September 24th, 2013 / 2:17 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Mike Meginnis—
“It’s time to kill the idea that Amazon is killing independent bookstores.”
This post is rather thin on evidence to claim it’s killing anything, but — while I am mostly agnostic on Amazon’s effects — it is undeniable that Amazon has made reading a much easier habit for many people, and I suspect this leads to more reading in general, not only more reading through Amazon.
The blogicle’s evidence is thin; a few more stores (by percentage) in a small length of time, which increase might be the effect of other (unexamined) factors, leaves a confirmation of a bias (and maybe an excuse for hope), not (much of) an argument.
Here’s a number: that site reports 1632 members of the ABA. There are 3141 “counties” (or like regions) in the US.
It’s so that Amazon obsolescences big-box print (which, 20 years ago, had shoved so many indies out of business), but every book bought on-line is a book not pulled off a shelf in a store. What Amazon does do for organized, aggressive independent sellers of (especially) used books is give them an internet portal. ALL of the not-many books I’ve bought through Amazon (about 20 in ~5 years), I’ve bought from independent book stores.
There are two used-book stores within 15 miles of where I live and where I have ‘accounts’. I hope they don’t close anytime soon.
I feel like Amazon promotes indie lit in a way. I read a lot of books from small presses on my Kindle, but I don’t know what the profit margin is on that.
Any thoughts from ya’ll indie publishers?
I put some eBooks up on Amazon and at the end of every month they send me between $8 and $28 depending on how many sell. It’s easy!
uhhhh except that amazon uses bullying tactics to get discounts from publishers, treats their workers like shit, is basically trying to create a monopoly on books, etc. http://www.thenation.com/article/37484/trouble-amazon#
i think re: the future of reading, books won’t necessarily become more accessible once amazon achieves a monopoly
First off, HTML Giant is amazing. I’m a huge fan. “Long time listener, first-time caller.” It’s great that you guys brought this point up for discussion. It’s an important question to raise.
If you look at things from the reader’s point of view, Amazon is a godsend: you’re getting books far cheaper than you would in a bookstore and without having to pay for shipping in most cases. Consumers and financial analysts feel that Amazon is a triumph of free enterprise. Unpublished or agentless writers also think Amazon’s great because it seems to offer them a route around the ‘gatekeepers’ at traditional large and indie publishing houses. Critics of the big box retailers and major chains like B&N seem happy that they’re getting payback for what they “did” to Indie bookstores.
From the publishers’ point of view, Amazon has gone from being a curious new type of bookstore (they were originally treated as an Indie bookseller), to being one of the major national players a la B&N and Borders and Target and Costco, to being publishers’ single largest customer calling the shots (much like B&N became in the 90s-00s), to being the largest customer AND the largest competitor (when they began their own ‘publishing house’), then finally (and here’s the difference) the lead determiner of what is published, how it is sold and how the revenue is allocated to do so.
I’ve spent my entire adult life in the book business wearing many different hats and have worked personally alongside Amazon corporate. It is no exaggeration to say that they’re destroying the industry. There has never been anything like them in the history of not just bookselling but retail, period. They are not a bookseller: they are the first and last titan of e-retail. This ubiquity is the component commentators seem to gloss over, and yet it’s everything. All they are is an excellent warehouse distribution network with a website overlay. It’s brilliant. Anyone could have done it but they did it first. Fair enough. Bezos is brilliant. Starting with books is brilliant b/c they’re cheaply and easily warehoused and shipped, and they’re cheap for the consumer and seem to permeate everyone’s households and daily routines: cookbooks, thrillers, biographies, literature, crossword puzzles, travel guides, on and on. Start with books, every single consumer demographic gets hooked, then you expand to higher-margin items. What’s scary to me is Amazon’s ‘delivery system,’ meaning the method with which they market to you and sell to you. It is unprecedented, because all you need to do is type ‘A’ into your search bar and the store appears. “Location, location, location,” they used to say regarding successful retail business. There is no better real estate than the first letter of the alphabet. Find the item you want (increasingly ANY sort of item you want: lawn chairs, toilet paper, anything) and you can bank on the fact that it’ll be cheaper in this pop-up store than anywhere else and you don’t even have to actually go anywhere to avail yourself of all this. It’s ingenious. But we need to keep in mind what the drawbacks are. As it stands, there’s no longer any practical reason, as a human being, to go to a store anymore, other than to try on clothes or buy food. Stores that lose traffic to the ‘e-retail effect’ disappear within two or three quarters.
