14 ms·

Hachette/Amazon Business Interruption

115 points by Rylinks 12y ago

001sky 12y ago
Confirms what has otherwise been in the press for 2 weeks. However, it's helpful to hear it from Amazon directly. Sidesteps the need to "shoot the messenger"--An unfortunate direction of earlier discussions on HN.
eugenez 12y ago
The 1.1% of Amazon sales (by item count) for Hachette is an interesting metric if only to determine overall sales volume for Amazon should someone happen to have the approximate Hachette numbers.
- ben336 12y ago
  they made it clear that was "weighted demand" though, so items sold, not items provided. You'd need "Hachette sales through Amazon", a number unlikely to be available beyond Amazon/Hachette employees/execs.
  - eugenez 12y ago
    I wonder if the combination of total Hachette sales weighted by the portion of overall book sales via Amazon would be a reasonable approximation.
    - julien_c 12y ago
      I think it would, but then what would be the portion of overall book sales via Amazon?
- qq66 12y ago
  Isn't overall sales for Amazon published in their annual report?
joshreads 12y ago
“A word about proportion: this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units.” -a normal thing a human would say
cperciva 12y ago
We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We've offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool - to be allocated by Hachette - to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it. I have to say, this is a classy move on Amazon's part.
- neil1 12y ago
  I wouldn't call it "classy", it's a public relations ploy, meant to turn public opinion in Amazon's favor.
  - pooper 12y ago
    It is sad that hachette is getting authors to write badly about amazon on blogs and on facebook. It is evident that Amazon.com is right and hachette is wrong. Why do we need these scummy publishers anyways? Good riddance.
    - koide 12y ago
      We would like for publishers not to be scummy. But even if they are, scummy publishers are better for the authors than scummy Amazon. If they manage to force publishers out of the picture, they will force writers to reduce their income as far as they can push it. Which in a world without publishers is very, very far. By the way, you look like an Amazon shill, not providing any argument for your position and appealing to emotion (scummy publishers die!)
      - pooper 12y ago
        Sorry, not a shill. Just expressing an opinion. (Sadly I can't prove it as it is probably what a shill would say)
      - WalterBright 12y ago
        > If they manage to force publishers out of the picture, they will force writers to reduce their income as far as they can push it. Which in a world without publishers is very, very far. This seems an odd statement to me. It implies that publishers pay authors well only because publishers are inherently nice guys. Isn't it more likely that publishers pay authors well because authors deliver the goods, and would not otherwise? If Amazon was the publisher, why wouldn't Amazon also pay a bestselling author well in order to entice that author to produce more/better books, which Amazon can make more money off of?
incision 12y ago
>'We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We've offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool - to be allocated by Hachette - to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it.' Wonderfully slick move. It makes Amazon look good, Hachette look bad and builds good will with the authors and spectators while turning the screws on the economic pressure that Hachette is already facing.
- conanbatt 12y ago
  Does it? For me its a strong-armed position (my 50% hurts less than your 50%), which is why they are in this battle to begin with.
  - pooper 12y ago
    Hachette [...] is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. I think it is Hachette which is trying to strong arm the up and coming Amazon.com
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      A $10 billion media conglomerate is small potatoes next to $143 billion Amazon. Plus, Hachette is not the dominant player in its industry, while Amazon is. So, nice try, but no.
      - pooper 12y ago
        I didn't realize Amazon.com's valuation was $143 billion. I thought the 10 billion figure was relevant since they included it...
      - chaz 12y ago
        Amazon's revenue is only 7% books, or about $5B. Then again, Hachette is just a part of a conglomerate and is not itself a $10B company and may be way smaller than that. Regardless of the nitpicking of who is the bigger fish, both companies are well-equipped with clever people, bankrolls, and influence to fight this one out.
ternaryoperator 12y ago
I'm an Amazon Prime subscriber, and have been for years. For most of that time, I've automatically bought stuff from Amazon, aware that occasionally I'm paying more than elsewhere. The reason is convenience. Order almost anything, get it fast, with no extra shipping cost. This spat has forced me to occasionally shop at Barnes & Noble. And I gotta say, if I have to go to two stores to get items, Amazon's convenience edge is much smaller. Just the other day, since I was on B&N I bought things there that I would normally have gone to Amazon for. Again, it's the pure convenience. I have no idea whether I'm typical or not, but if I am, then I think this will hurt Amazon more than Hachette.
