January 30th, 2010 / 5:52 pm
Snippets
Snippets
Blake Butler—
What the fuck: Amazon pulls all Macmillan titles (electronic and paper) after Kindle pricing dispute. [via The Faster Times]
Powells.com
Powells.com
not into the way amazon does business.
not into the way amazon does business.
CEO of Macmillan responded
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/free/
CEO of Macmillan responded
http://www.publishersmarketplace.com/lunch/free/
I wasn’t going to comment 2night since I am on the red wine. But the problem with the red wine is it makes you do things you don’t want to do.
Maybe HTMl can consolidate against Amazon, as a rule?
I mean this wave has already started, but maybe it needs a new thrust?
Amazon becoming Walmart. I think it’s advocacy at this point, for all. Indie/alt scene just leaving amazon, in most ways possible. And there are many ways.
I wasn’t going to comment 2night since I am on the red wine. But the problem with the red wine is it makes you do things you don’t want to do.
Maybe HTMl can consolidate against Amazon, as a rule?
I mean this wave has already started, but maybe it needs a new thrust?
Amazon becoming Walmart. I think it’s advocacy at this point, for all. Indie/alt scene just leaving amazon, in most ways possible. And there are many ways.
please do, blake and i have talked about this, he did not agree
please do, blake and i have talked about this, he did not agree
i have to say i don’t agree with a boycott either. though this place hasnt banned amazon, it hardly promotes it either. i cant even remember the last time i linked from a link here to an amazon page. so i feel like a boycott would be one of these ways of ‘sending a message’ to no-one about nothing. and, if the indie scene left amazon, would it really matter? amazon’s profit margins do not depend on indie literature. or indie anything. grove press’s backlog isnt going to boycott it. harper perennial isnt going to boycott it. so what does this do except remove small-press indie literature from the extensive global reference-base that is amazon’s database, search system and so on? because who doesn’t look at amazon simply for informational purposes these days, to find out what a book is and is about? so a boycott becomes a Pyrrhic gesture. i dont buy from small press stuff from amazon all that often but living overseas, SPD charges utterly exorbitant shipping prices. i don’t even know why it does, as many other smaller presses do not charge nearly as much as SPD does. but for whatever reason, the result is that it makes buying a small chapbook from there a costly proposition, which is especially difficult when they’re a lot of chapbooks to buy. and the same problem exists with powells, though to a lesser degree, as its shipping is somewhat more reasonable but still inflated. even at powells, it has not been unusual for me to pay 70 US dollars in shipping alone for six or so books. more than that, some small presses just refuse to ship overseas at all. take for example action books. or the zine posted up here the other day with the new schuyler poems in it: no overseas option, and when i emailed to ask if i could arrange a way around that, no response. the international aspect of amazon needs to be factored in. in north america, i can see more of a case for taking the financial pain of leaving amazon but still, a discount is not the enemy, and amazon is hardly forcing small presses out of business. what amazon is doing is agitating larger publishing houses because it refuses to fall into step with the new market monopoly scheme – the so-called ‘stable model’ of ‘healthy competition’ that the CEO of Macmillan talks about, what Marx would call a ‘communism of capitalism’ in which large profits are divided up between the major players by agreement. the Macmillan scheme is one in which the overinflation of book prices becomes normalised by the very factor all retailers sell books within the same price range, only offering marginal, incremental discounts. that isnt to say Amazon is doing a good thing in annoying them: rather it is like a kid who cheats the rules for its own gain. It’s literally the most capitalist of the lot. still, for all this, small presses are on the rise in the US right now, not on the decline. and I would bet that actually has a lot to do with amazon, as verboten as it is to say that. also too, i have to add that the discounts it provides on massively overpriced academic titles, which, mind you, do not need to be anywhere near the price they are, are also a big reason to buy from it. amazon does have an unintended equalizing side to it. the problem is that the equalization is a way of driving up its own earnings, not forcing publishers more broadly to bring down their sales. the last thing amazon wants is everyone else offering discounts. hence, it’s weird battle with wal-mart over the stephen king title.