Amazon’s tactics are what most of us would call nefarious. They spent years losing millions and millions of dollars with one goal: down-pricing products. It’s a long-term strategy called ‘loss leading,’ a business model designed to eliminate competition and create monopoly, which in itself can shore up value at a different order of magnitude entirely. Monopoly over the trade of written materials means political capital; it’s a chip in the larger game of Media. Also, Amazon has committed tax evasion at an unprecedented scale and yet they come out seeming heroic because what they’re dodging is sales tax collection, not paying the IRS. The result of this has been catastrophic for state governments. The loss of a few dozen store transactions a year is peanuts; the loss of more than half of a given state’s retail sales is not. There are very few laws in place to regulate e-retail and legislation is of course slow to catch up, and “e-retail” literally means “Amazon” at this point. Finally, Bezos’ owning the Washington Post means that he cannot de facto be hampered by any politician–not if they want a career. It is a chess move, a show of force, to have a media outlet on your list of assets. He doesn’t have to exercise the muscle. But it’s there. If we think the gov’t has been silent about or supportive of Amazon before, just wait.
Upshot is, with regard to the death of bookstores, you cannot compete against a website if you are paying mortgage or rent for a physical space; you cannot compete with another bookseller who is permanently undercutting your prices by more than half; and you cannot compete with an entity that has undue influence over legislation and jurisprudence on a national level. Combine all three and what you have is an unstoppable market force. (That last, by the way, is how McDonald’s and Exxon and Coke are untouchable. It is a step past defeating competitors. It’s owning seats in Congress.) Barnes & Noble is a speck compared to this machine, to say nothing of the Indies. We need to stop thinking of Amazon as a bookstore and start thinking of them as a titan with enormous fiscal and political goals that just happens to be sucking the life out of the book business along the way.
Reportage a la these pieces from Quartz and Digital Reader are out of their depth. I do not know Hoffelder personally but I’ve read enough of Digital Reader to see that he doesn’t understand the nuances or the bigger picture, even if his intentions are harmlessly those of an avid reader and tech enthusiast. He has no credentials and no background in the business, so what you’re getting are the opinions of an outsider. He has not sat in a boardroom with Amazon people, he has not visited their facilities or read their memos, he has not looked at book P&Ls, royalty statements or author contracts, and he certainly does not understand the immense complexities involved in the e-book pricing wars and the DoJ’s investigation this year, in which Amazon was the silent proponent against Apple and the big publishing houses. That decision removed the final impediment in Amazon’s way to e-book and book monopoly. Ironic, since it was an anti-trust case. Unfortunately, this case was brought about by a larger ‘trust’ looking to get rid of its competition for good. Random merging with Penguin is a defensive tactic.
If quantity is your concern instead of quality (meaning, saving time and money is more important to you than the means via which the product is brought to market) then Amazon is for you. For now. In ten years you’ll look around and see that the only retailers left are clothing stores and eateries. You’ll feel sad, maybe, that there are no bookstores. Maybe you’ll notice that the quality of the books themselves has dropped. Then you’ll have a book of your own one day that you want to publish and you’ll see that you have no choice but to sell it to Amazon, the only gatekeeper left, an entity that has created a tacit monopoly over the written word itself. Let alone lawn chairs.
Wow. Sorry to go on so long.
Is it feasible that Bezos has such plans for ‘the world’ that he would actually screen and censor future publications so he wouldn’t have to sell them at his omni-store? He sells pretty much any book right now. Will he wait until everybody else is out of business and then stop selling stuff he doesn’t like? Or perhaps it’ll happen after he’s dead and Amazon is still going, a board of directors taking over and cutting out stuff people want to read. I don’t know. I appreciate your deep comment, but the fear that Amazon will ruin literature seems no more reasonable than the claims that the Big Six ruined it. (Or maybe they did and it will only get worse?.? Personally, I don’t think so. But I’m not a publishing guy.)
