Morris Rosenthal reports that Amazon is poised to eclipse Barnes & Noble as the biggest book seller in the USA. My preference is for the few remaining small, independent book shops, though as they go extinct, I’m not sure I have a particular horse in the race. I have a emotional preference for a physical store, of course, but access to a more or less infinite catalog from my laptop is a pretty compelling argument.
And I am big proponent of web sales of books, largely because it (theoretically) levels the playing field for smaller, independent publishers, and independent authors for that matter. Ebooks and Print on Demand are game changers for publishing, and if all goes well we’ll see a flourishing over the coming decade of new indie publishers enabled by these technologies.
This is good news for readers and writers, according to Rosenthal:
On the bright side, large trade publishers may find that having Amazon as their #1 customer will free them from having to cater to the tastes of powerful chain buyers. In past years, buyers at the large chains had significant input in everything from the title mix at some large publishers to the physical format and design of new books. These chain buyers and a handful of review publications formed a cabal of gatekeepers in the American publishing industry, and while some may lament their waning power, I was never impressed by their choices. The exclusivity that they fostered contained the seeds of their own downfall. Amazon, to date, has offered the closest thing to a level playing field for booksellers that’s existed in the publishing world since the beginning of time.
There is the other side of the equation though. Amazon looks like it might use its weight to restrict choice in the Print on Demand business:
On the dark side, there’s Amazon’s attempt to force a new printing paradigm on the publishing industry. Strangely enough, they’re in a better position to dictate surrender terms to the large trade publishers than to self publishers like myself. If Amazon changes the rules such that I no longer want too play their game, I may lose over half my sales and a third of my after tax earnings, but I’ll still make a living thanks to diversification. Large trade publishers are only seeing their dependence on Amazon grow. If Barnes & Noble announced plans tomorrow to install print-on-demand machines to print ALL of the books they sell at each store location to save on fuel, what large publisher could afford to say no? Well, replace Barnes & Noble in the previous sentence with Amazon and replace “save on fuel” with “better serve our customers” and the economic decision remains the same. If Amazon actually builds the capacity to print all of the books they sell, the large trade publisher will be faced with an existential question. If the choice is to sign on or have the Amazon playing field tilt against their titles, they’ll be forced to sign. Amazon is their buyer who is too big to fail. [more...]
Amazon is going to dominate online, there’s no doubt. But I think the nature of the web means that savvy indie publishers, using the web, will find better ways to get to readers than through Amazon. The web is the great sifter of info, and to date Amazon has been able to eclipse all other online booksellers, in part because publishers have more or less ignored the web and outsourced the web presence of their books to Amazon. A typical search for a book turns up an Amazon page, or a Wikipedia page first – the publisher’s page for the book is often unfindable, and just as likely to be useless, with little information to speak of about the book, writer, or indeed how to buy it. That’s changing, thankfully, and if publishers are smart they will be working harder at making their own pages the first search link for any of their books.
That Amazon is getting so big means the web has become a more important book-buying destination than physical stores. Amazon is the elephant, but the web is a vulnerable place – if publishers have better web content about their books (and they have every incentive to do so), then google is going to start liking their pages better. In the end we readers don’t really care how or where we buy online, we just want good prices and fast delivery.
Surely publishers would be smart to help us find their books online, and make it easy to get them – with Amazon’s help or without.