- bigtones 12y ago
  I agree, this saga is hurting Amazon a lot. From a PR perspective at a time when American citizens are worried about monopolies and the implications of technology conglomerates, this very public spat seems ill timed. The New York Times has had five articles negative of Amazon on this issue in the past two weeks alone.
- akiselev 12y ago
  Even if you are a typical user, how much would it possibly hurt Amazon? If this becomes a regular occurrence I can see Amazon's leverage eroding but the company regularly goes toe to toe with many different industries and holds it own against half trillion dollar a year giants like Walmart. Amazon's core competencies are growing and the network effects are difficult to quantify. I suspect encroaching on Amazon's market dominance would be a hard task even for Google, let alone B&N
  - wmeredith 12y ago
    If the typical behavior of their current multi-year Prime subscribers is to shop around because they no longer like the company that is a BIG problem for Amazon.
mwsherman 12y ago
Anyone know what an author pool is, how it functions? A bit of Googling didn’t reveal anything.
paulhauggis 12y ago
I will never do business with Amazon again. As a book seller: 1) Customers aren't mine. I'm not allowed to send any of the people that buy from me a link to my website or collect any of their data. This means that this income channel can be taken away at the whim of Amazon. 2) Amazon regularly uses your sell data to undercut you and put you out of business. I regularly would sell rare books with no other listings. As soon as I had any sales, Amazon would popup with their own listing at half price. My sales would go down when this happened. 3) Strange things would go on with their listings. I was in business for 5 years. I saw patterns and know when my sales would be up and down. None of these rules applied on Amazon. I would be going strong for weeks at a time. One day, I would have no sales and this might last for a month. From 100 sales/day to 0 just seems to be a bit funny to me. Customer support would of course deny everything. However, after running my own tests, I could see that from certain IP addresses and on some Amazon servers, I would get random errors on checkout of my own listings. Amazon eventually banned me. I had near 100% feedback and 1 complaint from a user that I sold them the wrong book. Before the user complained, I even paid to have it shipped back to me. This wasn't good enough. The customer wanted to keep the >$200 book and not send it back. I nearly went broke because I couldn't access my money for 3 months. It took me a year to get my business back to where it was, but I am now in a better place (with many sales channels). Amazon is an evil company and anyone that does business with them is risking everything for short-term gains. It's the destroyer of small businesses.
- msh 12y ago
  As a customer I see it as a feature that Amazon don't allow people to to collect my data, I bought the book at Amazon, nobody else should know the details. That does not change that Amazon is scummy but that they don't allow you data is actually a customer protection feature.
  - mcphage 12y ago
    > As a customer I see it as a feature that Amazon don't allow people to to collect my data, I bought the book at Amazon, nobody else should know the details. I'm not sure the situation is that simple. You bought the book through Amazon, but (in this case), you bought the book from the other poster. Putting them closer to, say, a shopping mall. As a shopper, who's has a stronger relationship to you—the store you bought something from, or the mall you bought it in? And for the seller, it means that your only "customer" is Amazon. Who doesn't really care about you at all. If I were a seller, I'd rather have my customers be the people who are actually interested in the product I'm selling. When commerce goes well, the buyer and seller create a relationship that benefits both of them. With Amazon being a strict gatekeeper, there's no way for that relationship to form, and the seller ends up being an interchangeable name on a screen.
brisance 12y ago
Amazon conveniently sidesteps the fact that eBooks from Hachette are not subject to supply chain constraints. Or that deliveries were purposely delayed due to contract negotatiations, which Amazon itself admitted. Citation: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-hachette/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=business&pagewanted=all&_r=2 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-it...
- jpatokal 12y ago
  "But with such an online structure as pursued by Amazon, a book market is being destroyed that has been nurtured over decades and centuries." Yes, that's called "disruption". Adapt or die. http://gyrovague.com/2012/06/18/eat-yourself-or-be-eaten-a-tale-of-two-travel-publishers/ http://gyrovague.com/2012/06/18/eat-yourself-or-be-eaten-a-t...