Excellent points, Jeremy, really, thanks for the considered reply. Especially the point that it seems no more reasonable that Amazon would ruin literature than would the Big Five, which is itself a perfectly reasonable statement. In the grand scheme of things, I think we can look at any big players in a given system and extrapolate how they could negatively effect that system. I think your skepticism is level-headed and a good counterpoint to a lot of what I’ve said. A few things:
Amazon should be likened not to publishers but to Walmart. Imagine Walmart dominating the book publishing world (meaning not just book sales but actual publishing). Do you think the stuff they would put out would be of the same caliber of what any number of publishers large or small currently collectively produce? If you browse the websites of, say, Other Press or Tiny Hardcore or Melville House or Open Letter or big guns like Harper Perennial or Vintage International, you get a diversity that’s staggering. I do not have the confidence that one mega-publisher headed by Amazon management will bring the same diversity to the market. Monoculture is the watch-word here, like with Monsanto and Big Agro. Only it’s for books/media. So it’s not a case of Bezos putting people out of business and then whimsically selling stuff he likes and dropping stuff he doesn’t like, as if he has a vendetta against certain types of writing. I think American economic history has shown that, if one agent has too much power, the quality of the what they control diminishes. (It’s why any economist will agree that diversity and competition = ideal capitalism = a thriving culture.) So then the question becomes, what is the culture or morality of that power in charge? Do we trust that they’ll make equitable decisions? How can we know? Well, we can’t. All we can do is take into account how that power has conducted itself in the past. A corporation’s culture is a palpable, knowable thing, and is the best evidence of how the CEO thinks and acts. Compare the average Google employee’s assessment of their work environment, their company’s mission. They love what they do and what they do is almost wholly excellent. Amazon’s history is rife with very disconcerting stories of employee ‘abuse,’ the devaluing of the human contribution in favor of automation, the obsession with measurables and the disregard of aesthetic quality. Again, it’s how Walmart works. When you go in to sell a new book to a Walmart buyer, they do not care what the book is about. All they want to know is how the author’s previous book sold, how many copies they should buy, for how long they should put the book on the shelf. It’s bloodless; it might as well be cabbage or lip balm. It’s all numbers. Amazon is the same. (I’m contrasting with B&N buyers or bookstores, who want to know the books and figure out creative ways of bringing them to its audience.) That metrical ethos pervades Amazon’s stressed corporate culture (the word ‘metrics’ is sacred) and the way their Seattle office does business with other companies, to say nothing of its warehouse staff. What I’m saying is, if Amazon were more like Google, I’d be a lot less alarmed. (Which leads into a conversation of Google’s quest to put all books online, a very different type of struggle between publishers and an online giant, and maybe the topic of another thread.)
“He sells pretty much any book right now.” Not quite. It’s one thing to stock and list a book, it’s another to ‘sell it,’ and by that I mean promoting. Any of us can self-pub a book thru Amazon right now and upload it and there it will sit. What happens next is where the expertise of publishers would come into play. Everything self-published thru Amazon’s mechanism is on its own in terms of getting reviews, marketing and publicity, unless you pay for it yourself, which is EXTREMELY predatory. (Publishers do the opposite: they pay writers for their books and, on top of that, provide those services; it’s an investment in their purchase, a team effort). Amazon itself will do nothing for the book it self-publishes. It will in effect get buried. So in that sense, the service they offer is a kind of illusion. I worry about more and more low-quality self-published stuff (and in no way are ALL self-published works low quality, btw) proliferating via Amazon b/c they seem to offer an easy path. Yet if those same writers put in the hours and years slogging thru the traditional process of work-shopping and editing and submitting to journals and agents and small publishers, the books would be honed to a degree that they’re largely not if the Amazon route is taken. That’s what I mean when I imply Amazon will have a ruining effect on literature (a statement that I admit is a bit hyperbolic). Amazon has popularized self-publishing, and they’ve done so as a means of circumventing the publishers they are competing against, and their message to users and the media–via press releases, curated forums, and highly-publicized subsidies and donations–is that those publishers have selfishly ignored good writing while relentlessly raising the price of books, preying on the readership. That narrative is as untrue as a Rush Limbaugh broadcast.
As for the stuff Amazon’s own publishing house is publishing, all of it is given ‘promotion’ above and beyond all the other stuff they sell. Meaning quite literally that the Amazon user will more likely encounter Amazon’s own books than books from Random House or Soft Skull or Scholastic or McSweeney’s or whatever. Now, a search is a search: if you look for Billy Collins’ poems, that’s what you’ll find. But the recommendation engine will subsequently skew towards Amazon stuff, in the ‘If You Like X, Try Y’ scheme. Many of their publishing programs are interesting and have merit, like Amazon Singles. But we need to be wary when a retailer of their size and power is ALSO manufacturing the product they’re selling (in this case, publishing books). Take a look at the history of General Electric, producing power, delivering it AND selling products to use it, all in a closed system. (The book to read is called OFF THE GRID, first few chapters. Food for thought.)
