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Comment by marsavar | Hacker News Reader

As someone who worked for the world's largest trade book publisher a decade ago, let me tell you that dealing with Amazon is the worst. They squeeze publishers' profit margins to the absolute minimum, and they aggressively force them to accept terrible deals because they have the upper hand.

Amazon has been horrible for the book industry. Please buy your books elsewhere!

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Can I take this opportunity to recommend the lovely http://bookshop.org and http://uk.bookshop.org

And while I’m at it:

https://libro.fm/

for audiobooks.

https://www.hive.co.uk/

An online retailer that allows you to send a cut of the profits to a local independent bookshop of your choosing.

No connection. Just a satisfied customer.

I was about to suggest the same. They sell books, ebooks, music, films.

I got my hopes up, but hive says

> Please note: eBooks can only be purchased with a UK issued credit card and all our eBooks (ePub and PDF) are DRM protected.

Bloomsbury OTOH sells DRM-free e-books.

Book industry or just the publishers? Show me a single author who loves publishers

It does rather feel like the shoe is on the other foot now. Go back a few decades and publishers were the ones rinsing bookshops for all they were worth. Two wrongs don't make a right of course...

The real lesson is if you let a person or organisation get into a position where they can squeeze, they will squeeze. They won't even be doing it because they are "evil" because the hedonic treadmill makes everyone feel entitled to more. The problem is systemic. We know our failures but don't do anything about it.

This could be summarised as "companies leverage their power" which is unsurprising.

If you were to list occasions where entities acted intentionally against their best interests then that would be more noteworthy!

There's nuance to this. A company can achieve power by giving customers a better experience and in that way insert itself between customer and the industry. Thus wielding power in the interest of the customer. A company can also achieve power by giving producers a better experience and insert themselves between producer and industry.

I think my point is that in the majority of cases companies will do both. i.e. (when run "effectively") they will use all available levers.

If they fail to, it will usually be an oversight than a deliberate strategy.

Of course - some companies push harder, overstep more bounds and neglect the possible negative 2nd order effects more. But assuming there's an obvious lever that says "make more money legally" - the vast number of companies will reach for it.

Is it in Amazon's interest to destroy the publishing industry? Is it in publisher's interest for writing books to not be a viable career?

Don't worry, Amazon screws authors directly too when they self-publish, by using the cudgel of Kindle Unlimited to choke possible competition in ebook sales.

https://bsky.app/profile/glynnstewart.com/post/3leu7lzvy622g

KU is amazing.

There's entire genres like litrpg, progression fantasy and cozy fantasy that likely would either not exist or be a fraction of their current size without it.

And authors can make a living, there's plenty in those genres (not to mention romance) who via a combination of patreon + KU + Audible are doing just fine.

I too wish there was someone who could compete with amazon, but the thing is nobody seems to actually even try? I feel like the entire book industry would be quite happy if things had remained stuck in time circa 1990, on their own they would never have invented something like KU.

> I too wish there was someone who could compete with amazon, the thing is nobody seems to actually even try?

Apple was starting to compete, got sued by the US government for it, and decided they didn’t need to bother.

I mean, they did it illegally. Their fault for doing it that way. Kobo is competing with Amazon pretty well.

US market is heavily skewed in Amazon's favor though.

Sure doesn't help that unless you go out of your way to buy a third-party device, there's platform lock-in, which was never an issue with physical publishing.

Amazon has been more than just generically horrible - they use blatantly anti-competitive contracts (as if their near-monopsony position wasn't bad enough):

"Amazon fixed online retail prices through contract provisions and policies" that "prevent third-party sellers that offer products on Amazon.com from offering their products at lower prices or on better terms on any other online platform, including their own websites,"

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/05/amazon-sued-over...

Frugal is the business term :-)

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