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Amazon & Used Books II: Bezos Strikes Back
theodp writes: "Last week's call for authors to de-link Amazon from their sites has reportedly prompted Jeff Bezos to fire off a letter to all Amazon Marketplace sellers, asking them to help out by sending e-mail on Amazon's behalf in response to the Guild's call for Amazon to stop placing prominent used book ads on each title's main web entry and soliciting new books purchasers to resell their books through Amazon shortly after purchase.
Bezos wants everyone to be 'super-clear' that Amazon.com is supportive of and good for authors, indicating that Amazon's steep discounting of new titles and royalty-less sales of used books are two examples of how Amazon helps the book industry and
authors. Good to see Jeff's found a new cause, since it looks like he's done with up patent reform."
Good god, I wonder if writers buy all their books new?
love is just extroverted narcissism
A call to get rid of libraries as they damage sales? Actions like this are going to make the changes which are going to come for copyright law all the more popular with regular joes.
The more you know, the less you understand.
No used books? Just imagine if the car industry was going through the same thing.
Everyone, not just the rednecks, would have used cars sitting on their lawns.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
The Author's Guild had their chance when the first-ever used bookstore opened however many decades/centuries/millenia ago. Just because Amazon.com can sell used books on a much larger scale than Mom&Pop Used Book Store doesn't change the fundamental issues about selling used books.
I say to the authors, "Too bad." This whole supposed scandal just reeks of the same Napster fiasco odors, where the proposed solutions just don't fix the underlying issues. Publishers, authors, record labels, musicians, etc., just need to think harder about how to live in this modern world. If they can't deal with it, they should just become Amish or find some 3rd world country that is stuck in 1400AD and move there.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Wow. I love fatalists like you. So you only buy books that you will sell the minute you finish reading them? There are only a small fraction of people who routinely sell their used books. Most of us have these things called "bookselves" upon which we store the books we have purchased. Be they purchased new or used. Let's be honest the problem with the publishing industry is that they try to make too much profit off of new books. Who has the money to routinely buy $30 new books? If they really wanted to compete with used book sales they would try to sell more copies of paperbacks at competitive prices ($5). When you say "destroy the publishing industry" you're really saying destroy their 99% profit margins.
Offering customers a lower-priced option causes them to visit our site more frequently,
I don't doubt it, Jeff.
which in turn leads to higher sales of new books
Does it? Or does it simply lead to higher sales of used books?
while encouraging customers to try
authors and genres they may not have otherwise tried.
Absolutely.. too bad used books give no indication to the publishers that these authors and genres deserve a second book contract.
I've got no problem with Amazon selling used books. More power to'em. But when a book published in April 2002 already has a used book link offer up *right beside* the new book.. that strikes me as hurting the author and the publisher.
At least have the courtesy to separate them out for a few months so that publishers can have a more accurate indication of what's selling well and what's not.
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
...but I agree with Amazon on this one. This is such a throwaway culture, it really pleases me that reselling used books has become a real, mass-market movement. Until recently, you were pretty much screwed if you lived in an area where you didn't have any good used book stores.
...and frankly, if you're just in it for the money, you probably shouldn't be a writer. It's just not a good way to get rich.
reduce, reuse, recycle: even on just an enviromental basis, isn't reselling books the best of ideas? How many trees have been saved because people bought used books?
just a thought...
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
... I've discovered by picking up used copies of their books. I'm more willing to risk $0.50 - $4.00 on a used book by someone I'm not familiar with than $7.00 - $25.00 on a new book by same. And when I discover someone whose work I really like this way, I go out and buy everything I can from them new -- because I know that's the best way to ensure they keep writing.
I'd also talk about the number of bands whose work I discovered via Napster, and whose CD's I then bought new, but that's a dead horse.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
We have found a disturbing trend among car owners, when they no longer want a car they are not just storing it on a shelf to collect dust.
Used car dealers are actively working to divert customers shopping for new cars into their used car lots by prominently placing used car ads on websites and newspapers.
This is affecting the quality and diversity of new cars available to car dealers.
We believe it is in our members' best interests to de-link their websites from dealers who sell used cars. There's no good reason for car makers to be complicit in undermining their own sales. It just takes a minute, and it's the right thing to do.
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
I disagree. I think this will, in fact, help the industry.
First, let's clear something up. If someone is buying a book used (or even selling a book used), then the author already got money for the book sale. Beyond that, they don't deserve anything.
Second, if someone is buying a book used (or, again, selling), that means someone else bought the book and for some reason found it not to be worth keeping. They then make this book available to others at a cheaper price, who in turn may or may not feel that it is worth it, until:
- Someone finds the book worth keeping, and keeps it.
- It sits on the shelf of a used book section, and no one ever buys it.
In any case, each time the book is bought used, it devalues the overall worth of the book to the author. This is a good thing. It means that if they wrote a crap book, then the market compensates then at the rate for crap books.This means that yes, we may see less books. Authors who write books may see less money. The qualifier is that these authors are the ones who are writing crap books, and the should be making less money.
Books have been passed on and sold used for centuries. I don't think we have any fewer books today because of it.
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
WOW, look how much money I can save! Thanks to the authors guild for bringing this excellent service to my attention!
mp3's are only for those with bad memories
I honestly don't see what the guild is kvetching about.
