8 ms·

Big, bad Amazon

116 points by davidiach 12y ago

toolz 12y ago
So the argument against Amazon is that it is has the potential to do bad things, so they should have restrictions? Surely Krugmen's argument isn't so shallow and petty.
- nl 12y ago
  Many criticisms of Krugman are valid, but he is rarely shallow or petty. OTOH, the Economist article isn't petty, but it doesn't seem to make any particular groundbreaking point.
  - zo1 12y ago
    And these criticisms are what? Besides what the OP mentioned... Can you point us to his arguments/points?
    - nl 12y ago
      The article links to Krugman's post. One point Krugman makes that isn't discussed at all is that Amazon uses its market power to keep book prices low. That makes the article's points about it being easy to setup an online store somewhat moot: What point is an online store if no one buys from it because prices are dramatically lower elsewhere. Krugman also makes the point that Amazon is a (and perhaps the dominant) discovery mechanism for books. Of course, if you aren't in Amazon you miss that mechanism. Combine these two things, and it makes creating a competitor very, very hard. That's doesn't make it illegal, but it's a very big concentration of market power. Edit: notably, this makes it difficult for even publishers to compete: if the dominant discovery mechanism for your items excludes you, then it's a problem. Note the similarities to Google here, and how careful Google is to emphasise the algorithmic nature of their search ranking. Amazon can't use that defense. I'm not sure I totally buy Krugman's argument that Amazon is actually using its power in ways that "hurt America". But, I am more amenable to his argument that it has too much market power in the book market as outlined above - not totally convinced, but I think his points in that area are much stronger than the Economist makes them out to be.
      - russell_h 12y ago
        But publishers control the supply, so unless Amazon is willing to subsidize the difference (and purchase books through unexpected channels) they really can't undercut prices. What's going on here is that publishers want to use Amazon's platform, but they want to dictate the terms of that usage.
- lumberjack 12y ago
  Isn't it pretty much the mantra of most hackers to build trust less systems?
  - toolz 12y ago
    I think that's an interesting point and deserves to be considered carefully. I would suggest that hacking for trust less systems is a wonderful ideal which can only be successfully achieved when the system has the potential to be fully understood. At the moment we don't understand human behavior anywhere near well enough to presume we can target corporations with restrictions without negative consequences. If the approval of a restriction is wide sweeping we can make market wide changes, but targeting single corporations just isn't justified with our current ability to predict and expect outcomes in the economy.
- redwood 12y ago
  That's the foundation of anti trust law. Similar to how we protect Civil liberties from the government before the government does bad things...
  - toolz 12y ago
    Sure, I guess my argument would be that simply because a problem could exist doesn't mean it's practical to address it and especially not practical to address potential bad, on a company by company basis. I could spend days listing things people and companies could potentially use for ill purposes that aren't practical to address.
mattmanser 12y ago
But the biggest reason is that one simply cannot argue with any credibility that Amazon has control over the market for buzz. My book buying habits may not be representative of the public at large, but while I almost always buy my books through Amazon I cannot remember the last time I discovered one there. Yeah, appeal to the sample size of 1, great argument... I do use Amazon for discovering new books, now he has a sample size of 2 and Amazon controls a massive 50% of the world's "buzz". That changed fast didn't it. I'm sure there are good responses to Krugman out there, but this isn't one.
- mooreds 12y ago
  Here's a response to Krugman that I found far more thoughtful than this Economist article, from Matt Ygleslias of Vox: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo... And here's a response to his response: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias-doesnt-understand-about-book-publishing http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias...
  - brianbreslin 12y ago
    The new republic piece is interesting, but misses a large segment of the book industry: academic material. My father published a few non fiction books on an academic press, after years of work, they paid him less than $2000. Hardly worth the time, and due to the nature of how they published it, the price was far too high to gain much traction sales wise.
  - mcguire 12y ago
    "In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die.... "But I’m not sure that even Yglesias would want to live in the world he’s envisioning. Mark Krotov, an editor at Melville House, points out on Twitter that in posts like these two, Yglesias has often recommended 'good, unusual books' such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. 'I’m confident that none of these books, as different and diverse as they are, could ever have found their audience without a publisher,' Krotov writes." I'm rather suspecting that Evan Hughes could stand to be less ignorant of the industry he's discussing. For one thing, Tripmaster Monkey is at least the fifth book that Kingston has written (I can't find a complete bibliography.) and Dennett's Content and Consciousness was published in 1969, 22 years before Consciousness Explained. Both of them had already "found their audiences" before those books were written, much less published. Further, Dennett has published many of his books with academic presses, where advances are rare. (Anyone know if MIT Press pays them?)
pinkyand 12y ago
