Life After Amazon

Great straw man.

In my first yr, the accounting 1 professor released a new book each year, so the book i got from a friend the yr before was useless and I remember being pissed about that. He would change it up, add new tutorials and change up the workbook that goes along with it. Nobody ever questioned it but we all thought that was not right.

Without absolving the textbook industry (prices are nuts, have been for ages, dig up Supreme Court Justice Stephens' essay on the topic from the 1960s/1970s), this is in some ways a problem of the market-capitalist system. It's similar to the issues of equitable pay, automation, labor displacement, and business models for the arts, music, newspapers, and publishing in general. Oh, and this little thing called software.

In order to produce material, a certain amount of resources are necessary. The mechanism we've adopted for allocating those resources is the market. For much of present production, the fixed costs of production are high -- writing a book (particularly a textbook) is a large initial investment. Same goes for software. The marginal costs of production are low -- hell, you can download a 400 page text off of Project Gutenberg or stream a movie in a few seconds with a decent broadband connection. Amortize the costs of your laptop (a few hundred dollars for a basic model, a grand or two for high end), less for tablets or eBook readers), and a broadband subscription, and it's still cheap.

Textbooks generally do have to be updated every so often, though annual revisions are pretty ridiculous, and much of the industry is a fat scam, especially where the professor teaches from his own text. Rental schemes, "authorization codes" (required to access other materials), and the like factor into this as well -- they're akin to various tack-on fees for air travel. And there's a whole burgeoning movement for producing DIY book scanners and the like (pretty fascinating, do a quick DDG search or hit up Fixyt.com for videos). One thing I've come to realize about many commercial opportunities is that they require a control and toll-taking point. Revision updates, exercise questions, registrations, rentals, and the like, all create an arbitrary tollgate. Great for the publisher, for the student, not so much.

And the model requires that for a new or continued revenue stream, new books have to be published. I'm beginning to strongly suspect this is a market failure -- of externalities (the educational value of those books benefits more than just the reader) and perverse incentives.

The question is: what's the better way? Online we've been experimenting with vastly democratized publishing, and the result is Upworthy, Buzzfeed, HuffPo, and numerous other viral sites, which with time are finding their way into my hosts file with '0.0.0.0' entries, and search-engine blocklists. It leads to what Clay Shirky recognizes as a problem, not of data overload, but of filter failure.

There's also the problem within the publishing world, including academic publishing, of so much material being produced that not only is it not possible to keep up with it, even within a discipline or sub-specialty, but that good content is getting buried. That's the real tragedy of broken filters -- not the crap spewing everywhere, but the gold nuggets that don't float up.

I don't think that the pricing structure you describe is mentioned in the article. Maybe the books were the same retail price in both cases and the school chose Amazon because (for example) it made the accounting easier. Kind of weakens your argument, I think.

Probably because that number is actually less or equivalent, otherwise I am guessing they would have published the number. I would posit that most people find books not through stores, online or physical, but through friends/family reccomendations or television (e.g. Oprah driving book sales).

Well, Amazon sure tries, and I've certainly benefited from "People who bought/looked at/whatever the book your're looking at/bought also liked" selections.

And if I have a topic I want to come up to speed on, I've found it pretty good for that, when combined with its invaluable reviews.

And echoing user crucifiction in another reply to your posting, I can make the very best book recommendations for the friends I know well. If word of mouth, amplified to the Nth degree by the net, is still powerful, then a simple "what fraction does what" metric may not tell us very much, except for methods with negligible share.

That stuck out to me too. Of course, it could just come down to the particular people surveyed.

I know it's anecdotal, this idea does not seem far-fetched to me at all.

I buy about a hundred books a year, and while I used to buy a lot of them from amazon, I know that I discovered at most 2-3 a year through it. Now I never buy books on Amazon any more, because I'd rather give my money to the bookstores that I love (and provide me a valuable service) than to yet another internet monopoly.

Bookstores (well, the ones that do their job anyway) tend to select the books they will put on display and write reviews to help you discover good new things to read. On the other hand Amazon seems to be very bad at this, only ever giving irrelevant or useless suggestions (i.e. books on the same topic that the one i just bought, all the other books from the same author - as if I couldn't find them by myself - and that kind of useless "recommendations")

A market I have found very interesting is pen & paper role playing games. There has been an explosion of self-published content in the past three to five years. A good portion of it quite high quality, often coming from authors who previously had written titles for "big" publishers (Even in its glory days TSR was hardly a titan.)

The channels users are both finding out about these self published RPGs and purchasing them is not Amazon. Instead it starts with blogs, forums, Kickstarter, and Indiegogo, and is sold directly on the author's website, through Lulu, and Drivethrustuff (RPGNow etc.)

I was pleasantly surprised to see Wizards offering old Dungeons and Dragons books on RPGNow. Other "big" publishers have been doing the same.

As an unknown underdog, you want scale and recognition over paltry margins. Amazon does this for unknown authors by providing mass market distribution. The author still needs to get some initial traction, but the author never loses sales because the consumer couldn't find the book, or didn't have time to travel to the store while he or she was ready to turn over money in exchange for an unknown book.

Bookstores and publishers are the losers here. They are middlemen who do distribution and scaling using methods from the pre-Internet era.

As more content becomes digital only it is hard to see retail stores faring well. That may be an understatement, considering that this trend has been well underway for a decade. For now I'm positive on the prospects for retail clothing stores.

