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Originally Posted by Alfy
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Conspiracy to fix prices, yes. They handwave it away.
They handwave away that the reason Amazon has so much power over distribution is because the Manhattan gang has over the last 40 years concentrated their distribution into a handful of big accounts: B&N, Borders, Ingram, Baker&Taylor, Walmart, Costco... and Amazon.
Then, when Borders got into trouble through mismanagement and wanted to reorganize, the BPHs refused and forced thm into liquidation. They even refused to coooerate when prospective buyers tried to keep part of Borders alive. They thought the business would go to B&N, which was also shaky. Instead, 75% of th Borders business predictably went to Amazon . (Predictably: 75% of Borders's sites were within a mile of a B&N, so anybody shopping at Borders was doing it despite B&N being at hand. You'd expect them to still go elsewhere.)
The media handwaves away the exploitation of tradpub authors (many of whom are burning away their credibility with readers in joining the anti-Amazon screeds).
And the media handwaves away the fact that they have vested economic and political interests in the fight, all on the publishers side. Because they too are publishers, they too are facing hard times and potential extinction because of customers going to digital. And because the traditional, incestuous community they've built is crumbling.
Who owns S&S? CBS.
Who owns HC? News Corp.
How many reporters and columnists in the NYC media routinely supplement their income with cozy book deals with their friends from down the street? Easier to list those that don't.
Think they are going to tsk-tsk Hachette for picking a fight with no leverage?
Nope.
To the streets! Man the barricades!
Once upon a time NYC media controlled the facts the masses saw. "The paper of record", remember. They chose which presidents to cover for and which ones to vilify and bring down. Then the internet and Google and Wikioedia and what-not came along and people could find facts on their own, on demand and the power declined. They sued Google. And lost.
They consoled themselves they still had control over spin, their columns and pundits were the go-to authorities on how to interpret facts. Then the internet brought blogs and discussion forums and people learned to weigh opinions and make up their own minds, to see past spin and astroturf campaigns.
They consoled themselves that blogs were transitory and only online and that they controlled print and books which are permanent; they controlled history and literature! And the damned internet coughed up ebooks and, worse, made indie publishing respectable.
Suddenly, publishers (hachette, in fact) had to explain why they were relevant at all. And not doing a good job of it, either:
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2011/1...-hachette.html
Suddenly, books they and their buddies had sneered at were raking in money left and right and they had to pay unknowns millions to get a piece of the pie before people noticed they weren't indispensable. They found themselves rushing out me-too titles in genres they had no hand in defining. They found themselves reacting, out of control.
The Hachette amazon spat isn't the beginning of anything: it is the climax of a crisis 20 years in the making as the internet undercuts the power of the corporate media giants and they are, again, closing ranks and trying to spin the debate their way.
Everything the big media mafia says about Amazon they said about Google; everything they say about indie books, they said about blogs. In lockstep, as usual.
They just gave us this:
http://www.thebookseller.com/news/bo...ded-power.html
...and this:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/boo...rpreneurialism
Seriously, they are overplaying their hand. They're only making themselves look foolish once the dust settles and nothing significant changes.
They should have stayed quiet and not expose their own fear and loathing of the new world. Cause change is coming no matter what, regardless of what happens in the te a pot tempest of Hachette vs Amazon.