on a more political level, i dont think boycotting isn’t a solution to amazon really. amazon carries out some really shitty practices, some really cuttroat acts. but it isnt always the source of the problem. like in the dispute between the two here, it’s macmillian that wants to crank the prices up. though amazon isn’t some tribune of the masses in this, defending the right to affordable prices. it’s only defending the viability of the kindle as a device that has to set out an economical pathway as opposed to the uber aesthetic pathway of the ipad, etc. so it’s defending it’s own profits too. what would a boycott of amazon do here, at best, but align us with macmillan and the desire for more expensive books? why is a boycott of amazon appropriate here without a boycott of macmillan? more broadly, what lesson are we teaching amazon by boycotting? and is amazon even a thing that can be ‘taught’? companies arent people, despite what the supreme court says. the issue here is the constant passing on of costs to the consumer by larger companies (under the rubric that they are against the ‘devaluation’ of books; what baloney) attached to the command in the indie circle to support everything. discount pursuit is inevitable in that system.
thinking big, if you want to help small presses recoup direct returns on their product, i’d argue the best thing you could do is buy advertising space in places like the New Yorker. or even something even more out there and plebian. i dont know. the New York Post. to do that, you need money. so maybe the solution to this would be to formulate a donation based promotion outfit that would place advertisements for small presses as a means to let more people know they’re there. small presses cannot afford that kind of promotion alone so it would have to be almost a unionized donation-driven scheme. but it would give clout to those presses collectively. as for small presses themselves, the best thing they can do is undercut amazon on international shipping. i know inside the US amazon’s shipping is too difficult to rival but outside the US, amazon’s shipping costs are not at all phenomenal – often its cheaper to buy from the UK despite the higher currency exchange – and this can be underwritten. you might even do what a number of independent bookstores do for international customers buying online, which is charge a higher rate for the first item — about six dollars — but lower shipping on each item thereafter, placing an incentive to buy two books at least in any purchase — about three. if they do that, the economic incentive from beyond US borders will increasingly work in their favour. there are a lot of other ways for the indie and alt scene to promote itself than carry out seppuku in an ineffective bid to bring down amazon.
i have to say i don’t agree with a boycott either. though this place hasnt banned amazon, it hardly promotes it either. i cant even remember the last time i linked from a link here to an amazon page. so i feel like a boycott would be one of these ways of ‘sending a message’ to no-one about nothing. and, if the indie scene left amazon, would it really matter? amazon’s profit margins do not depend on indie literature. or indie anything. grove press’s backlog isnt going to boycott it. harper perennial isnt going to boycott it. so what does this do except remove small-press indie literature from the extensive global reference-base that is amazon’s database, search system and so on? because who doesn’t look at amazon simply for informational purposes these days, to find out what a book is and is about? so a boycott becomes a Pyrrhic gesture. i dont buy from small press stuff from amazon all that often but living overseas, SPD charges utterly exorbitant shipping prices. i don’t even know why it does, as many other smaller presses do not charge nearly as much as SPD does. but for whatever reason, the result is that it makes buying a small chapbook from there a costly proposition, which is especially difficult when they’re a lot of chapbooks to buy. and the same problem exists with powells, though to a lesser degree, as its shipping is somewhat more reasonable but still inflated. even at powells, it has not been unusual for me to pay 70 US dollars in shipping alone for six or so books. more than that, some small presses just refuse to ship overseas at all. take for example action books. or the zine posted up here the other day with the new schuyler poems in it: no overseas option, and when i emailed to ask if i could arrange a way around that, no response. the international aspect of amazon needs to be factored in. in north america, i can see more of a case for taking the financial pain of leaving amazon but still, a discount is not the enemy, and amazon is hardly forcing small presses out of business. what amazon is doing is agitating larger publishing houses because it refuses to fall into step with the new market monopoly scheme – the so-called ‘stable model’ of ‘healthy competition’ that the CEO of Macmillan talks about, what Marx would call a ‘communism of capitalism’ in which large profits are divided up between the major players by agreement. the Macmillan scheme is one in which the overinflation of book prices becomes normalised by the very factor all retailers sell books within the same price range, only offering marginal, incremental discounts. that isnt to say Amazon is doing a good thing in annoying them: rather it is like a kid who cheats the rules for its own gain. It’s literally the most capitalist of the lot. still, for all this, small presses are on the rise in the US right now, not on the decline. and I would bet that actually has a lot to do with amazon, as verboten as it is to say that. also too, i have to add that the discounts it provides on massively overpriced academic titles, which, mind you, do not need to be anywhere near the price they are, are also a big reason to buy from it. amazon does have an unintended equalizing side to it. the problem is that the equalization is a way of driving up its own earnings, not forcing publishers more broadly to bring down their sales. the last thing amazon wants is everyone else offering discounts. hence, it’s weird battle with wal-mart over the stephen king title.