The article ends in a non serious fashion.So the author discovers his books outside of Amazon.Does this fact has any relevance to how people in general discover books ? On the other hand, Amazon is Google's biggest threat in general product search(and probably discovery). So surely Amazon is even stronger in books. And i'm sure Amazon does play with search/recommendation ranking, and publishers see the effect on sales, or else they wouldn't have bothered with this fight.
- spydum 12y ago
  And just about every retailer does the same with their planograms/floor layout.
  - josefresco 12y ago
    Agreed. Amazon is not required to give equal promotion to every product it sells, and neither is any other retailer. Retailers will promote what sells, not what's fair.
spindritf 12y ago
Of course. It's so easy to use a different book store, even with kindle, that this whole argument holds no water. Since Amazon doesn't really carry Polish books, I get .mobis from random e-stores all the time. It takes no effort. There is no barrier to entry. Well, except actually having something in stock (easy enough when it's an infinitely copyable file) and making your website/UI not atrocious (not that easy, apparently). Most will even email it and Amazon will deliver it straight to the device. No need to look for the usb cable.
gutnor 12y ago
> On the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go around Amazon. It is tiring to hear that kind of argument all the time to determine if a business is a monopoly ( monopsonist ) or not and then it is supposed to be business 101 to know that people do not optimize their finance to the last cent and can be hooked into a company by habit or convenience. What matters is if amazon clients actually do go around Amazon or not and based on what criteria. Google thinks of Amazon as a threat to their ads business because people use Amazon as their search engine for stuff to buy. I would say that a pretty good indication that the original author may have had a point. > Setting up online stores is not rocket science ( to compete with Amazon ) Sorry but I can't read past that. Beside being insulting for anybody that has tried to put an online business together, can a economy journal be taken seriously when publishing that kind of statement in 2014 ?
- Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
  >> Setting up online stores is not rocket science ( to compete with Amazon ) > Sorry but I can't read past that. Come on - setting up an on-line store is trivially easy - Amazon can provide services covering you for ordering, payments, fulfillment...
- chatmasta 12y ago
  The author does have a point, though. He's not suggesting that the average reader throw up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon. He's suggesting that Hachette, a 200 year old book publisher, should be able to compete with Amazon, a 20 year old tech company. It's Hachette's fault that they don't have an eReader to compete with the Kindle, and it's Hachette's fault they don't have a storefront to sell directly to consumers. The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade. Any idiot could tell you that we were moving toward eReaders. A smart company would see the trend and adapt. Nothing stopped Hachette from hiring engineers and making a push into the future, except for their own 200-year-old stubborness. This is just another case of industry incumbents failing to keep up with moving technology. For others, see MPAA, RIAA, Taxis, etc. I have no sympathy for a company that could have entered the game five years ago, but failed to. Hachette, if anything, was in a better position, from a market/supply chain standpoint, to develop eReaders. They just failed to.
Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
Amazon vs. Hachette is increasingly one of those battles you'd like no-one to win. The discussions around the conflict have, to me at least, shown pretty clearly that book publishing as it currently is isn't a model which stands up to too much scrutiny when you look at how well it works for anyone outside it. On the other hand I think we'd all rather it wasn't Amazon, a company who many seem to like using but don't trust much further than they can comfortably spit a dead rat, giving it a kicking. The old metaphor about frying pans and fires springs to mind. Maybe we just live in a more cynical time but it would be nice if our disruption was something people generally felt optimistic about.
- lmm 12y ago
  Disruption has always been the province of companies that played fast and loose with the rules and were generally not very nice.
  - Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
    I disagree. Disruption involves change which is often stressful and yes, many of those who are disruptive can play it fast and loose with the rules. But being nice? I see no evidence that old businesses are nice (we're just more used to their nastiness) and I certainly see no case that new, disruptive businesses are any way worse. If anything I think back to the likes of Google in the don't be evil days - young idealists who just wanted to make the world better and would work out the money side of things later. Even if that weren't true, I still want to be optimistic about change. I accept that it's not all great, that everything comes with a cost, but if you're doing something that's so obviously potentially positive, surely something is wrong if people don't feel good about it?
    - obviouslygreen 12y ago
      I don't think it's useful or accurate to attempt a value judgment on "disruption" in general. It means massive change, the results of which can and likely will be good for some people, bad for others, and neutral for some as well. Being optimistic (or pessimistic, really) about such a broad concept doesn't make sense. Could positive consequences come out of any massive change? Depending on your point of view, perhaps, with exactly the same probability (undefined) as negative consequences. Current companies' and industries' goodness or badness are almost always a matter of perspective (though some are easier to argue one way or the other, again, depending on your point of view). Removing or stunting them with a new paradigm certainly changes things, but rarely if ever in a black and white, "things are universally [better|worse] now" way.
