. But as almost anyone knows, when they care to remember, you can very easily sideload a DRM-free Mobi file onto a Kindle and read it like any other Kindle title, without any lock in to the Kindle Store. All you need is – yes – a non-DRM’d Mobi file. So putative government intervention is supposed to do what?
I simply fail to see how this is supposed to work. With or without a DRM mechanism imposed and administered by Amazon, publishers who want to push through Kindle will have to go through Amazon’s gates if they want to use Amazon’s platform and reach. And there are plenty of reasons to believe that the real strength of Kindle lies not in the DRM itself, nor in the excellent devices, but in the immensely advanced marketing, recommendation, comparison and data capture mechanism of the Kindle Store. Just how is government intervention supposed to crack that?
And the publishers are the ones who created this problem in the first place. They could have stayed DRM-free and avoided being locked into anyone’s platform. But Big Publishing took the poisoned chalice of DRM, and the price was Amazon’s hegemony. So suck it up, people: It’s your own brew.
Countries like to control their culture. It’s what makes them unique. Next to invading armies, nothing bothers them more.
Europeans are already disturbed that Hollywood creates so many of the films they watch. They’re far from happy about Amazon serving as the ultimate retail gatekeeper for the books they read and the videos they buy. Amazon doesn’t have to not carry certain books. It can simply steer customers elsewhere.
It doesn’t help that Amazon often plays the bully, both here and overseas. Britain, France or Germany may prove Amazon’s undoing. And what happens there may spread here, particularly after a new administration comes into the White House.
I might add that issue has almost nothing to do with DRM. DRM is invisible to most users. Marketshare is the real issue, along with the dominating company’s ability to use below cost pricing to destroy competitors. Marketshare allows a company to force concessions out of publishers that other retailers don’t get, including making books only available through Amazon or making royalties contingent on the retail price.
I am an Amazon competitor….we operate in the Higher Ed market, and when doing our marketing at a student halls of residence plenty of students were picking up their Amazon book parcels. Was it disheartening? For this young company yes. Did it make me want to froth at the mouth and scream about Amazon? Absolutely not!
Seeing it spurs me on, to provide as best a service as we can.
So a call to my fellow non-Amazon booksellers:
Let’s build up our own, do something which is unique and put our efforts into that rather than spend time crafting anti-Amazon write ups/speeches/essays/videos.
I run Reference Tree, I read on Reference Tree, I also own and use a Kindle and physical books too. I use Amazon, Foyles, Waterstones, The Chorleywood Bookshop and my own platform for reading and study….
Delight your customers and be happy.
(Yes this is not an economic essay on Monopoly and oligopolistic competition nor culture merely a call to my fellow eBook/Booksellers to consider how hard are you fighting for the £/$ being spent with you?)