Please, don't buy my book on Amazon
pleasedontbuymybookonamazon.com
pleasedontbuymybookonamazon.com
Small presses fail because they generate the bulk of their sales from Amazon, but the margins are too thin when they sell on Amazon. Presumably if they don't sell on Amazon the margins would be healthier, but sales would drop precipitously. So if you can't make money with Amazon and you can't make money without Amazon it seems to me Amazon isn't the problem.
It's true Amazon took the fat margins, but it gave them to consumers. I suppose this guy is just asking nicely to get them back to support his sclerotic business model. But in the long run it's unlikely that people are going to pay more for a worse product.
(On the other hand maybe he could sell the book at the locally-grown organic farm stand.)
Yes, they shop at Wal-Mart, and it's much more convenient for them.
Then a couple of years later they wonder where all the local businesses went, why all the towns look the same, why there are fewer jobs.
It's naive to think that stopping the odd Wal-Mart or Amazon here and there will help, but it's also naive to think that just because a company is popular that it is doing good on a grander scale.
Then along came delivered groceries and everyone does that and just uses new "local supermarkets" to pick up a few impulse purchases and medicines.
As a result, every row of shops is saturated with takeaways. There are very few traditional local businesses left.
However, everyone is happier as they are not slaves to the requirement to drag stuff around themselves and can concentrate on more interesting things. No tears have been shed. We're all better off.
People just need to now get used to the fact that there isn't a job for everyone as we've reached a pretty good efficiency ceiling.
No, we're all more comfortable, while the economy is going to shit.
> People just need to now get used to the fact that there isn't a job for everyone
Please think about what you're saying.
I did think about what I'm saying. Not everyone has a useful function in society. It's a total fallacy that jobs are available for all and that it's a good metric for the success of a society.
Ah right, I misunderstood your comment. You're taking the position that it's always been like this and the wall marts and amazons of this world are not part of the reason things are like this, and moreover you're saying that societies can be considered successful even with high or rising unemployment.
It seemed to me like you were acknowledging that unemployment was rising and saying that people just had to get used to being jobless.
Have I now understood your position correctly?
Let's see. My axioms (and bear in mind these are written in half an hour) are:
1) People cannot ever be equal.
2) Things are not of equal value.
3) People need and want things.
4) It is not possible for everyone to have everything they want.
5) People want to own things.
6) It would be simpler if people did not want to own things ;)
7) People are fickle.
8) Given 5 and 7, trade will naturally arise.
9) Barter is impractical at scale
10) Barter is impractical across nonlocal distances.
11) Given 8, 9 and 10, money will naturally arise as a token for items.
12) People do not have a constant natural supply of valuable items.
13) People do have a constant natural supply of time and energy, at least for as long as it matters.
14) To gain money, people can sell their items
15) To gain money, people can sell their time and energy
16) Given 12, 13, and 15, jobs will naturally arise as a way to gain money.
At this point I start asking questions that are beyond my knowledge of economics.
a) How does money stop having a hard relationship with the items it originally represented (aka the "Why can't I get five pounds of gold for my fiver any more" question)?
b) How is the value of money set?
c) If money is subject to (a), then doesn't trade in money critically undermine the value of money?
But those notwithstanding, how do you rate my reasoning as to why jobs are essential to society?
edit: perhaps I've only demonstrated that jobs are one way to gain wealth. That's what I'm asking really. Assuming I've not made some huge error with my axioms, what is your number (17) that allows people to acquire money without selling items or their time and energy?
however have you considered charity and socialism (particularly marxism-leninism)?
18) In time there will be nothing worth paying a person for that a machine can't do cheaper or better
19a) People will need to work less and less as a result, and are free to pursue hobbies, be creative, enjoy nature, socialize more, and be less stressed and overall healthier as a result (if the benefits of distributed efficiency are evenly distributed)
19b) People will go hungry and homeless due to not having a source of income because of a system set in place by ignorant voters scared of socialism and communism
20) Utopia or dystopia? We choose
I disagree with 18. Would agree if "nothing" changed to "fewer things". I'm thinking of all manner of things; art, theatre, sex, the social aspect of chatting to your butcher, making better machines, responding to new market needs, etc. Machines can't replace all things, but I agree that there are lots that they can. I suppose if "cheaper or better" are mutually exclusive then I might agree with 18.