tokenadult 12y ago
I see the previous submission[1] to Hacker News of Matthew Yglesias's Vox essay, "Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers,"[2] didn't get much discussion here, but I think the essay supplements the arguments in the Economist blog post kindly submitted here very nicely from the author's side. (The Economist post mostly argues from the reader's side.) I still have plenty to read, and I don't find that Hachette or the other people whining about Amazon are doing as much as Amazon is to provide you and me with more to read at a better price than ever before. As Yglesias writes, "When all is said and done, the argument between Amazon and book publishers is over the rather banal question of price. Amazon's view is that since 'printing' an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should be really cheap. Publishers' view is that since 'printing' an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should offer enormous profit margins to book publishers. If you care about reading or ideas or literature, the choice between these visions is not a difficult one." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8493736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8493736 [2] http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo...
- Osmium 12y ago
  > is to provide you and me with more to read at a better price than ever before As a reader, do you want to optimise for price or for quality? The argument is that one will ultimately come at the expense of the other, because good books need good editors and good authors need sufficient money to allow them the time to write.
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    As a reader, I think Amazon helps me a lot on the quality information about books I might want to read, as it posts reader reviews and includes those beguiling "Readers who bought this also bought" links frequently to guide me to books I haven't heard about before. On the whole, as a reader who has been reading for half a century, I like the ecosystem for readers better since Amazon came along than I liked it before Amazon came along.
  - sampo 12y ago
patsplat 12y ago
The notion that Amazon is a book store is the most flawed aspect of this article.
- aet 12y ago
  They are more than just a book store, but they do sell 40% of all new books with no competitor in sight. I can't see how any bookstore can't afford to be online. Even small independent book stores do sales online.
  - saalweachter 12y ago
    I also suspect that books is the only market in which they can act like a monopsony.
robomartin 12y ago
The equation is somewhat complex. eBooks don't cost zero to deliver. In other words, the infrastructure required to deliver them (which includes people, not just servers) at a place like Amazon isn't trivial in cost. And then there's the author's need to earn a respectable living. Obviously that equation produces different numbers based on whether the product (the book being the product) sells a thousand vs. a million copies per year. If a publisher is in the middle then they need to make money to offset their fixed and variable costs. The presumption is that they provide the author with valuable services. I've paid up to $200 for privately published eBooks on very specific subjects from authors with deep expertise in the matter. In this case the authors undertake the entire task of producing the book, often hiring people to help edit, format, illustrate, etc. I wonder how the economics of such ventures works out. In all cases the books have always been worth every penny. One of my pet peeves with Amazon is that they don't offer eBooks in PDF format. I hate the Kindle experience, even on their PC application. I far prefer PDF documents everywhere.
at-fates-hands 12y ago
The fatal flaw in the article is this: >>On the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go around Amazon. One of the works Amazon is supposedly dooming, according to Mr Krugman, is a book called "Sons of Wichita". But if one googles "Sons of Wichita", then one of the first results is the book's page at the website of Barnes & Noble, a rival online bookseller. Barnes & Noble offers a competitive price and 24-hour delivery (same day delivery in Manhattan!). There is a fundamental difference in how people search for books compared to other items. Since people know Amazon has such a huge inventory, they go to Amazon and THEN search for their title. 99% of people I know do not simply Google a book title and then select the first result they get in Google, it just doesn't happen that way. This is an important fact which undermines the idea it's "easy" for consumers to selectively use another vendor to get their books from. It also gives a lot more weight to the fact Amazon really is a monopsony.
- mcguire 12y ago
  So you're saying that if Hachette pulled David Baldacci titles from Amazon, everyone would just give up on buying his books?
surement 12y ago
From the first sentence: >LAST week, the Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Jean Tirole There is no such thing as the Nobel prize in economics. The prize's real name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It's not a Nobel prize.
davidf18 12y ago
I live in Manhattan and love both Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's same day service as well as Amazon Prime's free 2 day and low cost overnight shipping. I have also had great customer service with Amazon. I don't understand why Krugman wrote a column about a firm which offers great selection at low cost with rapid low-cost or free shipping. Customer service is great as well. If only all firms aspired to be Amazon!
dewarrn1 12y ago
This may be a silly question, but could publishers simply set up their own Amazon storefronts? That is, could I buy a book from "Hachette, fulfilled by Amazon" if Hachette was willing to set things up on their end? I'm sure that the current dispute would make this approach untenable, but I have to wonder why publishers aren't using Amazon services to sell books at their preferred prices.

