Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption
amazon.com
amazon.com
Wonderfully slick move.
It makes Amazon look good, Hachette look bad and builds good will with the authors and spectators while turning the screws on the economic pressure that Hachette is already facing.
So, nice try, but no.
How does it make them look bad? If they had said "Hachette chose not to take us up on this", then sure, but as it stands, Amazon made the offer, and Hachette is deciding what to do with it. That's entirely reasonable.
Right-and that's not a bad thing. Sure, it puts Hachette in a position where they will look bad if they refuse, but I don't think they're there yet.
Or that deliveries were purposely delayed due to contract negotatiations, which Amazon itself admitted.
Citation: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-it...
Yes, that's called "disruption". Adapt or die.
http://gyrovague.com/2012/06/18/eat-yourself-or-be-eaten-a-t...
Amazon: "Well, yeah."
(1) Monopolistic collusion in e-books; and
(2) Net neutrality
Pray tell who is Amazon colluding with?
> (2) Net neutrality
Amazon doesn't offer last mile internet service as far as I'm aware. Are you alluding to some neutrality violation in their role as ISP for AWS customers or ...?
These people (and I am one of them) - only purchase e-books from Amazon. Because it's DRM encumbered, we need to make sure we purchase content from a supplier who is going to be around 10-20 years from now.
Only Amazon (and possibly Apple) has any strong probability of being in that category right now.
This gives Amazon an outsized ability to negotiate with vendors - Amazon is close to being a Monopoly for both the ebook purchasers, and Monopsony for the ebook sellers.
There was a small chance to correct this back when Apple attempted to negotiate agency and MFN rights for their book selling business, but they did it in heavy handed and clumsy way that appeared to the DOJ to be collusion. Some have argued that what Apple did with the book publishers was not that different than what Apple did with the Music publishers - the key difference, of course, is that there was no "Amazon" to complain about their market position being disrupted by a new business model.
I'll still continue to purchase books from Amazon, as distasteful as I find their current negotiating strategy, but I would be (very) happy to see the book publishers decided that DRM encumbered books will ultimately be their downfall because of the negotiating leverage it gives the DRM platform owner.
See: http://stratechery.com/2014/publishers-deal-devil/ for a nice literary analysis of the situation.
Books you buy from Amazon can have DRM or not, depending on the publisher[1].
Books you buy from other stores will work fine on Kindle so long as said other stores aren't using DRM themselves.
Admittedly, if you buy a book in EPUB format from another store you'll have to convert it to one of the formats Kindle supports. Amazon provides a program to do so, and independent stores like Baen[2] tend to give you a choice of formats anyway.
(Kindle not supporting EPUB natively seems pretty blatantly designed to avoid competition, since it's the non-Amazon industry standard at this point. No argument there.)
[1]: http://www.niemanlab.org/2010/01/amazon-quietly-lets-publish...
I wonder how much discussion has gone on with the publishers about eliminating DRM on their content. The music publishers certainly went that way...
Sure, just like, any one of the computer manufacturers that Microsoft was pressuring in the 1990s could have just pulled out of selling computers with Windows and rolled their own OS.
> If the rest of the big 6 publishers got on board that would be pretty catastrophic for Amazon
OTOH, if the rest of the big 6 didn't, it would be catastrophic for Hachette.
Setting up an independent ebook sales portal isn't as hard as writing a new operating system and getting it adopted. Not by many orders of magnitude.
You need:
1) A credit card processor. 2) An email server.
That's all.
I'm sure some PC vendors like HP could probably have figured out how to put together an OS -- because many of them did. effectively marketing a consumer OS in the market Microsfot had dominated, and where all the app development was focussed on windows, OTOH...
Adoption is hard for both scenarios.
Getting a user to set up his Kindle to read books from your indy store requires that he enter the Kindle's email address on your site, and your site's email address on the Kindle.
One easy way to fight Amazon would be to include a DRM-free digital copy download for free with every physical book purchase. Of course, the scummy publishers won't do that.
For online purchase of books? Not even close to "substantially all of them".
Even so, what barrier do customers have to purchasing at some other online retailer? Where's the insurmountable switching cost?
