Amazon rift — it’s a jumble out there
Writer Ursula K. Le Guin recently weighed in on Amazon’s dispute with publisher Hachette over e-book pricing. Referring to how Amazon is making Hachette books harder to buy on its site, she said, “We’re talking about censorship: deliberately making a book hard or impossible to get, ‘disappearing’ an author.”
Her statement was greeted with ridicule and outrage in the places on the Internet where those who use Amazon’s selfpublishing platform hang out. Here are a few of the more printable comments from the Passive Voice blog:
“She’s just mostly lying right there. That is all. LYING,” wrote Mir, an Amazon Kindle author.
“I’ve yet to see proof by anyone in Amazon/Hachette of any real active censorship, of making a book hard or impossible to get,” said the SF Reader.
Writers misled?
Hugh C. Howey, a sci-fi novelist, blamed Douglas Preston, the founder of a group of writers challenging Amazon, for misleading writers like Le Guin, who is the recipient of the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
“These authors signing these letters are being lied to,” Howey wrote. “Douglas Preston keeps using words like censorship, sanction, banning and boycott when no such thing is going on.”
Other commenters were considerably less polite.
In the digital era, it is very easy for a bookseller to put a virtual thumb on the scale but very hard for consumers to see exactly what is happening.
Craig Berman, Amazon’s vice president for global communications, said the company “has continued to sell all Hachette titles in print and digital despite our ongoing commercial dispute.”
But Amazon has made clear all along that its goal is to make Hachette’s physical books harder to get — delaying delivery time or eliminating discounts or refusing prepublication orders. “If you do need one of the affected titles quickly, we regret the inconvenience,” the retailer said in a statement in May. It went as far as to suggest shoppers go elsewhere.
Plunging sales by Hachette writers on Amazon indicate that the retailer’s tactics have discouraged potential customers.
A delay in shipping may not be censorship. But what if the book is hard or even impossible to find on Amazon, which sells nearly half the books in America? That seems to be what happened in August to Rep. Paul Ryan, one of Hachette’s most prominent authors.
The day after publication of “The Way Forward,” the host of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Andrew Ross Sorkin, told Ryan, “Very hard to buy your book, by the way, right now on Amazon.”
“I know,” a clearly frustrated Ryan answered. “Because that is what Amazon is doing with Hachette.”
Hard to find
A person close to Ryan, the 2012 Republican vice presidential candidate, said later that, “For a while, all you could see on Amazon was the audiobook.”
Berman directly challenged any suggestion that the book was impos- sible to buy. “Mr. Ryan’s book was available for purchase in print and digital formats at its publication date,” the spokesman wrote in an e-mail. He declined to elaborate.
Not long after Ryan’s appearance on CNBC, any problems with his book’s visibility ended. It started shipping without delays, in sharp contrast to many other Hachette books.
Don Meyer, a spokesman for Ryan, declined to comment.
Publishers other than Hachette also have issues with how Amazon sells their books.
When a reader goes looking for one title, sometimes it is simply straightforward marketing to try to offer him or her another book. “Peo- ple who liked this, also liked that” is a standard gimmick, on Amazon and everywhere else in the bookselling world. But what if the reader, looking for one author, is then offered novels by other writers in the same genre that are free? Does that qualify as an unfair thumb on the scale?
“It’s hard to compete with free,” said Laurann Dohner, a prolific and best-selling erotic romance writer who has been contending with that precise problem on Amazon.
Dohner is published by Ellora’s Cave, a pioneering e-book publisher that has experienced a general slowing of sales on Amazon, and is not sure why.
“You are probably aware of the quick, sharp decline of e-book sales via Amazon in recent months,” Patty Marks, chief executive of Ellora’s Cave, told its writers in late August in a letter that made its way online. “E.C. is not the only publisher experiencing this sudden decrease, and interestingly, we are not seeing the same drastic dip from other vendors.”
Marks added, “This is by no means meant to be a statement about Amazon.”
Plugging Dohner’s name into Amazon’s search engine returned the following list: two of her books, then two by other writers, another by Dohner, then three by others. Her e-books sell for $8 to $12. All of the other writers’ e-books are free.
She said she complained to Amazon. “They said they can’t tell me anything because my publisher is the one they deal with,” Dohner said. “Or I get told they don’t know. I feel like a participant in a game I didn’t sign up for.” Her sales on Amazon have fallen sharply.
Berman, the Amazon spokesman, said, “It has been business as usual for us with this publisher.” He declined to discuss Dohner’s specific situation.
The notion that Amazon hides books during contract disputes is not new. Randy Miller, a former Amazon executive, said in an interview in July that one of the most effective tactics was yanking books from promotional lists.
“If I pull you out of recommendations, customers aren’t going to see you at all,” Miller said.
This battle over books is also inevitably a battle over words. Howey, probably the most prominent advocate of Amazon, might argue that the company is not “banning” any books, but describes his own books as suppressed.
Feeling blacklisted
Independent bookstores, Howey told Publishers Weekly in August, “blacklist my books,” presumably because they are selfpublished through their enemy Amazon. Physical bookstores, he wrote on his blog, “ban Amazon imprint titles.”
If you can appropriate your opponent’s arguments, you must be halfway to victory. And for the people defending Amazon, just like the people attacking it, success will be measured on the bottom line.
“The anti-Amazon crowd is trying to get people to stop shopping on Amazon by painting it as evil,” commented a writer on the Passive Voice blog who goes by the name Nirmala. “This could directly harm my income.”