116 points by davidiach 12y ago

toolz 12y ago

So the argument against Amazon is that it is has the potential to do bad things, so they should have restrictions? Surely Krugmen's argument isn't so shallow and petty.

nl 12y ago
Many criticisms of Krugman are valid, but he is rarely shallow or petty. OTOH, the Economist article isn't petty, but it doesn't seem to make any particular groundbreaking point.
- zo1 12y ago
  And these criticisms are what? Besides what the OP mentioned... Can you point us to his arguments/points?
  - nl 12y ago
    The article links to Krugman's post. One point Krugman makes that isn't discussed at all is that Amazon uses its market power to keep book prices low. That makes the article's points about it being easy to setup an online store somewhat moot: What point is an online store if no one buys from it because prices are dramatically lower elsewhere. Krugman also makes the point that Amazon is a (and perhaps the dominant) discovery mechanism for books. Of course, if you aren't in Amazon you miss that mechanism. Combine these two things, and it makes creating a competitor very, very hard. That's doesn't make it illegal, but it's a very big concentration of market power. Edit: notably, this makes it difficult for even publishers to compete: if the dominant discovery mechanism for your items excludes you, then it's a problem. Note the similarities to Google here, and how careful Google is to emphasise the algorithmic nature of their search ranking. Amazon can't use that defense. I'm not sure I totally buy Krugman's argument that Amazon is actually using its power in ways that "hurt America". But, I am more amenable to his argument that it has too much market power in the book market as outlined above - not totally convinced, but I think his points in that area are much stronger than the Economist makes them out to be.
    - russell_h 12y ago
      But publishers control the supply, so unless Amazon is willing to subsidize the difference (and purchase books through unexpected channels) they really can't undercut prices. What's going on here is that publishers want to use Amazon's platform, but they want to dictate the terms of that usage.
lumberjack 12y ago
Isn't it pretty much the mantra of most hackers to build trust less systems?
- toolz 12y ago
  I think that's an interesting point and deserves to be considered carefully. I would suggest that hacking for trust less systems is a wonderful ideal which can only be successfully achieved when the system has the potential to be fully understood. At the moment we don't understand human behavior anywhere near well enough to presume we can target corporations with restrictions without negative consequences. If the approval of a restriction is wide sweeping we can make market wide changes, but targeting single corporations just isn't justified with our current ability to predict and expect outcomes in the economy.
redwood 12y ago
That's the foundation of anti trust law. Similar to how we protect Civil liberties from the government before the government does bad things...
- toolz 12y ago
  Sure, I guess my argument would be that simply because a problem could exist doesn't mean it's practical to address it and especially not practical to address potential bad, on a company by company basis. I could spend days listing things people and companies could potentially use for ill purposes that aren't practical to address.