patio11 12y ago
Hachette: "They're using leverage on us in a negotiation to get us to agree to terms!" Amazon: "Well, yeah."
- 001sky 12y ago
  This trivializes everything interesting about this case. Because this argument was previously had with Microsoft & Netscape. And Comcast and Netflix. And Amazon has a huge stake in two major policy issues upon which this touches: (1) Monopolistic collusion in e-books; and (2) Net neutrality
  - pooper 12y ago
    Can you force Walmart to put your products on shelves? How is it OK for Hachette to force Amazon.com to put the physical books on shelves? One easy way to fight Amazon would be to include a DRM-free digital copy download for free with every physical book purchase. Of course, the scummy publishers won't do that.
    - 001sky 12y ago
      Retailer's like wal-mart commonly extract rents for product placement. Comcast thinks this is a great business model. Paying such rents to comcast for "product placement" in the last mile? Not so clear cut for Amazon.
      - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
        This whole discussion turns on whether Amazon is a monopoly. That's the reason it's such a problem for Comcast to do it -- they have a hard monopoly on access to Comcast subscribers. You can't gain access to any Comcast subscribers by peering with Sonic, because the number of customers who simultaneously subscribe to multiple residential ISPs is effectively zero. Whereas you can sell your product to "Amazon customers" without selling through Amazon, because the percentage of customers who patronize more than one retailer is substantially all of them.
jpatokal 12y ago
Charlie Stross (cstross here on HN) has an interesting post on this: By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/amazon-malignant-monopoly-or-j.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/amazon-m...
- dublinben 12y ago
  I would happily buy a DRM free copy of his books directly, but I can't.
- tygorius 12y ago
  Well, by that logic the record studios were proxies for musicians. Sorry, not buying that argument. If I were Stross I'd certainly be peeved at the loss of access to customers and, by extension, income. Especially if I were obligated by contract to stay with a publisher on the outs with Amazon. But arguing that Amazon's endgame is to put him out of business seems a stretch. We're still in the early stages of the ebook publishing disruption and I suspect that as with music, direct commercial channels between producers and consumers is the future.
tptacek 12y ago
This topic has generated a variety of coverage, presumably in part because the negotiation is with a book publisher instead of a supplier of a different type of product. Some of the coverage has expressed a relatively narrow point of view. Here is one post that offers a wider perspective. http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-amazoncom.html http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-af... Apart from the amusing optics of "this topic has generated a lot of coverage, but here's a blog post that sees our side of the story", it's worth knowing that this "wider perspective" is that of a very small literary indie publisher that basically says two things: * Hachette is gigantic * Selling books online is great for indies Neither of those points has much to do with the issue at hand, and, in particular, I'd suggest that selling books online is great for indies so long as Amazon sees the dollars involves as a tiny rounding error.
bowlofpetunias 12y ago
The day publishers like Hachette start selling their publications directly and unencumbered by DRM is the day Amazon will slowly start losing their leverage. (And get me as a customer.) Sure, it will take a while, but that's only because these publishers have spent the last two decades sitting on their asses counting their money whilst Amazon ate their lunch. I don't subscribe to the doctrine "disruption = good", but publishers are part of the fat and lazy copyright exploitation industry that truly deserved to be disrupted. If Amazon tried to stop Hachette from competing that would be a different matter. But they are handing Amazon this leverage simply because they still can't be arsed to innovate themselves.
- pkaye 12y ago
  Amazon already allows DRM free publications to be emailed into Kindle devices.
  - dublinben 12y ago
    That doesn't help much when only a handful of smaller publishers sell their books in DRM-free formats. I read a lot, and really like e-books. I don't buy very many e-books though, because the condition in which they're sold is so hostile to the consumer.
    - pkaye 12y ago
      I have gotten DRM free books from O'reilly's, Informit, Peachpit and Apress. Although all technical books, they are all major publishers.
werid 12y ago
This is a lengthy piece that makes the point that these publishers aren't entirely innocent (there's delays on both sides, and the publishers are owned by some pretty big companies themselves) http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hachette-dont-believe-the-spin/ http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hache...