on a more political level, i dont think boycotting isn’t a solution to amazon really. amazon carries out some really shitty practices, some really cuttroat acts. but it isnt always the source of the problem. like in the dispute between the two here, it’s macmillian that wants to crank the prices up. though amazon isn’t some tribune of the masses in this, defending the right to affordable prices. it’s only defending the viability of the kindle as a device that has to set out an economical pathway as opposed to the uber aesthetic pathway of the ipad, etc. so it’s defending it’s own profits too. what would a boycott of amazon do here, at best, but align us with macmillan and the desire for more expensive books? why is a boycott of amazon appropriate here without a boycott of macmillan? more broadly, what lesson are we teaching amazon by boycotting? and is amazon even a thing that can be ‘taught’? companies arent people, despite what the supreme court says. the issue here is the constant passing on of costs to the consumer by larger companies (under the rubric that they are against the ‘devaluation’ of books; what baloney) attached to the command in the indie circle to support everything. discount pursuit is inevitable in that system.
thinking big, if you want to help small presses recoup direct returns on their product, i’d argue the best thing you could do is buy advertising space in places like the New Yorker. or even something even more out there and plebian. i dont know. the New York Post. to do that, you need money. so maybe the solution to this would be to formulate a donation based promotion outfit that would place advertisements for small presses as a means to let more people know they’re there. small presses cannot afford that kind of promotion alone so it would have to be almost a unionized donation-driven scheme. but it would give clout to those presses collectively. as for small presses themselves, the best thing they can do is undercut amazon on international shipping. i know inside the US amazon’s shipping is too difficult to rival but outside the US, amazon’s shipping costs are not at all phenomenal – often its cheaper to buy from the UK despite the higher currency exchange – and this can be underwritten. you might even do what a number of independent bookstores do for international customers buying online, which is charge a higher rate for the first item — about six dollars — but lower shipping on each item thereafter, placing an incentive to buy two books at least in any purchase — about three. if they do that, the economic incentive from beyond US borders will increasingly work in their favour. there are a lot of other ways for the indie and alt scene to promote itself than carry out seppuku in an ineffective bid to bring down amazon.
what david said i’ve been wanting to say for a while. i’ve bought from powells, but i cannot, i just cannot, afford to pay their shipping prices all the time. amazon offers me a way to save money, and not all authors/presses are kind enough like j.a. and molly and christe to hand out free copies.
the only other option is to seriously considering becoming revolutionaries and instead of simply writing about these things, and mentioning something like armchair banning and boycotting on a single website or even a million websites, which essentially doesnt destroy the problem, people should attempt to bring down the system of capitalism and reshape the way in which not just america but most countries are constructed. and if that sounds like a cheesy “we are the world” bullshit thing, then i hope it is realized that that line of thinking is generated, on purpose, by government campaigns and companies. read chomsky, read zinn, and know this is true. i dont really see a lot of this talk on this site or many others. nikki giovanni and her generation were more truthful about these things. they weren’t so called “political poets” as more they were just poets. sure, there was still the distinction but it was less so. now, it is more of a label because it is less common. something happened.