mattmanser 12y ago

But the biggest reason is that one simply cannot argue with any credibility that Amazon has control over the market for buzz. My book buying habits may not be representative of the public at large, but while I almost always buy my books through Amazon I cannot remember the last time I discovered one there. Yeah, appeal to the sample size of 1, great argument... I do use Amazon for discovering new books, now he has a sample size of 2 and Amazon controls a massive 50% of the world's "buzz". That changed fast didn't it. I'm sure there are good responses to Krugman out there, but this isn't one.

mooreds 12y ago
Here's a response to Krugman that I found far more thoughtful than this Economist article, from Matt Ygleslias of Vox: http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo... And here's a response to his response: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias-doesnt-understand-about-book-publishing http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119977/what-matt-yglesias...
- brianbreslin 12y ago
  The new republic piece is interesting, but misses a large segment of the book industry: academic material. My father published a few non fiction books on an academic press, after years of work, they paid him less than $2000. Hardly worth the time, and due to the nature of how they published it, the price was far too high to gain much traction sales wise.
- mcguire 12y ago
  "In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die.... "But I’m not sure that even Yglesias would want to live in the world he’s envisioning. Mark Krotov, an editor at Melville House, points out on Twitter that in posts like these two, Yglesias has often recommended 'good, unusual books' such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. 'I’m confident that none of these books, as different and diverse as they are, could ever have found their audience without a publisher,' Krotov writes." I'm rather suspecting that Evan Hughes could stand to be less ignorant of the industry he's discussing. For one thing, Tripmaster Monkey is at least the fifth book that Kingston has written (I can't find a complete bibliography.) and Dennett's Content and Consciousness was published in 1969, 22 years before Consciousness Explained. Both of them had already "found their audiences" before those books were written, much less published. Further, Dennett has published many of his books with academic presses, where advances are rare. (Anyone know if MIT Press pays them?)

pinkyand 12y ago

The article ends in a non serious fashion.So the author discovers his books outside of Amazon.Does this fact has any relevance to how people in general discover books ? On the other hand, Amazon is Google's biggest threat in general product search(and probably discovery). So surely Amazon is even stronger in books. And i'm sure Amazon does play with search/recommendation ranking, and publishers see the effect on sales, or else they wouldn't have bothered with this fight.

spydum 12y ago
And just about every retailer does the same with their planograms/floor layout.
- josefresco 12y ago
  Agreed. Amazon is not required to give equal promotion to every product it sells, and neither is any other retailer. Retailers will promote what sells, not what's fair.

spindritf 12y ago

Of course. It's so easy to use a different book store, even with kindle, that this whole argument holds no water. Since Amazon doesn't really carry Polish books, I get .mobis from random e-stores all the time. It takes no effort. There is no barrier to entry. Well, except actually having something in stock (easy enough when it's an infinitely copyable file) and making your website/UI not atrocious (not that easy, apparently). Most will even email it and Amazon will deliver it straight to the device. No need to look for the usb cable.

gutnor 12y ago

> On the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go around Amazon. It is tiring to hear that kind of argument all the time to determine if a business is a monopoly ( monopsonist ) or not and then it is supposed to be business 101 to know that people do not optimize their finance to the last cent and can be hooked into a company by habit or convenience. What matters is if amazon clients actually do go around Amazon or not and based on what criteria. Google thinks of Amazon as a threat to their ads business because people use Amazon as their search engine for stuff to buy. I would say that a pretty good indication that the original author may have had a point. > Setting up online stores is not rocket science ( to compete with Amazon ) Sorry but I can't read past that. Beside being insulting for anybody that has tried to put an online business together, can a economy journal be taken seriously when publishing that kind of statement in 2014 ?

Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
>> Setting up online stores is not rocket science ( to compete with Amazon ) > Sorry but I can't read past that. Come on - setting up an on-line store is trivially easy - Amazon can provide services covering you for ordering, payments, fulfillment...
chatmasta 12y ago
The author does have a point, though. He's not suggesting that the average reader throw up an ecommerce site to compete with Amazon. He's suggesting that Hachette, a 200 year old book publisher, should be able to compete with Amazon, a 20 year old tech company. It's Hachette's fault that they don't have an eReader to compete with the Kindle, and it's Hachette's fault they don't have a storefront to sell directly to consumers. The writing has been on the wall for almost a decade. Any idiot could tell you that we were moving toward eReaders. A smart company would see the trend and adapt. Nothing stopped Hachette from hiring engineers and making a push into the future, except for their own 200-year-old stubborness. This is just another case of industry incumbents failing to keep up with moving technology. For others, see MPAA, RIAA, Taxis, etc. I have no sympathy for a company that could have entered the game five years ago, but failed to. Hachette, if anything, was in a better position, from a market/supply chain standpoint, to develop eReaders. They just failed to.

Tyrannosaurs 12y ago

Amazon vs. Hachette is increasingly one of those battles you'd like no-one to win. The discussions around the conflict have, to me at least, shown pretty clearly that book publishing as it currently is isn't a model which stands up to too much scrutiny when you look at how well it works for anyone outside it. On the other hand I think we'd all rather it wasn't Amazon, a company who many seem to like using but don't trust much further than they can comfortably spit a dead rat, giving it a kicking. The old metaphor about frying pans and fires springs to mind. Maybe we just live in a more cynical time but it would be nice if our disruption was something people generally felt optimistic about.

lmm 12y ago
Disruption has always been the province of companies that played fast and loose with the rules and were generally not very nice.
- Tyrannosaurs 12y ago
  I disagree. Disruption involves change which is often stressful and yes, many of those who are disruptive can play it fast and loose with the rules. But being nice? I see no evidence that old businesses are nice (we're just more used to their nastiness) and I certainly see no case that new, disruptive businesses are any way worse. If anything I think back to the likes of Google in the don't be evil days - young idealists who just wanted to make the world better and would work out the money side of things later. Even if that weren't true, I still want to be optimistic about change. I accept that it's not all great, that everything comes with a cost, but if you're doing something that's so obviously potentially positive, surely something is wrong if people don't feel good about it?
  - obviouslygreen 12y ago
    I don't think it's useful or accurate to attempt a value judgment on "disruption" in general. It means massive change, the results of which can and likely will be good for some people, bad for others, and neutral for some as well. Being optimistic (or pessimistic, really) about such a broad concept doesn't make sense. Could positive consequences come out of any massive change? Depending on your point of view, perhaps, with exactly the same probability (undefined) as negative consequences. Current companies' and industries' goodness or badness are almost always a matter of perspective (though some are easier to argue one way or the other, again, depending on your point of view). Removing or stunting them with a new paradigm certainly changes things, but rarely if ever in a black and white, "things are universally [better|worse] now" way.

tokenadult 12y ago

I see the previous submission[1] to Hacker News of Matthew Yglesias's Vox essay, "Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers,"[2] didn't get much discussion here, but I think the essay supplements the arguments in the Economist blog post kindly submitted here very nicely from the author's side. (The Economist post mostly argues from the reader's side.) I still have plenty to read, and I don't find that Hachette or the other people whining about Amazon are doing as much as Amazon is to provide you and me with more to read at a better price than ever before. As Yglesias writes, "When all is said and done, the argument between Amazon and book publishers is over the rather banal question of price. Amazon's view is that since 'printing' an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should be really cheap. Publishers' view is that since 'printing' an extra copy of an e-book is really cheap, e-books should offer enormous profit margins to book publishers. If you care about reading or ideas or literature, the choice between these visions is not a difficult one." [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8493736 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8493736 [2] http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopoly http://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/7016827/amazon-hachette-monopo...