19c) People will try socialism or communism and end up being yet another depressing case study in a "failed political ideologies" book.
Cars, public transportation, and now the internet, did/do more damage than anything to small businesses and people are not location trapped.
Big box stores like Wal-Mart become a destination fostering business development nearby to take advantage of the situation
...shows why individual choice fails to give us what we want, and why we need to rely on collective action rather than individual choice to take us to where we want to be.
Don't buy it on Amazon...
"Always lower prices. Always." Yepand lower wages too. The town's inhabitants are also the consumers, so basically the end result is cheaper products AND smaller wages for everyone - and greater income disparity across the country (automation helps boost capital vs labor).
That's very neat. But aren't the people who shop there themselves getting lower wages, so the purchase power remains the same as before?
i.e. my grocery shop is 20% cheaper, but my wages are 20% lower.
They also know that they only need to have, on average, four checkouts open from the hours of 8-6, Monday through Friday, so there is no inefficiency when it comes to staffing, either.
Meanwhile at Mom and Pop's Five and Dime, inventory is brought in once a week on a truck, and if they got rid of cereal X and moved the milk over two aisles how much would their sales increase? Who the hell knows? They are just doing what has worked for the past 40 years. But it's okay, because shoppers in the area like them and because there isn't any meaningful competition, they can just use cost-based pricing to guarantee a satisfactory margin and keep themselves in business.
Unfortunately in this scenario, local town inhabitants are paying for this inefficiency. When Wal-Mart moves in and gives the consumers more choice at lower prices, Wal-Mart robs Mom and Pop of their margin, keeps a little of it, and gives the rest to the consumers. Your wages aren't 20% lower just because Wal-Mart ironed out a huge producer surplus. You are wealthier because you can go to the mall and buy a quality shirt for $30 that was made for about two bucks whereas before you would have had to make your own shirt which might take you most of a day. This is how economic progression works. Better business practices make society wealthier through efficiency.
Well, no. I can't find rabbit (meat, not pet) for love nor money. Because it "doesn't sell". Time was, the butcher would always have rabbits and if people didn't buy it they would go to his dogs.
> there is no inefficiency when it comes to staffing, either.
inefficiency, otherwise known as plenty of jobs.
I'm seriously not convinced that the ideal society is the one that is most efficient.
Wonderful things live in the obscure, inefficient corners of things.
All this is mitigated somewhat when a town can issue its own currency. But if they are forced to use the country's fiat currency, they may start defaulting on their loans. This can explain what happened with the PIGS countries' economies after they joined the EU for example.
In any event, the income disparity pushes some people around (making them move) . There is an ever greater amount of people unable to earn enough to leave their small town to a "booming center" without significant risk. Those who do are willing to put up with worse conditions in order to get a chance at the big bucks. This happened for 10 years in the Great Depression as farmers migrated to the cities and our country transitioned to be dominated by industrial sector. A sector which has been disrupted in the last 30-40 years much as the agricultural sector was before.
However, even with all that, a growing "underclass" of people becomes less economically significant. For example why develop vaccines for them? The overall pictureis that automation increasingly favors the capitalists over the wage laborers. One of the best ways that has worksd to mitigate this is to decentralize the capital, eg have wordpress and linux instead of facebook and windows. Patents work against this, though.
It used to be that most towns had a bookstore, and larger towns or cities had several. Eventually they were displaced by chains: Waldenbooks and B. Dalton, Borders and Barnes & Noble. First the chains chased out the independent bookstores by being able to cut costs and order more efficiently; then the chains ate each other at the same time that Amazon was cutting costs even further. Now there's one limping chain, B&N, and some specialized chains -- mostly religious, secondhand or otherwise discount -- and Amazon.
Efficiency is best served by a single distribution system with maximum economies of scale. That isn't actually a desirable outcome for customers or producers, though.
