A corporate boxing match broke from the ring and swelled into all-out rumpus last weekend, as readers and authors took sides in Amazon and Hachette’s fight over the publishing industry’s future.
The dispute between the online retailer and the publishing conglomerate began this spring, and revolves around the pricing of ebooks and contract details for distributing Hachette’s books. Much of it remained private – as most contract negotiations between giant corporations do – until Amazon halted sales of some Hachette books, making some unavailable to purchase, delaying deliveries of others by weeks and months, and advertising alongside some titles with a banner of “similar items at a lower price”.
The corporate brawlers
As the primary seller of ebooks in the US – with about 65% of the market, according to the New Yorker – and a major share of publishers’ sales, Amazon’s aggressive tactics were meant to press Hachette in negotiations. Hachette, however, is no lightweight: the Paris-based multinational, with $7.37bn in 2012 net sales, has resisted, and the CEO of Hachette Book Group, Michael Pietsch, responded with a rare statement about the dispute.
Authors divided
Hachette authors, who include Donna Tartt, JK Rowling and Malcolm Gladwell, were initially reluctant to step into the fray, but became increasingly outspoken as some, such as James Patterson, began making public statements against Amazon. Then came the flood: more than 900 authors, only some of whom publish with Hachette and including many bestsellers across a range of genres, signed a full-page letter that ran in the New York Times denouncing Amazon for “harming the livelihood of the authors on whom it has built its business”. Their message to the Amazon: leave us out of it, and do right by your customers and the authors who provide you business.
But not all authors concur, with major names in self-publishing petitioning Hachette to find a compromise with Amazon. Barry Eisler, one of the novelists leading the petition, accuses the authors against Amazon of being “the top 1%” who “have no interest at all in improving publishing for everyone. Only in preserving it for themselves.” Self-publishing authors, often closed off from the publishing titans who compose an insular industry that’s strapped for resources, have an easily accessible platform in Amazon and opportunities for success there.
The dispute
Many have tried to frame the debate as one between tottering dinosaurs of publishing, allied with pampered authors, and the “disruptive” agents of progress like Amazon, creating opportunities for hungry writers; but publishers have survived past extinctions and have never pretended to be in it for authors, and Amazon, with its history of paying minimal taxes, muscling out competitors and arguably monopolistic tactics, is hardly a friend to authors or even customers.
The truth, as novelist John Scalzi has pointed out, is that this is a fracas in which everyone is in it for himself, herself and itself, despite any claims to the contrary.
Amazon wants to control the prices of ebooks – that ubiquitous $9.99 – and level the market, thus wrangling customers and better controlling the system at large. Hachette wants to set its own prices, scaling them depending on the author, release date, the book’s success, etc.
In “a message from the Amazon Books Team” sent last weekend, Amazon says Hachette is resisting the changing times, struggling with ebooks like publishers once struggled with paperbacks (ignoring that paperbacks have been around since Victorian times), and arguing that ebooks should be cheaper, considering production savings, and that books must be cheaper to compete with other products. Amazon also points out that Hachette has been implicated in illegal collusion over prices, a valid but somewhat disingenuous criticism considering Amazon is also under federal investigation and that Hachette’s past sin has no direct bearing on the current spat.
Curiously, the post also quotes George Orwell, partially and out of context, and responds to authors’ pleas by saying Hachette forced Amazon into its present tactics. Elsewhere, Amazon said Hachette should “stop using their authors as human shields”.
Pietsch, in turn, clarified how Hachette prices ebooks, and defends his company’s practices, saying: “We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all ebooks, and that all ebooks do not belong in the same $9.99 box.” Scalzi, who has a series of level-headed blogposts on the dispute, agrees, noting that different authors command different audiences and prices – and that Amazon makes a number of misleading claims, for instance that books can or should be commodified alongside vastly different products as “mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more”.
Pietsch calls Amazon out for “seeking a lot more profit and even more market share … Both Hachette and Amazon are big businesses and neither should claim a monopoly on enlightenment, but we do believe in a book industry where talent is respected and choice continues to be offered to the reading public.”
In short, he argues that that in a competitive market, Hachette’s editors and authors ought to earn more, as their talent and skills merit – and not be placed in the bargain bin alongside everything else. Amazon, for which books only compose a small percent of profits, argues that the only way books and authors can compete is by letting Amazon reshape the playing field.
Amazon has said authors should receive 35% of revenues for ebooks, but Scalzi points out that any benefit writers receive comes “secondarily, if at all” to Amazon’s much bigger goals of controlling the market. Walter Jon Williams notes that the standard contract language of Kindle Direct lets Amazon unilaterally change its agreement with a given author – hardly the terms of a negotiator with an author’s interests at heart.
Should each corporation be able to come to terms, authors could benefit and the market could even open up as Amazon and Hachette are forced to diversify and accept each others’ conditions. But as it looks now, authors and readers, the sometimes partisan civilians in a corporate contest, will continue to pay.