i’d love to see not really less focus on the experimental side of writing and the craft and theories of “THE SENTENCE/THE ‘GRAPH” but more focus on actually changing the world we live in and encounter. sure, escapism and all that, sure, books and writing need not be embedded in the world, but it need not be forever separate neither.
i see a lot of disconnect from the world in indie literature. i honestly do.
what david said i’ve been wanting to say for a while. i’ve bought from powells, but i cannot, i just cannot, afford to pay their shipping prices all the time. amazon offers me a way to save money, and not all authors/presses are kind enough like j.a. and molly and christe to hand out free copies.
the only other option is to seriously considering becoming revolutionaries and instead of simply writing about these things, and mentioning something like armchair banning and boycotting on a single website or even a million websites, which essentially doesnt destroy the problem, people should attempt to bring down the system of capitalism and reshape the way in which not just america but most countries are constructed. and if that sounds like a cheesy “we are the world” bullshit thing, then i hope it is realized that that line of thinking is generated, on purpose, by government campaigns and companies. read chomsky, read zinn, and know this is true. i dont really see a lot of this talk on this site or many others. nikki giovanni and her generation were more truthful about these things. they weren’t so called “political poets” as more they were just poets. sure, there was still the distinction but it was less so. now, it is more of a label because it is less common. something happened.
i’d love to see not really less focus on the experimental side of writing and the craft and theories of “THE SENTENCE/THE ‘GRAPH” but more focus on actually changing the world we live in and encounter. sure, escapism and all that, sure, books and writing need not be embedded in the world, but it need not be forever separate neither.
i see a lot of disconnect from the world in indie literature. i honestly do.
Why is your assumption that it is an overinflation of prices in the macmillan model instead of an artificially low price under the current Amazon model?
Amazon wants the prices as low as possible because their goal is not a healthy price for e-books, their goal is to corner the market in e-reader hardware. Their goal is selling kindles, not ebooks. It is a loss-leader to them, more or less.
Why is your assumption that it is an overinflation of prices in the macmillan model instead of an artificially low price under the current Amazon model?
Amazon wants the prices as low as possible because their goal is not a healthy price for e-books, their goal is to corner the market in e-reader hardware. Their goal is selling kindles, not ebooks. It is a loss-leader to them, more or less.
What is it that makes $10 not a healthy/fair price for an ebook? You can buy a 250pp paperback for $15–why would an ebook need to cost the same? (I’m being sincere here, not sarcastic.)
What is it that makes $10 not a healthy/fair price for an ebook? You can buy a 250pp paperback for $15–why would an ebook need to cost the same? (I’m being sincere here, not sarcastic.)
Is it because Amazon bends publishers over with regard to the % of sales they get? (If so, is $10 for an ebook unfair only because of Amazon’s business practices in the first place?)
Is it because Amazon bends publishers over with regard to the % of sales they get? (If so, is $10 for an ebook unfair only because of Amazon’s business practices in the first place?)
The issue is flexible pricing, what the publishing world has always worked on. Specifically, selling sought after books for higher prices right when they come out then lowering the price. Publishers are not trying to sell ebooks for the SAME price as books at all, they expect them to be cheaper but they should follow a similar flexibility.
This sums it up well
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
The issue is flexible pricing, what the publishing world has always worked on. Specifically, selling sought after books for higher prices right when they come out then lowering the price. Publishers are not trying to sell ebooks for the SAME price as books at all, they expect them to be cheaper but they should follow a similar flexibility.