Anyway, thanks for reading such long comments. It’s crucial that awesome brains like the ones interacting with HTMLGIANT continue to debate these things.
When I said he “sells” I meant “offers for sale” not “advertises and aggressively markets.” I’m all for being wary. I just think that big inert publishing models are as much to blame as Amazon’s tactics. What have the 5 tried to change? What adaptions have they even attempted?
I mean books (the physical objects) were pieces of crap in the fifties but people still bought them because they like books. If costs are too high, try making them cheaper. Don’t pay for a glossy cover. Of course, if you’re the only publisher of fantasy fiction without a glossy embossed dragon on the cover, how’s that going to look? Of course, it won’t matter if you’re selling it online. All you need is a JPEG of a matte cover and pages with no margins. (I hate books with no margins, but if I wanted to read X and the only copy I had was a yellowed six-point type from the edge to the spine piece of crap, I still read it. Dag-nabbit.)
I get what you’re saying re the quality filter that traditional publishing offers; but it’s also slow and surely lots of great stuff actually is lost in the shuffle, particularly now that they’re in defensive mode, not taking risks, etc.
Your point ‘Amazon is more Walmart, less Google’ is well-taken.
Well that’s a huge question, “What the 5 tried to change?” In brief, they’ve experimented in countless ways in terms of marketing, packaging, involving readers, finding new talent, etc. I could go on, and I’m happy to if you’d like, but the main challenge is selling direct to the consumer. (I fought this battle at a major trade house where I was employed for about 7 years, lobbied for it like hell, and met with the inertia you mentioned. Very frustrating. To say the least.) By doing that, the publishers will reestablish what they lost to major retailers decades ago, and are now losing to Amazon nearly completely: their direct link to readers. Amazon happened so fast and the big guys were so slow to move, and, too, it would be to suddenly start competing with valued customers B&N, Borders and Amazon. Amazon did not have those same scruples and was happy to not only dominate the retail marketplace but also infringe on the publishing game itself. So in the main I’m agreeing with you that publishers have been slow to adapt–but that’s chiefly because their main interest has been the books themselves.
About the book’s quality, I didn’t mean the physical object so much as the quality of the writing. Gloss and matte finish are ‘effects’ publishers use to punch-up the look of their books, and frankly I’m all for that when its tastefully done. (Foiled and embossed abs on the covers of romance novels are a little much.) But books-as-objects are more and more interesting, especially coming from smaller indie publishers.
“marketing, packaging, involving readers, finding new talent” — all things they’ve been working on since before Amazon, right? Are you saying that since Amazon’s surge, they’ve doubled down on these efforts, or tried new approaches to the same activities? (Not that I need great detail.)
I love a nice book. Some indie titles have excellent design, as do many from the majors. I was just throwing out one thing that came to mind that they could change. Mass market paperbacks today are nicer than they really need to be, IMO. If they have to sell them to Amazon for less than they’d like, and they don’t want to make less money because of it, one way to prevent that is to reduce costs. But you bring up direct sales, something that I guess used to be big. I see those ads in the back of old books where you cut out a 3×5 form and mail it in. Could surely be streamlined with new tech.
First paragraph answer: Yes. Publishers have more than doubled down.
You’re right about dropping effects. But it’s a fraction of unit cost, when it comes down to it. Costs are more about print runs, which depend on prospective buys from customers… like Amazon. And Amazon never shares with publishers how many they’ll take until they place the order. Which wreaks havoc. But the point is a good one. You’d make a good Production Manager, I’ll bet.
Streamlined with new tech, most definitely.
i kinda liked this from a recent interview w/andrew wylie:
LB: What would you do if Martin Amis said, “I really want Amazon to publish my book”?
AW: I would talk him out of it. I would say, “Look at Amazon’s lack of success with authors.”… If Mrs. Bezos had published her book with Amazon, I’d be more convinced. She seems to feel that Knopf is a better publishing company than Amazon. Her agent could probably tell you why. That’s Amanda Urban.
Thanks for writing all of this, tjstrikes, and for the ensuing conversation with Jeremy (thanks also Jeremy). I wanted to single out this paragraph from your first response, since I think it bears emphasizing:
(emphasis mine)
If Amazon truly are or become the “lead determiner of what is published”, then one could argue there’s a perversion of capitalism at work. If Amazon’s decisions are not true reflections of consumers’ desires, AND these decisions determine what is and isn’t published, then one could say Amazon are not only bullying the publishers, but also the customer base. I don’t know if it’s at that point yet.