As for "what barrier," well, consider a website that is visible on Bing but not on Google. Go ahead and tell them "but visitors have no switching cost!" The cost of not being visible where customers are actually looking for you is very high indeed.
That isn't a cost to the customer, it's a loss to the supplier. The problem suppliers have is that customers have lots of competition to choose from. A customer might have equal preference for two books that each cost about the same amount and therefore choose the one which is easier to find. That choice makes all the difference in the world to the publisher but negligible difference to the customer.
That's why the customer places such little value on searching for alternatives. Because there is negligible harm to the customer. If there would be customer harm, the customer could instead exercise the option to spend only the few seconds necessary to find the book at another retailer. Unfortunately for the supplier, there isn't, so the customer doesn't.
Does it constitute a monopoly though? I doubt the folks at Google love Amazon.com but if this became the sufficient to declare Amazon.com a monopoly, then the obvious next step is to immediately declare Google web search a monopoly. With over sixty percent of the eye balls (the last time I read any stats), Google would be in the cross hairs.
I doubt that would be good for anyone.
http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-af...
Apart from the amusing optics of "this topic has generated a lot of coverage, but here's a blog post that sees our side of the story", it's worth knowing that this "wider perspective" is that of a very small literary indie publisher that basically says two things:
* Hachette is gigantic
* Selling books online is great for indies
Neither of those points has much to do with the issue at hand, and, in particular, I'd suggest that selling books online is great for indies so long as Amazon sees the dollars involves as a tiny rounding error.
By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/amazon-m...
If I were Stross I'd certainly be peeved at the loss of access to customers and, by extension, income. Especially if I were obligated by contract to stay with a publisher on the outs with Amazon. But arguing that Amazon's endgame is to put him out of business seems a stretch. We're still in the early stages of the ebook publishing disruption and I suspect that as with music, direct commercial channels between producers and consumers is the future.
This spat has forced me to occasionally shop at Barnes & Noble. And I gotta say, if I have to go to two stores to get items, Amazon's convenience edge is much smaller. Just the other day, since I was on B&N I bought things there that I would normally have gone to Amazon for. Again, it's the pure convenience.
I have no idea whether I'm typical or not, but if I am, then I think this will hurt Amazon more than Hachette.
I suspect encroaching on Amazon's market dominance would be a hard task even for Google, let alone B&N
Sure, it will take a while, but that's only because these publishers have spent the last two decades sitting on their asses counting their money whilst Amazon ate their lunch.
I don't subscribe to the doctrine "disruption = good", but publishers are part of the fat and lazy copyright exploitation industry that truly deserved to be disrupted.
If Amazon tried to stop Hachette from competing that would be a different matter. But they are handing Amazon this leverage simply because they still can't be arsed to innovate themselves.
I have to say, this is a classy move on Amazon's part.
They may be doing it for cynical reasons, but I still like it.
Why do we need these scummy publishers anyways? Good riddance.
If they manage to force publishers out of the picture, they will force writers to reduce their income as far as they can push it. Which in a world without publishers is very, very far.
By the way, you look like an Amazon shill, not providing any argument for your position and appealing to emotion (scummy publishers die!)
This seems an odd statement to me. It implies that publishers pay authors well only because publishers are inherently nice guys. Isn't it more likely that publishers pay authors well because authors deliver the goods, and would not otherwise?
If Amazon was the publisher, why wouldn't Amazon also pay a bestselling author well in order to entice that author to produce more/better books, which Amazon can make more money off of?
http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hache...
As a book seller:
1) Customers aren't mine. I'm not allowed to send any of the people that buy from me a link to my website or collect any of their data. This means that this income channel can be taken away at the whim of Amazon.
2) Amazon regularly uses your sell data to undercut you and put you out of business. I regularly would sell rare books with no other listings. As soon as I had any sales, Amazon would popup with their own listing at half price. My sales would go down when this happened.
3) Strange things would go on with their listings. I was in business for 5 years. I saw patterns and know when my sales would be up and down.
None of these rules applied on Amazon. I would be going strong for weeks at a time. One day, I would have no sales and this might last for a month. From 100 sales/day to 0 just seems to be a bit funny to me.
