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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.'"
Go to the store and buy them! They're ace! And you can give them to your friends afterwards.
I downloaded a crapload of them, he's really good.
Am I making it harder or easier for him to make a living?
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
The author's intentions could be summarized as, "Does this false dichotomy make me look smart?"
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.
I have to agree with this, the need for a publisher is disappearing just like the need for a recording label. Stross should self publish and then cut a direct deal with Amazon. He'd probably end up with more money that way.
Since he's a well know author, maybe try putting his self-published books up on Indiegogo first. He might net enough off from doing that for each book that the later revenue from Amazon is just gravy.
Publishers are not "proxys for authors". They are another obsolete industry group fighting the inevitable for their survival, no different than the RIAA.
Assume there is a world where I as an author can contract with a third party for proofreading and editing at a fixed cost, and then "self publish" to Amazon and other eBook providers, without a man in the middle publisher eating up my profits, I can sell the books far cheaper and interact directly with my audience. Many authors are flocking to self-publish nowadays and the number is just going to keep growing.
Publishers demanded that Amazon use DRM... and now whine that readers are locked in to Kindle because that DRM prevents them from moving those books to a different ebook reader.
Any publisher who wants to can upload DRM-free ebooks to Amazon.
Stross's novels are an extrapolation of contemporary science and culture into various futures. As a geek, you should be able to recognize the beginnings of Stross's fantasies--crypto currencies, IT culture, malware, MMORPGs, maker culture, -- and laugh as these trends are taken to their logical conclusion in the various universes he has devised.
Now, I seek out and read hard SF. The trouble with classic works of this subgenre, (the vast bulk of which is still under copyright protection) is that it becomes obsolete. For instance, take the Bussard Ramjet-- a relativistic spaceship that was (at least for the time)theoretically possible without breaking physical laws. The Bussard Ramjet enabled a host of authors, most notably Poul Anderson, to write stories about Relativistic Time (twin paradoxes, and the like) But IIRC, the fuel density in the interstellar medium is insufficient for the Bussard scheme to work. So all those stories suffer from a patina of obsolescence.
To avoid this, it's necessary to acquaint yourself with the writers of the here and now. Stross is one such writer.
Squeezing your suppliers' profit margins is never a good long-term strategy.
Publishers aren't Amazon's suppliers: writers are. Publishers are just middle-men who get in the way.
And, oddly enough, those writers only get about 15% royalties if their ebooks are sold through a Big Five publisher, whereas they get 70% if they sell direct through Amazon.
Maybe you're telling the wrong organization to give everyone a fair share of the profits.
I can't believe this was modded up. Just because there are plenty of good old titles doesn't mean one shouldn't read new titles. Following your logic nobody should bother writing at all. Let's just give it all up.
Talk about drivel. Your post has it in spades.
CR, you've turned this into a "paper vs ebook" argument, but I think you miss Strosss point: Amazon's monopolistic stranglehold on distribution forces the price down which puts publishers out of business. This results in Amazon being the dominant publisher, working directly with authors. But it also allows Amazon to dictate to authors what they will pay, just as they did with the traditional publishers. This is not "free market", it is a monopoly no less than Microsoft was, and it's not good for consumer choice.
Second point: It may not seem like it here at Slashdot, but the desire to have and to hold and to read "real" books is not dead. Certain segments of the current generation might feel that way, but I don't see it. The bookstores in my town are always busy, the library in my town is always busy, and many of the books (of the so-called "dead tree" variety) are often on hold by several library patrons before I get to check them out. I suppose you're going to say "What a quaint idea! To check out a book!", but many people still enjoy the experience of turning pages...
I know I'm probably the minority, but when I buy a technical book in electronic form, I immediately print it out and put it in a three-ring binder, much easier to locate what I'm interested and flip back and forth between sections... And here's the high-tech sacrilege: I print them out single-sided with wide margins. I use the blank side for notes...
Now get off my lawn.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
The authors also don't think that they will make more money by self publishing either, because they know how much less they will be writing because of the time spent on other tasks currently handled by the publisher.
While some fine modernist literature has come from people who were not targeting a mass audience and were able to depend on patronage or another line of work while writing, the English canon clearly offers abundant counter-evidence for the idea that mass-market writing results in lower quality. Shakespeare was knocking out plays at a fairly rapid pace for the plebian theatre-goers at the Globe, while Dickens was writing his novels in installments published in the ordinary magazines of his day. Mark Twain wrote for a general American public and enjoyed making a mint off it.
Cory Doctorow is quite successful and he's thus far refused to jump on the DRM band wagon. On the contrary, all his books are available under a Creative Commons license, and I think part of his success is due to this. Personally I'm much more likely to support an author who believes in freedom of information and I have happily bought some of his books to give away to friends, a while after I had read freely available versions on some electronic device.
Is this not just precise how capitalism is supposed to work?
Actually no. Not even close. This is how its supposed to work: the Charlie Strosses would just sell through different channels. The customers would buy through the other channels. Amazon would miss the income, and would pay what it took to get the novels (and customers) back.
But that requires a competitive marketplace with multiple competing channels. If amazon owns enough of the market, then the Charlie Strosses can't stay solvent just selling through other channels. This gives amazon more power to DICTATE pricing than a functioning market would normally allow.
I fail to see the advantage between your friend's relationship with Amazon and Stross's publisher. Amazon seems to just be acting as a really crappy publisher for your friend - offering no editing, no promotion, just taking a cut of the money because they're the gatekeeper and they can. You can call Stross's model "outdated," but I can certainly see why he'd try to defend it.
"But we've already had this conversation for music. Didn't we collectively decide that getting away from traditional publishing models was progress?" - Apple doesn't have a monopoly on music distribution (anymore). iPods play DRM-free mp3s. There's a big difference there. If your friend could self-publish on multiple platforms, so it was your friend controlling distribution and controlling (via competition) how much of a cut the distributors could take and how much influence they had, this would be a very different situation.