AMAZON Flexes Its Muscles in Fight Against Publishers... Books Vanish
As Publishers Fight Amazon, Books Vanish
By DAVID STREITFELD and MELISSA EDDY MAY 23, 2014 7:24 AM
As of Friday morning, the paperback edition of Brad
Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book
Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — was listed as “unavailable.”
Amazon’s power over the publishing and bookselling
industries is unrivaled in the modern era. Now it has started wielding its
might in a more brazen way than ever before.
Seeking ever-higher payments from publishers to bolster
its anemic bottom line, Amazon is holding books and authors hostage on two continents
by delaying shipments and raising prices. The literary community is fearful and
outraged — and practically begging for government intervention.
“How is this not extortion? You know, the thing that is
illegal when the Mafia does it,” asked Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House,
echoing remarks being made across social media.
Amazon is, as usual, staying mum. “We talk when we have
something to say,” Jeffrey P. Bezos, the founder and chief executive, said at
the company’s annual meeting this week.
The battle is being waged largely over physical books. In
the United States, Amazon has been discouraging customers from buying titles
from Hachette, the fourth-largest publisher by market share. Late Thursday, it
escalated the dispute by making it impossible to order Hachette titles being
issued this summer and fall. It is using some of the same tactics against the
Bonnier Media Group in Germany.
But the real prize is control of e-books, the future of
publishing.
Publishers tried to rein in Amazon once, and got slapped
with a federal antitrust suit for their efforts. Amazon was not directly a
party to the case but has reaped the rewards in increased market power. Now it
wants to increase its share of the digital proceeds. The publishers, weighing a
slide into irrelevance if not nonexistence, are trying to hold the line.
Late Friday afternoon, Hachette made by far its strongest
comment on the conflict.
“We are determined to protect the value of our authors’
books and our own work in editing, distributing and marketing them,” said
Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette senior vice president. “We hope this difficult
situation will not last a long time, but we are sparing no effort and exploring
all options.”
The Authors Guild accused the retailer of acting
illegally.
“Amazon clearly has substantial market power and is
abusing that market power to maintain and increase its dominance, which likely
violates Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act,” said Jan Constantine, the
Guild’s general counsel.
Independent booksellers, meanwhile, announced they could
supply Hachette books immediately. The second-largest physical chain,
Books-a-Million, advertised 30 percent discounts on select coming Hachette
titles. Among the publisher’s imprints are Grand Central Publishing, Orbit and
Little, Brown.
Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying
deliveries of books from Bonnier.
“It appears that Amazon is doing exactly that on the
German market which it has been doing on the U.S. market: using its dominant
position in the market to blackmail the publishers,” said Alexander Skipis,
president of the German Publishers and Booksellers Association.
The association said its antitrust experts were examining
whether Amazon’s tactics violated the law.
“Of course it is very comfortable for customers to be
able to order over the Internet, 24 hours a day, seven days a week,” Mr. Skipis
said. “But with such an online structure as pursued by Amazon, a book market is
being destroyed that has been nurtured over decades and centuries.”
Christian Schumacher-Gebler, chief executive for Bonnier
in Germany, said the group’s leading publishing houses noticed delays in
deliveries of some of its books several weeks ago and confronted the retailer.
“Amazon confirmed to us that these delays are directly
related to the ongoing negotiations over conditions in the electronic book
market,” Mr. Schumacher-Gebler said.
The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for
coming Hachette books, including J. K. Rowling’s new novel, published under the
pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
In some cases, even the web pages promoting the books
have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,”
coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle
edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $30).
The confrontations with the publishers are the biggest
display of Amazon’s dominance since it briefly stripped another publisher,
Macmillan, of its “buy” buttons in 2010. It seems likely to encourage debate
about the concentration of power by the retailer. No firm in American history
has exerted the control over the American book market — physical, digital and
secondhand — that Amazon does.
James Patterson, one of the country’s best-selling
writers, described the confrontation between Amazon and Hachette as “a war.”
“Bookstores, libraries, authors, and books themselves are
caught in the crossfire of an economic war,” he wrote on Facebook. “If this is
the new American way, then maybe it has to be changed — by law, if necessary —
immediately, if not sooner.”
Mr. Patterson’s novels due to be released this summer and
fall are now impossible to buy from Amazon in either print or digital form.
Hachette, which is owned by the French conglomerate
Lagardère, was one of the publishers in the antitrust case, which involved
e-book prices. But even before that, relations between the retailer and the
publisher have been tense. Hachette made the case to Washington regulators in
2009 that Amazon was having a detrimental effect on publishing, but got
nowhere.
For several months, Amazon has been quietly discouraging
the sales of Hachette’s physical books by several techniques — cutting the
customer’s discount so the book approached list price, taking weeks to ship the
book, suggesting that prospective customers buy other books instead and
increasing the discount for the Kindle version.
Amazon has millions of members in its Prime club, who get
fast shipping. This was, as Internet wits quickly called it, the “UnPrime”
approach.
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