IME, Amazon US's customer service has never been an issue.

The solution is that they should (at least in part) become showrooms for Internet Retailers and manufacturers pay them to show off their merchandise.

Staples -- one of the largest surviving brick-and-mortar chains -- announced recently that they were going to reduce the size of their stores, reduce the number of types of products carried on shelves, and (unspoken) focus on their web business.

If you're buying a known product, there's no reason to go to a store except immediate availability.

> because it had effectively become a “showroom” for Internet retailers—people would see books in the store and then buy them online.

I think there might be room for some retail outlets to embrace this. You could imagine a bookshop that was an amazon affiliate, stuck QR codes with their affiliate link to the book over all of the barcodes, had a nice cafe and environment for browsing the large numbers of books they have in stock, but don't actually sell any themselves. They could even arrange to be close to an amazon drop/warehouse so you could get things delivered super fast to the store itself for a small convenience fee.

Another factor in Denmark is that Amazon's convenience and prices are not as good as in the US. There's no amazon.dk, so you have to order from .co.uk or .de, which makes the order take 3-4 days. And it costs ~$10 to ship one book! (No free shipping on international orders.) The only case in which I consider it worth it is when I can find a book used on Amazon Marketplace for >$20 below list price. But since the Amazon UK/DE marketplaces have worse used selection than Amazon US Marketplace, that's also not that frequent.

There was a story a year or two or so ago about a bookstore in Boston (I believe, although it might have been some other major East Coast city) that managed to turn things around on Amazon.

They bought a high quality book-on-demand printer that can print and then very nicely bind a book in a few minutes, and that is backed by a very large catalog of books.

They put in convenient computers so that customers could use Amazon from right in the store to search for books and read reviews. The customers could go home and order from Amazon, of course, or they could buy from the bookstore, and then go have a drink or snack in the in-store coffee shop while their book was printed.

Oddly: I reverse-showroom often. I'll research purchases online, make them in stores. Possibly old school. There's a greater convenience and generally far better returns policy. And there's now a #surveillancestate argument. I don't know if it was Jacob Applebaum's recent C3SO talk or elsewhere, but the story was of a security-conscious hacker who's taken to walking into an arbitrary storefront for his electronic purchases to avoid having it intercepted and backdoors installed by the spooks.

> I can talk with a human being face-to-face if the thing is faulty

In the US, most "customer service" people are actually just human-looking facades for a computer system. Of course there are shining exceptions who apply their brain and even have domain knowledge. But most of the time dealing with a "person" actually takes more work than directly with the computer as you've got to prepare your request carefully. Companies wanted workers to be interchangeable cogs, and they got what they wished for.

I can't imagine the Big Six publishers are eager to cross Amazon after the last run-in with the DoJ

In the US it's actually more insane, we can also have different sales taxes at the county (a smaller administrative unit w/in states, there are a few thousand of them nationwide), and the city level. We also have different tax rates on different kinds of products (restaurants vs clothes vs gas, for example.)

This reasoning behind this is giving individual areas the flexibility to tax based on their individual needs, so a county could vote to raise sales taxes for (X) years to fund a new high school or something.

I believe they usually do this by other methods (like bonds), but want to keep taxes as an option.

I live in Washington DC, which is tiny and close to 2 other states, so there are days when I can end up going to DC, MD, and VA and buying food and gas, so I pay 6 different tax rates in the same day. It's all transparent to me of course, and most people only pay attention to income taxes when they think about moving somewhere.

>a sales tax on a state level

Some states have taxes, some don't. Some states allow cities or counties to have taxes, some don't. Some tax different items differently. Most places have no tax on food in grocery stores, but tax restaurants (as it is a service). One city can tax clothes, but one does not, etc.

For example, in New York City, there is a small tax on most/all (a fraction of a percent) taxable items to fund the mass transit system there, the MTA.

Some places make up for lack of/lower sales tax by larger property taxes, or other types of taxes (lotteries, etc...) High tourist areas can tax things like rental cars and hotels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_State...

I think it's more part of the United States culture, with things being done on a more local level. It's in the long run, confusing.

One reason is that it taxes consumption, not income, so the poor and middle class are hit the hardest because they spend a larger percentage of their income on food, clothes, etc.

"to give more prominent placement to books which aren't available at Amazon"

Ask any "old timer" about how "stereos" used to be sold.

At the start there were specialized shops (and of course there still are but "back then" that was the channel) where you went to get a stereo and got knowledgeable advice and good service. Then mass retail came about and all those good brands (that could) just went mass retail and forgot about all those small fokesy sales channels. Once again, because they could and someone dangled the opportunity. This happened with Apple as well which (as all computers were) was originally offered through small computer stores.

My point is giving prominent placement is great but don't assume that if something becomes popular it won't automatically go where the money and opportunity is and quickly forget the people who first gave it an opportunity (mainly because new sales people get hired that aren't rewarded for the past loyalty).

"so leaving is cutting your nose off to spite your face."

Well, according to the article.....

"It has been nearly two years since the Amazon decision and I can proudly report that our company is still alive, well, and prospering. Our direct-selling division has recorded seven consecutive months of year-over-year growth, and new sales force hires are up 25% over last year as well. And, thanks to our loyal retail customers, we recorded the largest ever sales month in the history of that division in October—and we did it without Amazon!"

.... clearly not.