Another Amazon Dust-up

It seems like every few months something controversial happens over at Amazon Corporate HQ that makes the news. It’s become regular enough to appear, to me at least, rather PETA-esque. I won’t go into the whole thing, as it’s been covered at length and from all sides at outlets ranging from little corners of the netosphere like this one all the way to the New York Times. To summarize:

While in their contract negotiations with book publisher Macmillan, Amazon wanted, the way I understand it, bigger price reductions on their e-books than Macmillan was willing to give. Both sides walked away from the table, and, as a result of the stalemate, Amazon decided to pull all Macmillan titles, including hardcover and paperback editions, from their virtual shelves, leaving them only available through their third party resellers. This includes all the books from Macmillan owned imprints, such as Tor/Forge Books and St. Martin’s Press (together perhaps the most prominent imprints on my own personal bookshelves).

Since I’m certainly not an expert on the situation, allow me to point you to a few of the more prominent sources of the controversy in case you want to look into it for yourself:

LA Times Article

NY Times Article

Huffington Post Article

Guardian Article

Macmillan CEO John Sargent’s response

John Scalzi, a Tor published author, has published extensively about all this on his blog as have several others.

If you look closely at that list, there’s a rather glaring omission… Nothing from Amazon. The only thing from the bookseller to come out about all this (that I have seen, anyway) is a post on their Kindle message boards from “The Amazon Kindle Team”

Basically, the proposal that Macmillan put forth was similar to the pricing structure used by the movie studios for film releases…

1. First run in a theatre: most expensive
2. Pay-per-view: cheaper, released after the first run in the theatre
3. Rental (Blockbuster, Netflix, etc): cheaper still, released after the PPV
4. TV: Free! Released well after the Rental and edited to fit your screen and for content

This type of staggered release schedule is referred to, if I make the connections correctly, as a Windowed Release model, which is what Macmillan was pushing for:

1. Hardcover: most expensive, released first
2. e-book: somewhat cheaper (I’ve seen $12-$16 floated around different articles), released after the Hardcover
3. Paperback: cheapest, released after the e-book? (release is my assumption, based on the pricing model)

Amazon, the way I read it, wants to set the price of their e-book titles at $9.99 and wants the release date to be the same as the hardcover release date. Macmillan feared a loss of revenue and said no, and that’s when the negotiations broke down and Amazon put a freeze on sales of all Macmillan and Macmillan subsidiary publisher titles, including the hardcover and softcover book versions.

Here’s my take on it…

It isn’t the price of the e-book that is foremost in Amazon’s mind, regardless of what “The Amazon Team” says. The $9.99 pricing model they want is geared to bolster the position of the Kindle as the #1 reader amid the onslaught of new readers making their way to market (the most important, perhaps, being the Apple iPad). Amazon’s talk of Macmillan holding a “monopoly over their own titles” is akin to saying that Nabisco has a monopoly over all it’s cookies and crackers. Or, perhaps more telling, it’s like saying Amazon has a monopoly over all the titles it distributes through the Kindle store. Using the word “monopoly” to describe intellectual property that Macmillan has contractually purchased from hundreds of individual authors is nothing but spin-doctoring a tantrum thrown by the Amazon execs when they didn’t get their way during the negotiations. The word “monopoly” has negative connotations associated with it, and it’s use is designed to set a very specific tone in the Amazon response. Compare it to the Sargent’s statement (a full page ad he took out in, I think, Publisher’s Weekly, as opposed to a random post on a company message board by an anonymous employee) and decide for yourself which company is the one attempting to “monopolize” the e-book market.

What’s worse, though, is the point that John Scalzi makes in this post.  While these two corporate behemoths butt heads, it’s the Macmillan authors that are paying the price. Scalzi says it far better than I could hope to, especially since he is an author who’s books have virtually disappeared from Amazon’s shelves, so go to his site and read it there.

What am I going to do about it?

Well, personally, this is kind of the last straw for me with Amazon. I was rather put off when they stripped the sales ranking from many gay and lesbian themed books. I was even more concerned when Amazon remotely accessed the Kindles of their customers and actually DELETED the George Orwell books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four which their customers had legally purchased through the Kindle store without any kind of notification from Amazon (they did refund the purchase price, however). I have been toying with the idea of getting a Kindle for a while now, but, quite simply, I really don’t want to support Amazon any longer. I’ll use their site to browse, and to keep booklists and wishlists and giftlists for friends and family, but I’ll do my shopping at places like Powells, B&N, or any other place I can get a decent deal. Because it was never about the price at Amazon… it was about the convenience.

Additionally, I won’t be linking any more titles to Amazon. I’m far to lazy to actually go through and remove all the links I’ve already put up (and I doubt more than 10 books have been bought through those links since I started doing it), but I’ll make a point from here on out to not send them any more potential business.

As for e-book readers, that post is coming up soon. Suffice it to say for now… if I do ever purchase an e-reader, it sure as hell won’t be a Kindle.