This sums it up well
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/01/amazon-macmillan-an-outsiders.html
if you look above, i already said that, lincoln. i noted that amazon’s interest is to forge a place for the kindle as the prime economical model in e-readers. and it isn’t only kindles they want to corner the market on, it’s whatever they sell. i said that too when i spoke of discount pursuit. what you have here, however, is a rouge depressurization of an overinflated market arrangement – hence the hostility toward amazon. not because amazon is doing an ethical thing but because it isnt playing by the rules of the game. the game, however, is the problem and it naturally produces its cheaters. macmillan’s model is precisely overinflated because the argument for flexible pricing revolves around the richter scale calibration of price so that there can be no upsurge in interest without cost. i agree with much of what the article you linked to says but the evidence of macmillan’s (and all other big publishers) agenda is in this section: “What any sane publisher would like to do is to get away from the current crude fixed-price points — a system they can’t do anything about right now because it’s locked in via the wholesale/retail distribution model — and get round to flexible pricing on books: start selling high, then drop the price incrementally with much higher granularity than is currently possible. Such a system would allow them to get a lock on the price elasticity of demand, and thus work out the price point at which they can maximize book sales. A fixed-percentage agency model (distributor takes a flat 30 or 35%, whatever the price, while the price is set by the publisher) lets them do that.” the fixed-price point system here is called crude and the whole middle man bogeyman is summoned up but wholesaling is precisely what enables discounting of any kind – that referred discounting from the publisher enables discounting in good time to the reader. despite the big claims that books will be cheaper under the macmillan model, in actual fact, the so-called granularity will mean there will be fewer big discount cuts in booksales even eventually because prices will trickle in painful slow motion down the scale, slowly ebbing toward a bottom price, rather than staining the ‘drop’ that characterises the market now when the book reaches its final fixed form. there is a reason that apple has seized on this and it is precisely to try and outcorner amazon, in a typical apple strategy, by ‘honouring’ the market. you can bet your bottom dollar that this be so-called price elasticity of demand will translate out to readers paying the highest amount for a book at most times because – for instance – if a film version of a book is released, prices will balloon, not fall, for the price of an already published item can be recalibrated in a way that is impossible currently: the item must sell at the price at which it is purchased. wholesaling is not a simple middle man; it’s a market broker. to cut it out leaves you with the publishers and the retailers. the publishers which are obsessed with their narrow margins (and it is true that publishing houses run on far lower profits than any other entertainment industry, but ‘narrow’ does not mean either poverty-stricken or – the greatest bulldust – even meager, especially to authors, who will see their earnings rise under the macmillan model but not in a way that augments their percentage of the return, only the real amount they receive). and the retailers which must – whatever they do – sell above the price of purchase to stay viable. if you look at macmillan’s argument, it promises the world: more money for us, more money for writers, less cost to the readers. that’s just fantasy. the real terms of any market transaction insist that the only way to increase profits and lower costs is to increase sales so that the discount can be provided on the margins of the total profit. that’s what wholesaling (at least in the book industry) was designed to do. i’m not defending amazon – because that article nails their nasty agenda just right. but macmillan is not Oliver. i hate the way that this apparently ‘left’ anti-capitalist reaction ends up casting big publishing concerns in the role of victim to amazon’s vampire. amazon is a parasite’s parasite.
if you look above, i already said that, lincoln. i noted that amazon’s interest is to forge a place for the kindle as the prime economical model in e-readers. and it isn’t only kindles they want to corner the market on, it’s whatever they sell. i said that too when i spoke of discount pursuit. what you have here, however, is a rouge depressurization of an overinflated market arrangement – hence the hostility toward amazon. not because amazon is doing an ethical thing but because it isnt playing by the rules of the game. the game, however, is the problem and it naturally produces its cheaters. macmillan’s model is precisely overinflated because the argument for flexible pricing revolves around the richter scale calibration of price so that there can be no upsurge in interest without cost. i agree with much of what the article you linked to says but the evidence of macmillan’s (and all other big publishers) agenda is in this section: “What any sane publisher would like to do is to get away from the current crude fixed-price points — a system they can’t do anything about right now