Customer support would of course deny everything. However, after running my own tests, I could see that from certain IP addresses and on some Amazon servers, I would get random errors on checkout of my own listings.
Amazon eventually banned me. I had near 100% feedback and 1 complaint from a user that I sold them the wrong book. Before the user complained, I even paid to have it shipped back to me. This wasn't good enough. The customer wanted to keep the >$200 book and not send it back. I nearly went broke because I couldn't access my money for 3 months.
It took me a year to get my business back to where it was, but I am now in a better place (with many sales channels).
Amazon is an evil company and anyone that does business with them is risking everything for short-term gains. It's the destroyer of small businesses.
That does not change that Amazon is scummy but that they don't allow you data is actually a customer protection feature.
I'm not sure the situation is that simple. You bought the book through Amazon, but (in this case), you bought the book from the other poster. Putting them closer to, say, a shopping mall. As a shopper, who's has a stronger relationship to you—the store you bought something from, or the mall you bought it in?
And for the seller, it means that your only "customer" is Amazon. Who doesn't really care about you at all. If I were a seller, I'd rather have my customers be the people who are actually interested in the product I'm selling.
When commerce goes well, the buyer and seller create a relationship that benefits both of them. With Amazon being a strict gatekeeper, there's no way for that relationship to form, and the seller ends up being an interchangeable name on a screen.
The issue here is not who has the right to the data, it is customer satisfaction.
It is. But for me, part of customer satisfaction is buying from a seller that I know and trust. So I like buying things that Amazon is the seller, since I know and trust them. But Amazon doesn't make it easy to build up trust with the other sellers in their marketplace.
I cannot see how a mall is analogous. In the mall, you choose the stores you go to and then look for the product there. You are explicitly entering different stores, and you have the obvious ability to return to that store. That builds affinity with the store.
With Amazon, the typical entry point is to search for the product you want. You don't particularly care who is selling it so long as the price, delivery, and trustworthiness are there. Maybe if all other things are equal, I'll choose a vendor that I bought from before. But, to be honest, for most purchases, I've only ever thought of it as being fulfilled by Amazon or someone else.
Anecdotally, I literally can't recall the names of any vendors I've bought from in Amazon. But I do know the places I like in the mall.
> Anecdotally, I literally can't recall the names of any vendors I've bought from in Amazon. But I do know the places I like in the mall.
That's exactly my point. There are stores that you're buying from-many of them with physical locations as well. But because of the way Amazon sets things up, their identity fades into the background. They could be stores you like, just like the places you like in the mall. But Amazon makes it hard for you to know about them, and build a relationship with them.
Apple created Ios,Google Android.While Android is more open(you dont have to sell your app through Play),both vendors own their respective plateform,even Microsoft wants to adopt that model.Things will not get more open in the future,definetly less and less open.It always works like that.
Every other day it's someone saying they'll never use Facebook again, they'll never use Amazon again, they've quit Dropbox, they'll never use Google again. People in HN are quitting startups, quitting established companies, forswearing this and that, and getting angry at all kinds of shit day in and day out, and to be honest, I'm not sure it's ever made any bit of difference ever.
Even GoDaddy is still alive and strong and not one of these other companies has a founder go and shoot elephants and post about it on their official blog with pictures, after supporting SOPA and demeaning women on national television. Boycotting does nothing, and crying about it even less.
The last thing the world needs is to mock people for speaking up.
Actually for-real boycotting and similar types of actions like calls for coordinated divestiture do often cause changes, sometimes very big ones; but a few people posting on some internet forums is by no means a real boycott.
Personally I also have a number of issues with Amazon but none of them are serious enough to overcome the fact that they do retail sales on the Internet about a billion times better than anyone else (only Newegg comes close, and only in the narrow band of computers/electronics).
Stripe exists because they have a really awesome API and they make refunds super easy without penalties.
Square exists because Jack Dorsey is able to drum up a lot of VC money and engineering talent from followers of his personality cult. Not a lot of profitable business though, apparently.
I'm curious: which bookseller does let you do this? Barnes & Noble? Your neighborhood bookstore?