115 points by Rylinks 12y ago

Confirms what has otherwise been in the press for 2 weeks. However, it's helpful to hear it from Amazon directly. Sidesteps the need to "shoot the messenger"--An unfortunate direction of earlier discussions on HN.

eugenez 12y ago

The 1.1% of Amazon sales (by item count) for Hachette is an interesting metric if only to determine overall sales volume for Amazon should someone happen to have the approximate Hachette numbers.

ben336 12y ago
they made it clear that was "weighted demand" though, so items sold, not items provided. You'd need "Hachette sales through Amazon", a number unlikely to be available beyond Amazon/Hachette employees/execs.
- eugenez 12y ago
  I wonder if the combination of total Hachette sales weighted by the portion of overall book sales via Amazon would be a reasonable approximation.
  - julien_c 12y ago
    I think it would, but then what would be the portion of overall book sales via Amazon?
qq66 12y ago
Isn't overall sales for Amazon published in their annual report?

joshreads 12y ago

“A word about proportion: this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units.” -a normal thing a human would say

cperciva 12y ago

We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We've offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool - to be allocated by Hachette - to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it. I have to say, this is a classy move on Amazon's part.

neil1 12y ago
I wouldn't call it "classy", it's a public relations ploy, meant to turn public opinion in Amazon's favor.
- pooper 12y ago
  It is sad that hachette is getting authors to write badly about amazon on blogs and on facebook. It is evident that Amazon.com is right and hachette is wrong. Why do we need these scummy publishers anyways? Good riddance.
  - koide 12y ago
    We would like for publishers not to be scummy. But even if they are, scummy publishers are better for the authors than scummy Amazon. If they manage to force publishers out of the picture, they will force writers to reduce their income as far as they can push it. Which in a world without publishers is very, very far. By the way, you look like an Amazon shill, not providing any argument for your position and appealing to emotion (scummy publishers die!)
    - pooper 12y ago
      Sorry, not a shill. Just expressing an opinion. (Sadly I can't prove it as it is probably what a shill would say)
    - WalterBright 12y ago
      > If they manage to force publishers out of the picture, they will force writers to reduce their income as far as they can push it. Which in a world without publishers is very, very far. This seems an odd statement to me. It implies that publishers pay authors well only because publishers are inherently nice guys. Isn't it more likely that publishers pay authors well because authors deliver the goods, and would not otherwise? If Amazon was the publisher, why wouldn't Amazon also pay a bestselling author well in order to entice that author to produce more/better books, which Amazon can make more money off of?

incision 12y ago

>'We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We've offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool - to be allocated by Hachette - to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it.' Wonderfully slick move. It makes Amazon look good, Hachette look bad and builds good will with the authors and spectators while turning the screws on the economic pressure that Hachette is already facing.

conanbatt 12y ago
Does it? For me its a strong-armed position (my 50% hurts less than your 50%), which is why they are in this battle to begin with.
- pooper 12y ago
  Hachette [...] is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. I think it is Hachette which is trying to strong arm the up and coming Amazon.com
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    A $10 billion media conglomerate is small potatoes next to $143 billion Amazon. Plus, Hachette is not the dominant player in its industry, while Amazon is. So, nice try, but no.
    - pooper 12y ago
      I didn't realize Amazon.com's valuation was $143 billion. I thought the 10 billion figure was relevant since they included it...
    - chaz 12y ago
      Amazon's revenue is only 7% books, or about $5B. Then again, Hachette is just a part of a conglomerate and is not itself a $10B company and may be way smaller than that. Regardless of the nitpicking of who is the bigger fish, both companies are well-equipped with clever people, bankrolls, and influence to fight this one out.

ternaryoperator 12y ago

I'm an Amazon Prime subscriber, and have been for years. For most of that time, I've automatically bought stuff from Amazon, aware that occasionally I'm paying more than elsewhere. The reason is convenience. Order almost anything, get it fast, with no extra shipping cost. This spat has forced me to occasionally shop at Barnes & Noble. And I gotta say, if I have to go to two stores to get items, Amazon's convenience edge is much smaller. Just the other day, since I was on B&N I bought things there that I would normally have gone to Amazon for. Again, it's the pure convenience. I have no idea whether I'm typical or not, but if I am, then I think this will hurt Amazon more than Hachette.

