Amazon’s stranglehold over the ebook market has led to strong-arm practices.
Initially, the online seller’s attempts to control (i.e., limit) sales of the publisher Hachette was seen as a problem for Hachette (and its writers) alone. Gradually, however, other authors began to wonder what would prevent Amazon from exercising its influence in more and more offensive ways, leading them consider whether the “Justice Department [ought] to investigate Amazon for illegal monopoly tactics.”
An article from the New York Times asks: “What are the rights and responsibilities of a company that sells half the books in America and controls the dominant e-book platform?”
By choosing to place certain books (on certain subjects) on sale, or to ship more quickly, Amazon is able to privilege some political views over others. Of course, merchants can always influence or express political views through their sales and product lines. The difference is that Amazon has a vast influence on book selling, particularly ebook selling. In Ursula k. LeGuin words: “Amazon is using censorship to gain total market control so they can dictate to publishers what they can publish, to authors what they can write, to readers what they can buy. This is more than unjustifiable, it is intolerable.”
The Times article in particular describes the coming together of a diverse group of authors, some amongst the most well-known in American letters, to form Authors United. A letter signed by the assembled group and sent to Amazon’s Board of Director’s protested Amazon’s sanctioning of Hachette authors’ books, stating: “[t]hese sanctions included refusing preorders, delaying shipping, reducing discounting, and using pop-up windows to cover authors’ pages and redirect buyers to non-Hachette books,” acts which led to reduced sales by at least 50, and as much as 90 percent. The letter asks, “Do you as an Amazon director approve of this policy of sanctioning books?”
Jon Ciliberto
I just want to counter by pointing out that Amazon ebook self publishing is a far more favorable deal to authors than say Apple, or really anything else out there. It’s the publishers who actually have these authors in stranglehold, not Amazon. Amazon would like nothing more than to bypass publishers and get authors to work with them directly.
And the publishers, for their part, have found Amazon a cruel mistress. They love the sales they get… but they hate that they are no longer the ones in charge, and that significant portions of their author’s revenue is coming from a single source. Many authors have dropped their publishers in favor of self publishing, or agent based publishing, where they are not tied to contracts with a publisher for years or decades, and this scares the bejeezus out of publishers like Hachette. If an author can sell half as many books but reap 3x-4x per sale by self publishing… why the hell would they stay with a publisher?
The publisher as distributor business model is just one more victim of the disruption new technology has created in the media and retail landscape. They simply cannot compete, but have a stock of products (authors) which they have under legal contract to only work through them.
Ursula LeGuin, as an author, should be respected. Earthsea is great. But her age is showing here. She simply has zero understanding (other than what her publisher has told her) of how the ebook market place is shaping up in the 21st century. She’s been told by her publisher a list of talking points against Amazon. A publisher which, I will point out, is named as co-defendant along with the other 800lb Gorilla in the ebook world, Apple, in a price fixing and anti-trust lawsuit for colluding to fix prices on books.
Hachette, the publisher named in the Authors United letter, is also named in that lawsuit.
I don’t deny that it is complicated issue.
Yesterday’s NYTimes featured an Op-ed by Paul Krugman:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amazons-monopsony-is-not-ok.html
It concludes: “What matters is whether [Amazon] has too much power, and is abusing that power. Well, it does, and it is.”