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Originally Posted by khalleron
Penguin's actions don't make any sense on the surface - there must be something we're missing.
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I think it's about Amazon and publishers becoming competitors:
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ETA: Per today's Publisher's Lunch (login required, though it's free):
Though OverDrive had promised in April that patrons' "confidential information will be protected," in implementation their program is an engine for turning library users into Amazon customers. The expectation was that OverDrive would serve Kindle-compatible files, but instead they send patrons directly to Amazon's site for processing. Some publishers believe this violates their contracts with both OverDrive and Amazon....
Despite those contractual and "security" issues, some publishers we spoke to this fall had concluded that, under the first sale doctrine, it would be hard to achieve any remedy on ebooks already purchased by libraries. Little did they know that they could "instruct" OverDrive to stop serving Kindle versions and that OverDrive would comply. If this holds, you might see other publishers issuing similar instructions soon.
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And I think this is making them angry, too.
from
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Amazon is lending one eBook per month to their Prime Kindle customers through the Kindle Owners' Lending Library. Similar to digital streaming of videos for Prime members on the Kindle Fire, Kindle owners who are also Prime members can borrow books from the "Kindle Owners' Lending Library" which appears as a menu option on the Kindle. Any book marked with a "Prime" logo is eligible for lending through the Kindle Lending Library.
The titles are only from certain publishers, not all, and Amazon customers can only borrow one book per month.
This is alarming for a few parties, including publishers, authors, and public libraries. This is basically a private lending library just for Kindle owners with Prime membership.
Publishers are frostily put out about this because, as the Publisher's Marketplace special bulletin read:
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As publishers and agents have started to realize with exasperation today, a number of titles in the Kindle Lending Library program--including some of the bestselling, prominently-promoted titles on the program's home page--are part of this new initiative without the consent or affirmative participation of the publishers and rightsholders. Not only that, but at least some come from companies that directly turned down Amazon's initial offer over the past few months to license a broad selection of backlist for a flat fee. Multiple participants were only told by Amazon yesterday (or found out themselves this morning) that this was happening. How could such a thing be possible, many people are wondering? Under most standard wholesale contracts with Amazon, as long the etailer pays the stipulated wholesale price for each download, there is nothing to prevent them choosing to give those titles away for free, under whatever additional rules they might designate. So Amazon pays the publisher the wholesale price each time a qualified Prime member "borrows" the ebook. Those will count as sales, because, well, they are sales, which will at least boost the "sales rank" of those titles at the site.
That explains why Amazon's press release specifically mentioned that "in some cases, Amazon is purchasing a title each time it is borrowed by a reader under standard wholesale terms as a no-risk trial to demonstrate to publishers the incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents." They weren't talking to consumers or the press; they were addressing publishers and authors.
Amazon spokesperson Sarah Gelman acknowledges that "for a minority of titles in the service, we added titles that we currently sell under wholesale terms, which we are purchasing in exactly the same fashion as when a customer buys a book a la carte from the store. It is essentially an Amazon-funded promotion, much the same as a Kindle Daily Deal or our long-standing 4-for-3 deal in children's books, where the author and publisher are compensated identically regardless of whether a book is purchased or borrowed."
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As of right now, publishers and agents are trying to decide what they can do about the Kindle Lending Library, because Amazon is paying for the books, then lending them for free.
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