Actually, this situation happens a lot. In film, for instance, audiences don’t really have access to all the films being made—they have access to the ones that get distribution. And you’d be surprised what never comes out, or where it does. One of my favorite films in 2002 was Liliana Cavani’s Ripley’s Game, based on Patricia Highsmith’s popular novel and starring Ray Winstone, Dougray Scott, and John Malkovich. And despite all that, it never got a theatrical release in the US—instead it premiered on television. And it’s lucky it got that—lots of films just rot on shelves. … There’s a reason why vertical integration got broken up in the film industry (and the situation is still problematic). Amazon is vertical integration in publishing.
Capitalism isn’t about giving consumers what they want; it’s about return on investment. Meanwhile, advertising manufactures desire accordingly :)
Well, yeah, once a business is established, the emphasis is on return. Supposedly, when establishing a business venture, one offers something people want (or may want if convinced to). If Amazon become really so limited in their offerings, people will still be able to buy from small presses. It’ll be expensive, but it already is. If the main concern is that Amazon won’t PUSH alternative, non-bestselling lit, then I doubt it will be so much worse than the last twelve years. If you want something outside the mainstream, you have to either seek it out or wait for a watered down version to make it into the mainstream. I think it’s been that way for as long as I’ve been alive.
Perverting capitalism is what’s going on, but that’s just my opinion. Having undue influence in the marketplace is the precise thing that antitrust law was invented to block. But those laws are over a century old. I do however have faith that our system of gov’t will eventually wake up and block Amazon from monopoly. It’s just very disconcerting that 5 of the Big 6 plus Apple were aggressively pursued by the Dept of Justice for collusion when what was happening there was a defensive measure against Amazon’s relentless downpricing/devaluing of the product. Given the legislative and judiciary influence Amazon has exhibited the past many years with regard to their tax collecting evasion, it’s not much of a leap to say they funded that investigation, and by funding I mean using its millions to buy people in govt and at the DoJ and in the courts. It’s not unheard of. The only purpose and outcome of that trial was to block the only possible eBook competitor for Amazon, Apple, from being able to freely price ebooks outside of the established Amazon discount scheme. Additionally it took even more power away from publishers to control the value of their product. Btw, America is the only country that considers a manufacturer’s setting the price of its
product as “price fixing.” I mean the retail price. In this country, retailers are free to sell wares at whatever price they choose. Sounds good on paper, and in most cases it is, but in extreme cases it can be disastrous. Walmart has devoured industries while simply b/c they’re the biggest distributor of those industries’ products. Upshot is, I do think the example of Amazon points up a major flaw in our capitalism right now and that’s that anti-monopoly law needs to reinvent itself to deal with e-retail b/c it’s truly (in terms of physics) a different animal. But, as I’ve said, “e-retail” = “Amazon.” So legislation to reform antitrust law will be greatly unduly influenced by Bezos and, yes, his Washington Post.
Well said. And yes Ripley was fantastic! And a a good example of the problem of distribution having too much power. All we need to do is look at the history of broadcast television networks.
Incidentally Highsmith’s novels are IMO underrated. So excellent.
I’m a huge Highsmith fan.
And if movie studios remain as narrow as they’ve been, people will still be able to hunt out films that aren’t distributed. Only they won’t know they exist. And, where will they find them? Will the indie studios or directors have their own websites? Will they be able to produce hard copies on disc for distribution? How will they get the product to the customer? Increasingly shopping and shipping alternatives diminish. Meanwhile the artists responsible for creating that undistributed film will see no ROI and continue to starve. This is how a culture kills its own artistic output: by devaluing it.
We can throw our hands up and say, “Well that’s just the way it is,” but isn’t the point to critique the way things are and choose to change those things for the better? Amazon needs to be checked and all that would is result is a few less million a year for them, a fraction of their revenue, which is a small price to pay for revitalized diversity in the marketplace. Question is, will Bezos pay it? Should such power be in the hands of one man? No. And that’s where government is supposed to step in, to balance things out a bit. We’ll see how it goes.
It’s definitely true that people will always be able to make small presses. But if that’s the only option, our culture will be in a bad place. The bottom line is that it’s dangerous for a single company to be in charge of all non-small press publishing, distribution, and retailing.
Also, keep in mind that we’re talking about the entire publishing industry here, which includes a lot more than just niche fiction/poetry. All non-ficton.All textbooks. All periodicals. Consider the enormity of it!