Osmium 12y ago
> is to provide you and me with more to read at a better price than ever before As a reader, do you want to optimise for price or for quality? The argument is that one will ultimately come at the expense of the other, because good books need good editors and good authors need sufficient money to allow them the time to write.
- tokenadult 12y ago
  As a reader, I think Amazon helps me a lot on the quality information about books I might want to read, as it posts reader reviews and includes those beguiling "Readers who bought this also bought" links frequently to guide me to books I haven't heard about before. On the whole, as a reader who has been reading for half a century, I like the ecosystem for readers better since Amazon came along than I liked it before Amazon came along.
- sampo 12y ago

patsplat 12y ago

The notion that Amazon is a book store is the most flawed aspect of this article.

aet 12y ago
They are more than just a book store, but they do sell 40% of all new books with no competitor in sight. I can't see how any bookstore can't afford to be online. Even small independent book stores do sales online.
- saalweachter 12y ago
  I also suspect that books is the only market in which they can act like a monopsony.

robomartin 12y ago

The equation is somewhat complex. eBooks don't cost zero to deliver. In other words, the infrastructure required to deliver them (which includes people, not just servers) at a place like Amazon isn't trivial in cost. And then there's the author's need to earn a respectable living. Obviously that equation produces different numbers based on whether the product (the book being the product) sells a thousand vs. a million copies per year. If a publisher is in the middle then they need to make money to offset their fixed and variable costs. The presumption is that they provide the author with valuable services. I've paid up to $200 for privately published eBooks on very specific subjects from authors with deep expertise in the matter. In this case the authors undertake the entire task of producing the book, often hiring people to help edit, format, illustrate, etc. I wonder how the economics of such ventures works out. In all cases the books have always been worth every penny. One of my pet peeves with Amazon is that they don't offer eBooks in PDF format. I hate the Kindle experience, even on their PC application. I far prefer PDF documents everywhere.

at-fates-hands 12y ago

The fatal flaw in the article is this: >>On the other hand, it is incredibly easy to go around Amazon. One of the works Amazon is supposedly dooming, according to Mr Krugman, is a book called "Sons of Wichita". But if one googles "Sons of Wichita", then one of the first results is the book's page at the website of Barnes & Noble, a rival online bookseller. Barnes & Noble offers a competitive price and 24-hour delivery (same day delivery in Manhattan!). There is a fundamental difference in how people search for books compared to other items. Since people know Amazon has such a huge inventory, they go to Amazon and THEN search for their title. 99% of people I know do not simply Google a book title and then select the first result they get in Google, it just doesn't happen that way. This is an important fact which undermines the idea it's "easy" for consumers to selectively use another vendor to get their books from. It also gives a lot more weight to the fact Amazon really is a monopsony.

mcguire 12y ago
So you're saying that if Hachette pulled David Baldacci titles from Amazon, everyone would just give up on buying his books?

surement 12y ago

From the first sentence: >LAST week, the Nobel prize in economics was awarded to Jean Tirole There is no such thing as the Nobel prize in economics. The prize's real name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. It's not a Nobel prize.

davidf18 12y ago

I live in Manhattan and love both Amazon's and Barnes & Noble's same day service as well as Amazon Prime's free 2 day and low cost overnight shipping. I have also had great customer service with Amazon. I don't understand why Krugman wrote a column about a firm which offers great selection at low cost with rapid low-cost or free shipping. Customer service is great as well. If only all firms aspired to be Amazon!

dewarrn1 12y ago

This may be a silly question, but could publishers simply set up their own Amazon storefronts? That is, could I buy a book from "Hachette, fulfilled by Amazon" if Hachette was willing to set things up on their end? I'm sure that the current dispute would make this approach untenable, but I have to wonder why publishers aren't using Amazon services to sell books at their preferred prices.