When an efficient competitor "wins" and drives the competition out of business, everyone loses, as that competitor eventually turns into an entrenched toll-taker. As a consumer, you want your vendors fighting each other all of the time. The situation in books, where Amazon tolerates the existence of B&N, and doesn't give a hoot about Jesus books isn't good for anyone.
I even used order books by mail order. (In particular Dover published a catalog which had a lot of their math and science reprints. You'd fill in an order form and send it with a check through the mail; 4-6 weeks later your books would arrive.)
The current situation for the consumer is much better.
I should have said "in the long run, it isn't good for anyone". I used to camp alot in the Adirondacks in upstate NY. There was one grocery store that was basically the only store in a 50 mile radius. Guess what? The store hours sucked, and milk was $4/half gallon.
Even now, it's difficult to resolve situations with Amazon -- good luck figuring out how to contact a human to resolve a complex problem.
But I imagine that Amazon is continuously under competitive pressure -- consider the disruption e-books caused. Had that caught Amazon flat-footed, it could have decimated their book business.
This is why we have a regulated market, and rules about monopolies.
What Amazon would have to do to maintain a monopoly is to continuously locate and destroy startups which try to compete with it, by using its scale. You're saying that, while it's doing this, it may make things worse for the consumer. Perhaps, but that's REALLY tough to do (until someone writes software to do it).
One thing is for sure though - regardless of how good the service is to consumers, the demand for human labor will erode further and the comparative advantage of local economies will erode all over the world - not just for books but tons of products and services. As a result, we will need an ever greater welfare state so that many out-of-work people can be paid to be consumers and send price signals back into the economy, even if they are unable to make much money themselves (because presumably robots would be employed instead).
This problem does not seem to be surmountable with the level of social infrastructure we have. I doubt even more societies with a greater level of public organization, like Norway, could do this. Knowledge and experience are just best when hoarded.
That's not true, there are many online book sellers out there, and I'm guessing not all of them are in danger of going out of business. Amazon is the biggest player, but what has played out is that book selling is too low-margin to be viable as a meat-space transaction.
I'm an avid reader, and have all the walls of my apartment plastered with shelves of dead tree shavings, but I've noticed lately (like maybe within the last 3-5 years since the kindle and tablets have come out) that I don't buy physical books anymore; the reading experience on an electronic devices is sufficient, and the lower price of an ebook is attractive.
With the amount of books I buy, I'm ok with trading a little bit of nostalgia and ephemeral tactility for "2 books for the price of 1". Putting words into my head is the main thing, and authors can put words into people's heads (and make a profit) on their own now: 1. write a book, 2. convert to ebook format and make available online, 3. sprinkle with marketing voodoo (which I think any book author could do: blog, tweet, email, link to book, etc.)
Yes, if they don't sell on Amazon they will loose huge amount of sales because the Amazon exposure will be lost.
But in this case he's trying to avoid selling on Amazon while simultaneously making effort that he maintains the exposure by using other avenues (like how he got it on top of HN frontpage). That is not the same as someone who decides he wouldn't sell on Amazon and miraculously expects to get some exposure somehow.
If you buy directly from the publisher, then the publisher does get 100% of the price. And if they donate 50% of that to your local bookstore, they're still making more money than if you'd bought the book from that local bookstore. None of this has anything to do with Amazon.
I get that Amazon is bad for small independent bookstores (and for large chain bookstores too!), and I notice that the author just happens to own a small independent bookstore, so take his other complaints with a large grain of salt.
This should probably be the top comment.
"co-owner of Newtonville Books, an independent bookstore in Boston"
I was under the impression that amazon could discount a book as much as they wanted, but this did not affect the fixed dollar amount that the publisher received per sale.
CSS transitions are a great feature, however, using them to make hyperlinks fade slowly over 500ms on hover is a really bad idea.
It is both distracting and not helpful, as a casual pass over a link with the mouse won't actually reveal it.
So please, please, by all means use CSS transitions for nice graphic effects, or to make the colour transition smoother over 50, or 100ms, but too much is not better.
