Beware of Amazon

By Dou­glas Gibson

Most read­ers are aware that Ama­zon is becom­ing an increas­ing force in the book busi­ness. Very few are aware just how dom­i­nant it is becom­ing. In fact, the adjec­tive “dom­i­nat­ing” seems appro­pri­ate here. As in “bul­ly­ing”. Let me explain how this has affected me, as a Cana­dian author.

In Feb­ru­ary of this year Ama­zon was engaged in re-negotiating its terms with the IPG organ­i­sa­tion. IPG is a North Amer­i­can dis­trib­u­tor that han­dles scores of pub­lish­ers, most of them fairly small. Among them is my own (excel­lent) Cana­dian pub­lisher, ECW Press.

The “nego­ti­at­ing” con­sisted of Ama­zon stat­ing that they wanted a markedly increased dis­count, which would see both the pub­lish­ers involved and their authors lose close to a tenth of their rev­enue, includ­ing rev­enue from both books in print and in e-book form.

With the sup­port of the pub­lish­ers they serve, IPG protested. Then they learned about “nego­ti­at­ing” with Ama­zon. The gun-to-the-head Ama­zon style led to the threat that IPG had to agree to the pro­posed terms, or all of their e-book titles would be pulled off the Ama­zon site. That is pre­cisely what hap­pened in the mid­dle of Feb­ru­ary. And that is the sit­u­a­tion today.

There was gen­eral out­rage in the book­selling com­mu­nity, with some inde­pen­dents in the US mak­ing a point of stock­ing up on the titles by the affected pub­lish­ers. Some con­trib­u­tors to the debate in Pub­lish­ers Weekly used terms like “thug­gish” to describe Amazon’s behaviour.

But that, I sug­gest, is the whole point. Ama­zon, I believe, is delib­er­ately tar­get­ing these smaller fish “pour encour­ager les autres”. In other words, to scare the other, big­ger pub­lish­ers who will in due course find them­selves “nego­ti­at­ing “ with Ama­zon, and will do so in the knowl­edge that fail­ure to accept the dic­tated terms will result in their books being de-listed.

This, I believe, is part of a pat­tern, which sees Ama­zon get­ting big­ger and not bet­ter. Every book­seller is aware of the Ama­zon “show-rooming” tech­nique, where book buy­ers were encour­aged to use their local book­store as just that, a show­room. Ama­zon made it easy for cus­tomers in stores to com­pare elec­tron­i­cally the prices in the store with Amazon’s cheaper prices, with the expec­ta­tion that the store would be chal­lenged to match the lower price. A Book City man­ager in Toronto told me that he found him­self debat­ing this ques­tion with cus­tomers on three occa­sions, point­ing out that he and his col­leagues had jobs there, and that the store not only pro­vided a pleas­ant local amenity but paid local taxes. He won the debate two times out of three. Ama­zon has appar­ently stopped its “show-rooming” pro­gram, but the aggres­sive intent is crys­tal clear.

We saw it again on April 13 when the US Jus­tice Depart­ment sided with Ama­zon in their com­plaint that Apple had col­luded with a num­ber of major U.S. Pub­lish­ers to allow them to set the price of the e-books they pub­lished, with Apple tak­ing a set 30% dis­tri­b­u­tion fee. It was a sweep­ing vic­tory for Ama­zon, which was able to pose as the defender of lit­tle peo­ple who sim­ply wanted to get their e-books as cheaply as pos­si­ble. The New York Times quoted an indus­try observer as say­ing that if Ama­zon had been “the puppet-master” they could not have got­ten a bet­ter result.

Speak­ing about this deci­sion on behalf of Amer­i­can authors, Scott Turow lamented the fact that in defence of a fine the­ory that is intended to pre­vent monop­o­lies, the Jus­tice Depart­ment had just made a real monop­oly in the world of books much like­lier. He clearly was refer­ring to the increas­ing, dom­i­nat­ing power of Amazon.

It could get much worse. Ama­zon is acquir­ing edi­tors and pub­lish­ers to work for it, and, like a pizza deliv­ery com­pany acquir­ing tons of flour and cheese, this is caus­ing much com­ment. A cyn­i­cal pub­lish­ing friend tells me not to worry about this, with a dis­tant Cana­dian exam­ple. “Remem­ber when Coles started pub­lish­ing books? The dis­trib­u­tors always get out of the busi­ness of pro­duc­ing books from scratch when they find out how hard it is.” We shall see.

As for me, there are many other ways of get­ting Sto­ries About Sto­ry­tellers in e-book form with­out going through Ama­zon. But I had a cri­sis of con­science when I realised that I had accepted a role as a juror in the Ama­zon Canada First Novel Award, admin­is­tered by Quill & Quire. I ful­filled my duty as a judge (very impressed by the five nov­els that were final­ists, with The New World by David Bez­mozgis as the deserv­ing win­ner). In the end I accepted the reader’s fee from Quill & Quire, but refused the offer of a fur­ther gift from Ama­zon. This leaves me free to write warn­ing pieces like this.

After a 42-year career in Cana­dian book pub­lish­ing, Dou­glas Gib­son wrote book of mem­oirs, Sto­ries About Sto­ry­tellers: Pub­lish­ing Alice Munro, Robert­son Davies, Alis­tair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau, and Oth­ers (2011) which he has turned into a very suc­cess­ful conference/stage show. Dou­glas Gib­son is a for­mer CCA board member.

Dou­glas Gibson’s mem­oirs, STORIES ABOUT STORYTELLERS: Pub­lish­ing Alice Munro, Robert­son Davies, Alis­tair MacLeod, Pierre Trudeau and Oth­ers (Octo­ber 1, 2011, ECW Press) is avail­able at good book­stores and online retail­ers (Cloth edi­tion: ISBN 978–1-77041–068-8/ePub: 978–177090-049–3). For more infor­ma­tion check out the web­site www.douglasgibsonbooks.com

The views and opin­ions expressed herein are those of the author and do not nec­es­sar­ily reflect the views of the CCA. The CCA encour­ages open debate and a diver­sity of views.