because it’s locked in via the wholesale/retail distribution model — and get round to flexible pricing on books: start selling high, then drop the price incrementally with much higher granularity than is currently possible. Such a system would allow them to get a lock on the price elasticity of demand, and thus work out the price point at which they can maximize book sales. A fixed-percentage agency model (distributor takes a flat 30 or 35%, whatever the price, while the price is set by the publisher) lets them do that.” the fixed-price point system here is called crude and the whole middle man bogeyman is summoned up but wholesaling is precisely what enables discounting of any kind – that referred discounting from the publisher enables discounting in good time to the reader. despite the big claims that books will be cheaper under the macmillan model, in actual fact, the so-called granularity will mean there will be fewer big discount cuts in booksales even eventually because prices will trickle in painful slow motion down the scale, slowly ebbing toward a bottom price, rather than staining the ‘drop’ that characterises the market now when the book reaches its final fixed form. there is a reason that apple has seized on this and it is precisely to try and outcorner amazon, in a typical apple strategy, by ‘honouring’ the market. you can bet your bottom dollar that this be so-called price elasticity of demand will translate out to readers paying the highest amount for a book at most times because – for instance – if a film version of a book is released, prices will balloon, not fall, for the price of an already published item can be recalibrated in a way that is impossible currently: the item must sell at the price at which it is purchased. wholesaling is not a simple middle man; it’s a market broker. to cut it out leaves you with the publishers and the retailers. the publishers which are obsessed with their narrow margins (and it is true that publishing houses run on far lower profits than any other entertainment industry, but ‘narrow’ does not mean either poverty-stricken or – the greatest bulldust – even meager, especially to authors, who will see their earnings rise under the macmillan model but not in a way that augments their percentage of the return, only the real amount they receive). and the retailers which must – whatever they do – sell above the price of purchase to stay viable. if you look at macmillan’s argument, it promises the world: more money for us, more money for writers, less cost to the readers. that’s just fantasy. the real terms of any market transaction insist that the only way to increase profits and lower costs is to increase sales so that the discount can be provided on the margins of the total profit. that’s what wholesaling (at least in the book industry) was designed to do. i’m not defending amazon – because that article nails their nasty agenda just right. but macmillan is not Oliver. i hate the way that this apparently ‘left’ anti-capitalist reaction ends up casting big publishing concerns in the role of victim to amazon’s vampire. amazon is a parasite’s parasite.
hm. sorry if i sounded a little testy when writing this. i’m mad at the gall of the whole thing, not you, lincoln.
hm. sorry if i sounded a little testy when writing this. i’m mad at the gall of the whole thing, not you, lincoln.
Lets just not link to Amazon anymore. Not really a “ban” i guess, just a we-don’t-link-them-because-they-suck-and-you-can-buy-cheap-books-other-places policy.
Lets just not link to Amazon anymore. Not really a “ban” i guess, just a we-don’t-link-them-because-they-suck-and-you-can-buy-cheap-books-other-places policy.
You have a lot to respond to there, but one thing I’d like to say:
“i hate the way that this apparently ‘left’ anti-capitalist reaction ends up casting big publishing concerns in the role of victim to amazon’s vampire. amazon is a parasite’s parasite.”
Not sure what left anti-capitalism has to do with this or not, but I think it would be a mistake to think that Amazon will deal any nicer with small publishers or self publishers. I think this is a case where the interest of big publishers and indie publishers overlap.
You have a lot to respond to there, but one thing I’d like to say:
“i hate the way that this apparently ‘left’ anti-capitalist reaction ends up casting big publishing concerns in the role of victim to amazon’s vampire. amazon is a parasite’s parasite.”
Not sure what left anti-capitalism has to do with this or not, but I think it would be a mistake to think that Amazon will deal any nicer with small publishers or self publishers. I think this is a case where the interest of big publishers and indie publishers overlap.
what if that’s the ONLY place you can buy it?
man, i just set up my amazon author profile too…figures
what if that’s the ONLY place you can buy it?
man, i just set up my amazon author profile too…figures
read this interesting piece on it all:
http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/
read this interesting piece on it all:
http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/
Amazon actually backed out of this on Sunday
http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/01/31/amazon-caves-to-macmillan-with-passive-aggresive-letter/
Amazon actually backed out of this on Sunday
http://thefastertimes.com/fiction/2010/01/31/amazon-caves-to-macmillan-with-passive-aggresive-letter/