And even we small press devotees still occasionally buy major press stuff, right? I recently picked up Phil Lapsley’s Exploding the Phone (Grove), Simon Pegg’s Nerd Do Well (Gotham/Penguin), and the most recent issues of Sight & Sound and Empire magazines—plus a new copy of The Princess Bride (Harvest/Harcourt).
And god forbid you’re a small press writer who has any aspiration of gaining a wider audience, being compensated for your work, and having your writing actually distributed… I like small presses as much as anyone else, but they can’t do everything.
To both of you: I am against gov’t officials rolling over for donations.
The potential for stuff you want to see and read to not be distributed has always existed.
On the one hand, it seems scary that one organization could be such a large factor; on the other, it means there’s only one target when things go bad. Personally (and generally), I’d rather see some kind of anti-trust action kick in before industries falls to pieces, but you need evidence, and adequate evidence might be nothing short of those scattered pieces.
Is there currently a better avenue for small press/self-published writing?
Oh I wasn’t implying that you’re for gov’t corruption or anything. I hope it didn’t seem that way. I’m taking this as a spirited debate and nothing personal. If I’m off-base in that apology then whoops but it bears saying, just in case.
About the one target, that’s true but what happens once things go bad and you know who’s to blame? What do we do with a Monsanto or McDonald’s when we know they’re to blame for essentially poisoning our food supply? Answer is, nothing. Both of those corporations are more powerful than the US legislative branch. So I’m saying it does no good to take solace from the fact that there could be one player in a given market sector in the hopes that it’ll somehow simplify things. In a way, it’s like saying it’d be good to have an autocratic king instead of a Congress b/c, when things go wrong, we can blame the king. Fine but good luck dethroning him.
You’re right about availability of things always being tricky. That’s always been a challenge for creators/manufacturers and always will be.
In your last paragraph, what do you mean by better way?
RE: the king — Yes, and often it was people other than the king himself who would deserve the blame leveled at him. Yes, so long as Congress is a mire of inaction and interest, it probably wouldn’t be any better to have a single target.
Last paragraph — Is there a more efficient, advantageous way for creators and publishers to distribute to as many customers (both established and new) all at once?
If by efficient you mean quickly, then that’s a slippery slope. Writers should concern themselves more with their craft than with speedily bringing their books to market. Efficiency meaning delivery to customers? No, Amazon has the most efficient distribution system out there. And it exists at the expense of their own employees and the state governments losing sales tax revenue. In that way it’s like a drug: we love it like hell but it’s rotting away a fundamental part of our infrastructure. Also there’s the question of consumers becoming spoiled by cheap and free and fast things, which is no small sociological concern. It is an unsustainable bubble that’s been written about extensively — great book called CHEAP for example. My point is, yes you’re right that Amazon’s fulfillment system is efficient but we need to ask ourselves who is paying for it and how and what is the ultimate effect of the whole thing? Efficiency alone is a bloodless attribute, I think you’ll agree. If a person’s job is lost or house is bulldozed for the sake of efficiency, I think we are justified in asking: Who exactly is this efficient FOR?
Yes, writers should be concerned with the quality of their work, but once they believe their work is done, I’m sure it’s nice to be able to publish/ship it almost immediately.
The price and selection certainly are tempting. I’ve bought a lot through Amazon the last couple years, (often used, but they get a slice). I could buy used books elsewhere, and new books, but it’s nice to have them all shipped together with fewer fees.
Industries change. Last I heard the big publishers were still making lots of money. Some metric of their income has probably decreased, be it profit or profit margin or revenue or whatever. If they hadn’t sold through Amazon, would they have made more money or less? I don’t know. Are they complaining the devil is a bad dancer or staving off a siege? (Wouldn’t they rather claim the second?)
Agreed. I’ve already noticed the deeply discounted books on Amazon getting more expensive now the competition is slowly dying off. Once they have a monopoly, there’s no reason for them to discount books any more.
Amazon also makes it very difficult for indies who don’t sign up to their Advantage programme. But with Advantage you need to give them 55% discount (US) or 60% discount (UK), and the press pays the postage. That leaves little to no profit for most.
Self-published authors might enjoy royalties of $8-28 per month, but that’s really peanuts. It’s difficult for them too because of the number of cheap 99p books to compete with.
Readers get books faster. But they mostly buy the books Amazon pushes at them via their recommendations algorithm. Authors and indie presses, meanwhile, get screwed.