This skirmish will end, though, and when it does, we’ll be left with the larger questions of what the landscape of writing and reading will look like in the English-speaking world. On those questions, we should be backing Amazon, not because different principles are at stake, but because the same principle — Whose actions will benefit the reader? — leads to different conclusions. Many of the people rightly enraged at Amazon’s mistreatment of customers don’t understand how their complaint implicates the traditional model of publishing and selling as well.
Some of the strongest criticism of Amazon comes from authors most closely aligned with the prestigious parts of the old system, many of those complaints appearing as reviews of “The Everything Store”, Brad Stone’s recent book on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, wrote one such, “Citizen Bezos,” in The New York Review of Books:
At least two qualities distinguished Bezos from other pioneers of e-commerce and help to explain his subsequent success. The first was his gargantuan vision. He did not see himself merely chipping away at Barnes & Noble’s share of retail book sales; he saw himself developing one of the greatest retailers in history, on the scale of Sears Roebuck or Walmart. Secondly, Bezos focused relentlessly on customer service — low prices, ease of use on his website, boundless inventory, and reliable shipping. To this day, Amazon is remarkably successful at pleasing customers.Coll does not intend any of this as a compliment.
He writes about book-making and selling as if there are only two possible modes: Either the current elites remain firmly in charge, or else Amazon will become a soul-crushing monopoly. The apres nous, le deluge!-ness of this should be enough to convince anyone that the publishers are bullshitting, but if your worry is market manipulation, the publishing cartel we have today has has already created decidedly non-hypothetical harms.
Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.
Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to protect first editions; as long as ebook prices remained high, hardback sales could be protected. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.
Faced with evidence of their connivance, the publishers all settled with the Department of Justice. (Apple argued they’d done nothing wrong, took the case to court, and lost.) For all the worries about a future where Justice has to investigate Amazon, nothing that company has done comes close to conspiring against their customers. Coll concedes that these publishers did, in fact, break the law, but excuses them on the grounds that had they not colluded, they might make less money. (...)
As has been widely noted, the last time the industry panicked about increased access to reading material was with the original spread of paperbacks, an invention that occasioned similar hand-wringing about the economics and prestige of publishing. “Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents,” said one publisher at the time, a sentiment as vain as it was wrong. Whole genres were born after the spread of low-cost publishing, a happy colloquium of new writers and new readers previously thwarted by high prices.
Although Hachette’s CEO recently claimed “The invention of mass-market paperbacks was great for all”, the real story is one of co-optation. When paperback publishers were independent, prices fell for the first two decades of the new format. Agitated publishers worried that the new format “could undermine the whole structure of publishing.” They finally figured out how to restore that structure in the early 1960s, through industry-wide consolidation. Over the next two decades, hardback publishers bought up the competition and increased paperback prices by almost 300%, while delaying their publication for a year or more.
All this had the effect of degrading paperbacks as a substitute for hardbacks. The industry’s idea of co-existence looks like a reduction in competition rather than a response to it. The same dynamics are playing out today. The big publishers complain about the Kindle, but they could create a competitive market for ebook readers tomorrow morning, by simply publishing without DRM (as Tor, O’Reilly, Baen and other publishers currently do.) This would make digital distribution more attractive, though, which is the last thing they want. (...)
Similarly, the idea that only the Big Five will fund speculative work for small audiences doesn’t jibe with the growth of niche publishing enabled by lower publishing costs. (A quarter-million titles have appeared on the Kindle in the last 90 days.) Nothing here is magic. Books are just large chunks of writing. Digital publishing creates many new ways for delivering those chunks from writer to reader. Only some of those new ways require the services of people who work in lower Manhattan.
by Clay Shirky, Medium | Read more:
Image: uncredited
