5,000 Kindle titles shut down by Amazon in pricing dispute

[DiapDealer]

Bigger is always eviller, innit?

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by TechnoCat

What's with the antagonism towards Amazon? They have many thousands of free ebooks, and tens of thousands of commercial ones. Ten years ago there wasn't a single one of you who would go into Borders, Crown, Barnes & Noble, etc. looking for books and because you couldn't find one specific line of books, decided the store was evil. They only carry a limited number...

• What is being pushed/advertised heavily by the publisher (free promotion)
• What did they get a big buy on?
• What do they have an exclusive to?
• What is selling? Which excludes book 1 (or possibly book 3 even) of that series you're reading)

Out of a smallish selection of books, you come away with 3 or more anyhow, even if that one you always look for still isn't there.

So now IPG is not giving Amazon terms they want... but they feel entitled to be sold by Amazon? How much of that back-catalog is carried in-print at your neighboorhood bricks-and-mortar store? Or in the shlock-section of your grocery?

Amazon does not have a monopoly on paper book sales. They don't have a monopoly on ebook devices, or on ebook sales to other devices. B&N protects the Nook market as Amazon protects the Kindle market. And yet it's Amazon the ire is towards? I don't get it.

Yes. Because Amazon is helping (the most) to make ebooks worse for people who don't buy into their system. If I wanted a book before, I just had to order it (being from a small town, I never got instant gratification). Now, that can't be done because AMAZON has signed so many exclusive contracts.

These types of "you can't be sold anywhere else but here" contracts are very new to the book world. So Amazon gets my ire.

[rhadin]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Bigger is always eviller, innit?

Not always but often enough that size warrants watching. Certainly unregulated monopoly is always eviller

[anamardoll]

This makes me uncomfortable. I'm reminded of Walmart essentially bullying a lot of vendors into unfavorable contracts. That only helps the consumer in the short term, and -- in this case -- certainly not the authors.

I do wish we knew the details.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

This makes me uncomfortable. I'm reminded of Walmart essentially bullying a lot of vendors into unfavorable contracts. That only helps the consumer in the short term, and -- in this case -- certainly not the authors.

I do wish we knew the details.

Are you speaking of the books and magazines that are sold in Wal-Mart?

Perhaps that accounts for the (=ahem=) excellent selection of reading material in their stores.

[anamardoll]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

Are you speaking of the books and magazines that are sold in Wal-Mart?

Perhaps that accounts for the (=ahem=) excellent selection of reading material in their stores.

That too, but there's a long and controversial history of Walmart using their market share to push vendors into favorable terms.

Somewhere between "honest negotiation" and "using a market position of power to bully someone" is a gray area that I wish we had better legal guidance on.

[Prestidigitweeze]

Increasingly, we rely on huge booksellers for independent content, telling ourselves that unwanted books are weeded out by customers' purchasing decisions rather than perfectly good books being excluded by theirs. The problem seems twofold: their monopolization of content distribution and exposure and our laziness in seeking out more obscure content.

One issue might be that we're too comfortable with stores and search engines being one and the same. We want to find, purchase and download ebooks as easily as possible, but we still don't have an inclusive, well-organized and efficient shopping search engine just for ebooks. Yes, there are small-scale sites that attempt sprawling metasearches, but they tend to become unwieldy and obscure. There's nothing on the level of, say, a Google shopping engine tailored specifically to books (since, unfortunately, Google opted to become yet another vendor and even their ebook store is terribly organized: search for an obscure author with a common name and you'll see what I mean).

For customers not to become dependent on specific vendors for content, they need a comparison-shopping engine that can be set by format and which doesn't simply apply to a few sites of like description, and which can separate groups of results under title and author names. I'd love it if a less-common search engine unburdened by ads and tracking (like ixquick) were the first to provide that service with an ease that rivaled Amazon's.

Since ebooks have become popular enough to deserve their own (non-exclusive) pages on major search engines, it might be time to stop seeing Amazon as more attractive than other booksellers simply because their searches and purchasing process are easier. Then monopolies might monopolize less and diverse content become more available to everyone -- even us at our laziest.

[Edit: My use of the word we is intended not to refer to Mobile Read members but rather all consumers who might buy ebooks. Yes, of course our members tend to be aware of better options (or become more aware over time).]

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Prestidigitweeze

Increasingly, we rely on huge booksellers for independent content, telling ourselves that unwanted books are weeded out by customers' purchasing decisions rather than perfectly good books being excluded by theirs. The problem seems twofold: their monopolization of content distribution and exposure and our laziness in seeking out more obscure content.

Customer laziness (for lack of a better word) is a given. It's also one of the attractions of e-books - we can go shopping whenever we want without leaving the house.