bigtones 12y ago
I agree, this saga is hurting Amazon a lot. From a PR perspective at a time when American citizens are worried about monopolies and the implications of technology conglomerates, this very public spat seems ill timed. The New York Times has had five articles negative of Amazon on this issue in the past two weeks alone.
akiselev 12y ago
Even if you are a typical user, how much would it possibly hurt Amazon? If this becomes a regular occurrence I can see Amazon's leverage eroding but the company regularly goes toe to toe with many different industries and holds it own against half trillion dollar a year giants like Walmart. Amazon's core competencies are growing and the network effects are difficult to quantify. I suspect encroaching on Amazon's market dominance would be a hard task even for Google, let alone B&N
- wmeredith 12y ago
  If the typical behavior of their current multi-year Prime subscribers is to shop around because they no longer like the company that is a BIG problem for Amazon.

mwsherman 12y ago

Anyone know what an author pool is, how it functions? A bit of Googling didn’t reveal anything.

paulhauggis 12y ago

I will never do business with Amazon again. As a book seller: 1) Customers aren't mine. I'm not allowed to send any of the people that buy from me a link to my website or collect any of their data. This means that this income channel can be taken away at the whim of Amazon. 2) Amazon regularly uses your sell data to undercut you and put you out of business. I regularly would sell rare books with no other listings. As soon as I had any sales, Amazon would popup with their own listing at half price. My sales would go down when this happened. 3) Strange things would go on with their listings. I was in business for 5 years. I saw patterns and know when my sales would be up and down. None of these rules applied on Amazon. I would be going strong for weeks at a time. One day, I would have no sales and this might last for a month. From 100 sales/day to 0 just seems to be a bit funny to me. Customer support would of course deny everything. However, after running my own tests, I could see that from certain IP addresses and on some Amazon servers, I would get random errors on checkout of my own listings. Amazon eventually banned me. I had near 100% feedback and 1 complaint from a user that I sold them the wrong book. Before the user complained, I even paid to have it shipped back to me. This wasn't good enough. The customer wanted to keep the >$200 book and not send it back. I nearly went broke because I couldn't access my money for 3 months. It took me a year to get my business back to where it was, but I am now in a better place (with many sales channels). Amazon is an evil company and anyone that does business with them is risking everything for short-term gains. It's the destroyer of small businesses.

msh 12y ago
As a customer I see it as a feature that Amazon don't allow people to to collect my data, I bought the book at Amazon, nobody else should know the details. That does not change that Amazon is scummy but that they don't allow you data is actually a customer protection feature.
- mcphage 12y ago
  > As a customer I see it as a feature that Amazon don't allow people to to collect my data, I bought the book at Amazon, nobody else should know the details. I'm not sure the situation is that simple. You bought the book through Amazon, but (in this case), you bought the book from the other poster. Putting them closer to, say, a shopping mall. As a shopper, who's has a stronger relationship to you—the store you bought something from, or the mall you bought it in? And for the seller, it means that your only "customer" is Amazon. Who doesn't really care about you at all. If I were a seller, I'd rather have my customers be the people who are actually interested in the product I'm selling. When commerce goes well, the buyer and seller create a relationship that benefits both of them. With Amazon being a strict gatekeeper, there's no way for that relationship to form, and the seller ends up being an interchangeable name on a screen.

brisance 12y ago

Amazon conveniently sidesteps the fact that eBooks from Hachette are not subject to supply chain constraints. Or that deliveries were purposely delayed due to contract negotatiations, which Amazon itself admitted. Citation: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-hachette/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&_php=true&_type=blogs&ref=business&pagewanted=all&_r=2 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/23/amazon-escalates-it...

jpatokal 12y ago
"But with such an online structure as pursued by Amazon, a book market is being destroyed that has been nurtured over decades and centuries." Yes, that's called "disruption". Adapt or die. http://gyrovague.com/2012/06/18/eat-yourself-or-be-eaten-a-tale-of-two-travel-publishers/ http://gyrovague.com/2012/06/18/eat-yourself-or-be-eaten-a-t...

patio11 12y ago

Hachette: "They're using leverage on us in a negotiation to get us to agree to terms!" Amazon: "Well, yeah."

