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Author Charles Stross: Is Amazon a Malignant Monopoly, Or Just Plain Evil?
An anonymous reader writes "Sci-fi author Charles Stross has a post providing insight into Amazon's recent bullying tactics against a major book publishing group. He puts the fight into perspective for the two most important parts of the book market: author and reader. He says: 'Amazon's strategy (as I noted in 2012) is to squat on the distribution channel, artificially subsidize the price of ebooks ("dumping" or predatory pricing) to get consumers hooked, rely on DRM on the walled garden of the Kindle store to lock consumers onto their platform, and then to use their monopsony buying power to grab the publishers' share of the profits. If you're a consumer, in the short term this is good news: it means you get cheap books. But if you're a reader, you probably like to read new books. 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. And after a while, there will be no more Charlie Stross novels because I will be unable to earn a living and will have to go find a paying job. TL:DR; Amazon's strategy against Hachette is that of a bullying combine the size of WalMart leaning on a much smaller supplier. And the smaller supplier in turn relies on really small suppliers like me. It's anti-author, and in the long term it will deprive you of the books you want to read.'"
While publishers are middlemen, at least they are at least some level of quality control. As an Amazon top reviewer, I get several times a week solicitations to review a book self-published through Amazon, and the vast majority of these are appallingly bad -- mispellings and grammatical errors abound, the typesetting is goofy, and in terms of style these authors could not write themselves out of a paper bag. An established publisher would reject the majority of these, saving consumers the time spent finding out that they are dreck, and for the small minority of authors with fledgling talent, there would be an editor who could propose changes for the better.
Furthermore, the publishers also provide some level of advertising. Often the books I am asked to review are hyped through a marketing agency that the author had to hire at his own expense, and considering how unreadable some of these books are, I highly doubt the authors will make enough money back to compensate for what they paid on marketing. For the vast majority of authors, the new economy is just money down the drain with nothing to show for it compared to the old model.