One issue might be that we're too comfortable with stores and search engines being one and the same. We want to find, purchase and download ebooks as easily as possible, but we still don't have an inclusive, well-organized and efficient shopping search engine just for ebooks. Yes, there are small-scale sites that attempt sprawling metasearches, but they tend to become unwieldy and obscure. There's nothing on the level of, say, a Google shopping engine tailored specifically to books (since, unfortunately, Google opted to become yet another vendor and even their ebook store is terribly organized: search for an obscure author with a common name and you'll see what I mean).

For customers not to become dependent on specific vendors for content, they need a comparison-shopping engine that can be set by format and which doesn't simply apply to a few sites of like description, and which can separate groups of results under title and author names. I'd love it if a less-common search engine unburdened by ads and tracking (like ixquick) were the first to provide that service with an ease that rivaled Amazon's.

The problem with a neutral, ad-free, non-tracking search engine is that you can't really monetize it. Meaning that - no matter how it starts out - it will end up less and less useful as it fails to keep up with search engines that have revenue.

Since ebooks have become popular enough to deserve their own (non-exclusive) pages on major search engines, it might be time to stop seeing Amazon as more attractive than other booksellers simply because their searches and purchasing process are easier. Then monopolies might monopolize less and diverse content become more available to everyone -- even us at our laziest.

The problem with this is that Amazon *is* more attractive because its searching and purchasing processes are easier. You might as well say that we should stop seeing Walmart as cheaper than other retailers simply because they charge less money for their products.

All of which is to say that the only way to beat Amazon will be to outcompete Amazon in some way. Which won't be easy - Amazon would be even further ahead of the major US e-book sites if they weren't being propped up by the agency model (so that Amazon wouldn't be superior in search, purchasing, *and* cost).

But as you touched on in your post, there are gaps that need to be filled in the e-book realm. When Google beat out Yahoo and Altavista for search, its primary weapon was the fact that its search results were much better. I remember being really surprised that whatever I was searching for tended to be in the first 2 or 3 links on Google; on Yahoo it would be on like the the 3d page. What I think the e-book realm really needs is a good recommendation engine. I'm not sure that something like that is really possible - but a really smart recommendation engine that succeeded in reliably introducing me to authors I hadn't considered before but would really like is something that would be extremely valuable to me.

"Because you like 'The Golden Ass' and 'The Killing Floor,' we think you'll like 'Appointment in Samarra'".

Of course, the recommendation has to be right...

[Prestidigitweeze]

Unfortunately, I'm sitting at a laptop with a dodgy trackpad and feel unwilling to trust that whatever I write will be immediately editable. Consider this placemark for a later response on a more reliable computer.

[TechnoCat]

Originally Posted by anamardoll

This makes me uncomfortable. I'm reminded of Walmart essentially bullying a lot of vendors into unfavorable contracts. That only helps the consumer in the short term, and -- in this case -- certainly not the authors.

But is it really Amazon's responsibility to help the authors? And besides, they are helped by listing on Amazon; if you look back 50 years, it was much harder to make it as a writer. Not that it's easy now, but at least you can more easily get disseminated and read.

I've run into several articles by authors stating that they made more going Amazon-only than by using all the other channels at once... and they were frustrated by this... but part of it is clearly that Amazon has greater reason to market exclusives. I think I've run into just one article where the author decided Amazon was the less profitable path.

[TimW]

IPG books return to Amazon. It would be interesting to know the new terms.

[SeaKing]

Originally Posted by TechnoCat

What's with the antagonism towards Amazon? They have many thousands of free ebooks, and tens of thousands of commercial ones. Ten years ago there wasn't a single one of you who would go into Borders, Crown, Barnes & Noble, etc. looking for books and because you couldn't find one specific line of books, decided the store was evil. They only carry a limited number...

• What is being pushed/advertised heavily by the publisher (free promotion)
• What did they get a big buy on?
• What do they have an exclusive to?
• What is selling? Which excludes book 1 (or possibly book 3 even) of that series you're reading)

Out of a smallish selection of books, you come away with 3 or more anyhow, even if that one you always look for still isn't there.

So now IPG is not giving Amazon terms they want... but they feel entitled to be sold by Amazon? How much of that back-catalog is carried in-print at your neighboorhood bricks-and-mortar store? Or in the shlock-section of your grocery?

Amazon does not have a monopoly on paper book sales. They don't have a monopoly on ebook devices, or on ebook sales to other devices. B&N protects the Nook market as Amazon protects the Kindle market. And yet it's Amazon the ire is towards? I don't get it.

Like the Don said.

"It's business, nothing personal."

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by TechnoCat

What's with the antagonism towards Amazon?

Jealousy and BPH fear that the cosy non-evolving monopoly they controlled is about to end.

[stonetools]

Originally Posted by TimW

IPG books return to Amazon. It would be interesting to know the new terms.

Unconditional surrender most likely. IPG just didn't have any leverage on Amazon the way MacMillan did , and they were losing money every day their books weren't on Amazon.
Yet another reason why publishers are going to cultivate sales channels other than Amazon.

[hn333]

Did any one miss these books? I didn't.