I'm an author. I have a book on Amazon, and although the used price on my book is still fairly close to the new price, there's a chance that used sales will start to cut into new sales at some point.
So, does Amazon have a right to sell used copies of a book, or not? If not, then they are breaking the law, and should be sued. If so, then the Author's Guild is interfering with legitimate business, and is exposing itself as a bunch of whiny brats.
Books are SOLD, *NOT LICENSED*. If you buy a book, YOU OWN IT. There is no contractual relationship; it is your book. You can sell it, rent it, burn it, or make paper airplanes out of it. The only things you can't do are copy it or claim its contents as your own, due to copyright law (which I mostly agree with, except for the DMCA). If the Author's Guild wants to claim that this is not true, then they have an uphill battle against hundreds of years of tradition. But frankly, I think they're just bitching, and should be ignored.
-John
There are two components to a book's price: the intellectual property and the physical object. If you reduce the price of the physical object by sharing it, you liberate more money to pay for the intellectual property.
When the contents of a book are shared, by reselling used books, the net average price for each user is reduced. When price goes down, demand goes up. Thus there is more demand for the contents of books.
However, note that the price for the book contents is what went down, so demand for the contents is what increases. Fewer actual physical books are needed, because each book transports the contents to multiple users. So demand for books goes down, and the price goes up.
Thus, in the end, an actual book will cost more, but fewer will be sold. The income for publishers will decrease. But the intellectual property value has increased, and market forces should result in authors getting more money.
It is really a simple effect: When you make a process more efficient, both the supplier of the actual value and the consumer benefit, because they no longer have to pay for the inefficiency. It is only the supplier of the previously needed inefficiency that suffers.
"There has grown up in the minds of certain groups in this country the notion that because a man or corporation has made a profit out of the public for a number of years, the government and the courts are charged with the duty of guaranteeing such profit in the future, even in the face of changing circumstances and contrary to public interest. This strange doctrine is not supported by statute or common law. Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back."
Robert Heinlein's Life-Line
nuclear iraq bioweapon encryption cocaine korea terrorist
Here's my letter to the Authors Guild:
Dear Mr. Aiken,
I'm writing today to voice my support for Amazon's innovative used-book program. I'm a professional science fiction writer and journalist, the recipient of the Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Writer at the 2000 Hugo Awards, and the author of two novels forthcoming from Tor Books and a short-story collection forthcoming from Four Walls Eight Windows. I also spent my adolescence working in book stores and libraries.
I'm quite distressed at the Authors Guild's reactionary position on Amazon's used-book service. As a new author whose books will be published as $25+ hardcovers, my principal challenge will be to find a way to introduce my work to new readers. The intershelving of used and new books has been shown to be an effective means of driving sales of new authors -- I discovered this myself when I was a bookseller, and it's an experience that has been replicated in many bookstores, from corner operations like my local genre bookstore, Borderlands Books, all the way up to Powell's Books, the largest bookstore in the world.
What's more, the Amazon used-books service does not push the bounds of established copyright law or practice *at all*. The right of a consumer to resell the property s/he's lawfully acquired (called the Doctrine of First Sale) is the reason that we are able to have used bookstores at all. Also, yard-sales, charitable donations, library discard sales, collectibles sales, etc and so forth.
Indeed, one of the most revolting characteristics of many e-book technologies is that they abridge this right -- think of all the tens of millions of books donated to schools and libraries, sent to prisons and literacy programs, passed from friend to friend or within a family. The Doctrine of First Sale makes all of this possible.
Amazon's used-book service only reduces the friction involved in a used-book sale. When I worked at Bakka, a science fiction bookstore with new and used stock, young sf fans with tight budgets would often request popular titles that were available new on the shelf as used copies on their wish-lists. These are precisely the readers whose disappearance that we science fiction writers lament at every sf con as we look around at our greying ranks and wonder whether the genre is disappearing. Amazon's service makes this kind of thing easier and better for those readers -- why would we, as authors, wish to stop Amazon from extending the service?
Arguably, this is what the Internet is *for* -- connecting people at low cost, finding new market niches and exploiting them, reducing friction.
Copyright is a bargain between the public domain and creators -- we are able to create well and profit by our creations because we are able to benefit from the commons created by the works of those who came before us, which have entered the public domain. The bargain allows us to be effective creators, and it allows others to be innovative consumers.
Here Amazon and its customers (who are providing every one of those used books!) are building an innovative secondary market that will improve the overall economy. The bargain allows our *creative* expression, it allows their *innovative* expression.
To quote one of my colleagues:
> Companies should be lauded for extracting additional value from the formerly
> fallow copyright resources that belong to the public (like first sale and
> fair use).
In short, keep your disapprobation to yourself -- I want to work *with* my readers, not *against* them.
Thank you,
Cory Doctorow,
Former Canadian Regional Director,
Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
One correction to the blurb I'd like to make: the used-book sales aren't royaltyless. No royalty is paid to the author on this sale because the author has already received the royalty on that copy of the book the first time it was sold (as a new book). The Guild is complaining not that the author isn't being paid, but that they aren't being paid multiple times for a single copy sold.