I have the feeling CSS transitions are quickly becoming a kind of modern standard of amateur design, discreet and appealing yet annoying and distracting, like coloured scrollbars and animated mouse cursors once were.
Agreed that CSS transitions are neat and easy to use but you are right about the hyperlinks being a bad place to use them. If the link in the page wasn't the URL and instead just a word in the paragraphs I wouldn't have noticed it either. When I use transitions for links or to open sub menus I usually pick a color that really stands out so they can understand they should click there. Usually 100ms will do fine, I think the transitions have their place but some people including my Manager do not like them for links or menus.
For links, I've found that a 150ms intro animation and a 250ms outro (with the proper easing) is the maximum duration that looks good.
This I don't understand. How is it possible that Amazon's discounts reduce the publisher's margin? Doesn't the publisher simply sell it to Amazon for what the publisher thinks is a fair wholesale price? Amazon can screw small bookstores by reducing their own margins to almost nothing, but surely they can't reduce the publisher's margins? If Amazon wants to pay less for the book, then surely the publisher can simply not sell through Amazon?
So what use is it to tell people not to buy from Amazon? Maybe I just don't get how the book industry works.
I should also keep funding my publisher which does it's best to top slice cash, screws libraries with license agreements for texts, force DRM where possible?
I think people resent amazon in this market because it's stamped on their little castles they all built. That's business, regardless of what you sell or create.
And yet, I can't find any way to download his book as an ebook right now. I would love to buy from authors directly... but help me help you. You can also save lots on the production and distribution costs.
Otherwise, I agree. It would be great if more publishers offered up eBooks directly from them. Even at a highly discounted price, they'd make more per sale than through other channels. (But if it was their only distribution channel, likely less overall.)
http://qz.com/127861/its-time-to-kill-the-idea-that-amazon-i...
Amazon seems to be killing its medium-sized competitors more than its smaller ones. But the article does not touch on the subject of publishers.
* They have it, always(and the newest printing of it)
* They usually have it digital, I start reading it within 60 seconds
* If it's not digital it is often available used($200 textbooks for $5? Yes, please, my "local" bookstore can keep their copies at $150 used).
* Prime shipping
* Oh, I also need new batteries, and a box of diapers? Might as well throw those in to the order and get back to things I would rather be doing than driving through town wasting my time.
The trouble is, Amazon knows that consumers think this way - so whenever they want to extort publishers into giving them a bigger discount they just make all that publishers' books unavailable on Amazon, knowing that everyone will just assume the books are out of print and not bother looking elsewhere.
Amazon's retail key is its unmatched distribution network. If someone can duplicate it, they'll eventually have half of the market.
really? this comes off more like, here's my book, you haven't heard of it, but if I say something bad about Amazon I have an excuse to tell you of it.
If small publishers don't want to sell their books through Amazon then stay out of the channels where Amazon buys books. How is that not possible?
I had planned to initially offer my book at $9.99, and then raise the price to $14.99. Unfortunately, I'd basically have to stop offering Amazon as a vendor, or at the very least stop advertising it as one on my site. I may or may not do that at some point, but it's frustrating to say the least that I don't have control of the pricing of my product. I'm not willing to charge my customers more and receive less.
Shameless plug for my book - http://buildanappbusiness.com/
Starting a physical book publisher in this day and age is like trying to start a radio rental business in the 80s. Your business is going to be screwed by market trends whatever you do.
"Indie Bookstores Aren’t Dead Yet"
http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/26/indie-bookstores-arent-dead...
> You can’t yet order Vernon Downs directly from your local bookstore because the distributor that fills those orders would also have to fill orders to Amazon.
I'm guessing that there are no medium or large distributors that avoid amazon
How can Amazon sell a book against the publisher's wishes? If true, that's the real story here.
Maybe the intended audience is already familiar with that part.
End of the day, mass consumers look at the bottom line, in this case cheap prices and good service.
If they really want to make a good cut, they should sell the ebook on their own web site.
Since the very beginning.
Stop screaming about the sky falling. It's just rain.