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Comment by GeorgeOrr | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to book publishing, isn't it Hachette that is the Giant monopoly?

If you want to buy a book they publish, you are a click away from bying it from http://www.barnesandnoble.com/ or from Apple if you want it on your ipad.

But if Amazon wants to sell it they have no choice but to get it from the conglomerate Hachette.

My favorite comment on this so far comes from Hugh Howey (author of the WOOL series)at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hugh-howey/winning-at-monopoly...

From that article.

“The real monopoly, once you start examining business practices and attitudes, is Big Publishing itself,”

"Where is the outcry for Amazon-published authors who are blocked from sale by practically every brick and mortar store? It doesn't exist. The response is simply: That's what those authors get for signing with Amazon. Imagine an observer today saying, "That's what those authors get for signing with Hachette." The hypocrisy astounds."

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If you ask, "cui bono?", the decision on who to side with is pretty obvious, at least for the average consumer.

Amazon has for decades been one of the most pro-consumer companies out there. The publishers have been slapped in court for trying to collude to raise prices. In fact, the whole source of this dispute is that Hachette wants the option to charge more for its books on Amazon.

So on the one hand, we have a company that wants us to pay more for the same product. And on the other hand we have a company that, while large in the ecosystem, is by no means a monopoly (maybe it is a monopsony, but even that is someone questionable considering they only have a 65% share of the market), and wants to charge us less. You can always buy the publishers' books from a different store if Amazon won't sell them. Well, if it weren't for the DRM the publishers originally insisted on, you could.

Hrm. Well, I know where I stand on this.

> (maybe it is a monopsony, but even that is someone questionable considering they only have a 65% share of the market)

65% of distribution volume is more than enough to practice monopolistic practices, especially if the industry is hurting.

I'm not necessarily against traditional publishers disappearing, but it would be nice to have a more diversified spread when it comes to the surviving distribution channels

I don't know how true that really is Everything I've read suggests that exercising monopoly power requires very high market shares when it comes to fungible products with low marginal cost, like delivery of e-books. Example citation: section A.2. of http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/reports/236681_chapter2.ht...

I think monopoly power is especially difficult with digital distribution because the company is using technology that everyone else has access to. If Amazon suddenly started overcharging, it would not be difficult for Barnes and Noble or someone else to take over their business.

This is why free software like Apache and Linux is so important. However big Amazon gets, as long as other companies, however small, have the necessary technology to provide similar services and the option to scale operations with increased business, Amazon has to offer superior services and prices to stay competitive. Book publishers, on the other hand, use specialized factories and distribution networks to throw their power around. With commoditized servers, free software, and an open Internet, Amazon can't leverage those same unique advantages.

I disagree, the technology is necessary but not sufficient. To compete as a distributor of mass consumer goods, you need a distribution infrastructure (warehouses, trucks, servers and the logistics operation to run them). The technology that makes up trucks, warehouses and servers may be commoditized, but the ability to own and operate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of them, with enough profit to keep growing the fleet every year - that's a very real barrier to entry because customers like getting their purchases the next day or even the same day, and doing that consistently for many customers requires that kind of a fleet.

On top of that, you need a way to reach customers online. The brand is sticky enough that many people start their book search directly on Amazon. To get a chance to compete for that search (presumably on Google) you'll need to hope that they find the price outrageous enough to overcome the promise of a convenient and reliable next-day delivery, pre-configured shipping and billing, etc.

Lastly Amazon is working hard to move the battle away from the open web: once a customer has a Kindle, the bar is even higher to compete for their future purchases.

I agree with what you are saying, but I was talking specifically about digital distribution. Closed platforms like Kindle definitely cause some lockdown, but Kindles are relatively cheap and replaced as often as yearly. If Amazon did start gouging on prices, a lot of people would switch to Kobo or Nook.

With digital distribution, you can guarantee that everything you're selling is always available for free (with the risk of legal fines) from other channels. Companies like Spotify, Netflix, and Amazon's digital distribution are aware that they are competing with free and tailor their services to be worth the cost. Physical goods that require factories and distribution centers will be a barrier to entry for a long time, at least until commodity 3d printers can compete with large-scale factories, which will take some time.

I see a future where hyper-low-volume printers paired with warehousing and delivery logistics providers (Amazon) and crowd-funded _investing_ for advances replace and eliminate the rent extraction of the big publishers in film, print, and music.

I want to live in a world where the creators set their own prices and reap the most benefits.

Are you referring to Espresso book printers or another type of print technology?

I'm thinking something like an Espresso book printer scaled up to a small (mostly) automated factory serving logistics companies (shippers and warehousers like Amazon) and local book shops. The key being the possibility of producing a large volume of books per day but down to ones of copies per title eliminating the up front cost of 10,000 units (or whatever a reasonable industry standard is).

Doesn't Amazon already run their own POD press? One of the rumored disputes with Hachette is that Amazon wants access to digital masters so they can print books on demand, if the publisher is unable to supply physical copies for any logistical reason. That's like demanding access to software source code.

I believe Amazon already does, but the future isn't an Amazon monolith controlling the entire vertical infrastructure.

The correct future is many printing businesses competing with each other, many logistics and shipping companies competing with each other, all separate and competing amongst themselves for the business of both content creators and content consumers. It doesn't work right if authors are 'vendor locked' into Amazon's printing and distribution network, it needs to be a many-to-many printers-to-distributors network with healthy competition for the "right future".

There are likely quite a few underutilized Espresso printers out there today. Just noticed that http://www.ondemandbooks.com/ is a search engine that links to the handful of stores which have a printer.

considering http://www.diybookscanner.org/ and the speed with which illegal texts of books popped up on the internet even before drm-breaking of ebooks was a thing, i think it's like demanding access to the source code of an unobfuscated python program you've already been given. getting the source isn't hard; the only hurdle is a legal one.

i find it hard to believe that 1) amazon would violate contracts on something like that or 2) if they did, hachette would somehow suffer financially, but not notice, or be unable to do anything about it.

I can ship books to 1dollarscan.com, and for $3 per 100 pages, get 600dpi, ocr layered, human adjusted/verified PDFs of a book.

The hurdle, as always, is layer 8.

> That's like demanding access to software source code.

No it isn't. It's like demanding a copy of master for a CD or DVD.

> I see a future where hyper-low-volume printers paired with warehousing and delivery logistics providers (Amazon) and crowd-funded _investing_ for advances replace and eliminate the rent extraction of the big publishers in film, print, and music.

By silicon valley computer-nerd salary standards, advances are... very small amounts of money. Like not even a nice car amounts of money.

the same goes for printing a few thousand copies of a book. And amazon will ship for you, if that's what you want.

Advertising is hard - and getting it into stores that aren't online-only is also hard

but discounting those two aspects? your average silicon-valley computer nerd could drive an older ford rather than a new car that is more appropriate to his or her station and use the difference to publish a book. It's not something that requires a huge amount of money.

My point, though, is that if you really feel strongly that the publishing houses aren't adding value, you can do this right now. If you are a silicon valley computer nerd, you don't even need investors or other people's permission. Hell, you don't even have to come up with more than the advance until the book is done.

Hugh Howey is really one of my favorite Authors and I picked up all of his books on the Kindle. I probably wouldn't know him if he'd signed with brick-and-mortar stores for paper books, as I stopped buying those dust-magnets.

Talk to a publisher that has resisted Amazon, and ask what happened to the sales.

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