001sky 12y ago
This trivializes everything interesting about this case. Because this argument was previously had with Microsoft & Netscape. And Comcast and Netflix. And Amazon has a huge stake in two major policy issues upon which this touches: (1) Monopolistic collusion in e-books; and (2) Net neutrality
- pooper 12y ago
  Can you force Walmart to put your products on shelves? How is it OK for Hachette to force Amazon.com to put the physical books on shelves? One easy way to fight Amazon would be to include a DRM-free digital copy download for free with every physical book purchase. Of course, the scummy publishers won't do that.
  - 001sky 12y ago
    Retailer's like wal-mart commonly extract rents for product placement. Comcast thinks this is a great business model. Paying such rents to comcast for "product placement" in the last mile? Not so clear cut for Amazon.
    - AnthonyMouse 12y ago
      This whole discussion turns on whether Amazon is a monopoly. That's the reason it's such a problem for Comcast to do it -- they have a hard monopoly on access to Comcast subscribers. You can't gain access to any Comcast subscribers by peering with Sonic, because the number of customers who simultaneously subscribe to multiple residential ISPs is effectively zero. Whereas you can sell your product to "Amazon customers" without selling through Amazon, because the percentage of customers who patronize more than one retailer is substantially all of them.

jpatokal 12y ago

Charlie Stross (cstross here on HN) has an interesting post on this: By driving down the unit revenue, Amazon makes it really hard for publishers—who are a proxy for authors—to turn a profit. Eventually they go out of business, leaving just Amazon as a monopoly distribution channel retailing the output of an atomized cloud of highly vulnerable self-employed piece-workers like myself. At which point the screws can be tightened indefinitely. http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/amazon-malignant-monopoly-or-j.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/05/amazon-m...

dublinben 12y ago
I would happily buy a DRM free copy of his books directly, but I can't.
tygorius 12y ago
Well, by that logic the record studios were proxies for musicians. Sorry, not buying that argument. If I were Stross I'd certainly be peeved at the loss of access to customers and, by extension, income. Especially if I were obligated by contract to stay with a publisher on the outs with Amazon. But arguing that Amazon's endgame is to put him out of business seems a stretch. We're still in the early stages of the ebook publishing disruption and I suspect that as with music, direct commercial channels between producers and consumers is the future.

tptacek 12y ago

This topic has generated a variety of coverage, presumably in part because the negotiation is with a book publisher instead of a supplier of a different type of product. Some of the coverage has expressed a relatively narrow point of view. Here is one post that offers a wider perspective. http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-amazoncom.html http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-af... Apart from the amusing optics of "this topic has generated a lot of coverage, but here's a blog post that sees our side of the story", it's worth knowing that this "wider perspective" is that of a very small literary indie publisher that basically says two things: * Hachette is gigantic * Selling books online is great for indies Neither of those points has much to do with the issue at hand, and, in particular, I'd suggest that selling books online is great for indies so long as Amazon sees the dollars involves as a tiny rounding error.

bowlofpetunias 12y ago

The day publishers like Hachette start selling their publications directly and unencumbered by DRM is the day Amazon will slowly start losing their leverage. (And get me as a customer.) Sure, it will take a while, but that's only because these publishers have spent the last two decades sitting on their asses counting their money whilst Amazon ate their lunch. I don't subscribe to the doctrine "disruption = good", but publishers are part of the fat and lazy copyright exploitation industry that truly deserved to be disrupted. If Amazon tried to stop Hachette from competing that would be a different matter. But they are handing Amazon this leverage simply because they still can't be arsed to innovate themselves.

pkaye 12y ago
Amazon already allows DRM free publications to be emailed into Kindle devices.
- dublinben 12y ago
  That doesn't help much when only a handful of smaller publishers sell their books in DRM-free formats. I read a lot, and really like e-books. I don't buy very many e-books though, because the condition in which they're sold is so hostile to the consumer.
  - pkaye 12y ago
    I have gotten DRM free books from O'reilly's, Informit, Peachpit and Apress. Although all technical books, they are all major publishers.

werid 12y ago

This is a lengthy piece that makes the point that these publishers aren't entirely innocent (there's delays on both sides, and the publishers are owned by some pretty big companies themselves) http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hachette-dont-believe-the-spin/ http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hache...