Amazon rudely flexing its muscles vs publishers

[thewayne]

I first came across this a couple of days ago while browsing my Twitter feed, a rare event. Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Games was writing a lot about it. Nasty stuff, makes me glad that we buy from Barnes & Noble and another chain when we can.

"Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as 'unavailable.' In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher."

I'll be honest: I'm of very mixed feeling re: Amazon. My main objection has been the genocide of mom & pop book stores, but they have many business practices that I'm not exactly sanguine about. The genocide wasn't Amazon's fault, it began when B. Dalton and Waldenbooks started growing and became Barnes & Noble and Borders. Then along comes Bezos and Amazon destroys Borders and is close to doing in B&N. Some small chains have found places where they survive, we have one such here called Hastings. And while we do drop a fair amount of coin there, they are an endless source of frustration for my wife and I. A couple of years ago Bujold had a new book coming out on my wife's birthday, the release date was confirmed through Bujold's web site, Amazon, and B&N. Hastings told us to our face that they wouldn't be getting it for two months. So it was ordered from Amazon. And don't get me started on gripes about Kindles.

We buy a lot of non-entertainment from Amazon, right now I'm wearing a pair of sweat pants that I couldn't find locally. Sweat pants. What a ridiculously trivial item, yet I shopped in three different cities for them and couldn't find what I needed. I love the used book marketplace that Amazon provides, I recently got a training manual for a slightly older piece of software from some used bookstore that otherwise would have been hard to track down, and it was a drop kick finding it on Amazon. I've ordered lots of used books on Amazon, but only after I scour my regular supply of used bookstores and come up empty.

I guess it boils down to this: I could live without Amazon, but I don't want to. But if they continue their rectal haberdashery ways, I may put it to the test.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/23/1743225/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-publishers

Comments

[moiraj.livejournal.com]

I'm steamed at Amazon but I'm taking a wait and see approach for now. I buy only books from them, but I never need the books quickly, so I don't mind ordering them through a book store. The sticking point for me is selling my own books. Almost all of the copies of Heroes Reward that I sell are sold through amazon. While I offer Heroes Reward for free, I won't be doing that for the next one, so it's risky for me to abstain from selling that one on amazon. That's the easiest way for readers to learn of its existence. Yet if they are going to keep up these practices, I don't want to deal with them.

So, wait and see.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Amazon is an 800 lb gorilla that cannot be ignored. They're going to take a lot of heat for this, and hopefully they'll mend their ways. But invariably they'll do the same thing again some time down the road. Bezos has done an amazing job of maintaining control of the company and its inexorable growth, so it would be hard for someone else to viably compete with them. All we can do is protest and hope they change.

My wife ordered a book from them a few days ago that we couldn't find at our regular haunts. Then the next day she gets an email from them that the delivery date has been pushed back, even though it was listed as in stock. It would appear to be them doing a scam to encourage people to upgrade their shipping, I should check with her to see if the publisher might be related to this mess.

[silveradept]

Yet another story of a corporation realizing what kind of power it has and immediately turning to nefarious ends because of it. Will anyone manage to stay good with a large customer base?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Money is morality these days, so no, I doubt anyone will stay good with a large customer base. Until greed gets demoted, I think we'll continue to see things like this.

One question does occur to me: is this part of the increased news reporting that we have these days? Did more of this happen in pre-World Wide Web days and we just didn't know about it?

[silveradept]

I suspect it did, but everyone had to rely on a news outlet to publish the information they had, and for that, the information had to be good enough to get people to subscribe to the paper in the excess of the money that would be lost through advertising. With blogs and the Internet, while there's still the possibility of losing advertisements, there are both more eyes looking and more places that can stand to gain more from publishing than before. And once it's reported somewhere, it can be rebroadcast for very little cost to those joining in.