How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
Source: How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
Category Archives: Amazon
How Amazon’s crackdown on scammers is impacting indie authors
Amazon Killed the Bookstore. So It’s Opening a Bookstore
Store opening in University Village in Seattle, WA. Twenty years after Amazon started selling books online.
by Issie Lapowsky
Source: http://www.wired.com/2015/11/amazon-killed-the-bookstore-so-its-opening-a-bookstore/
Bookstore owners already loathe Amazon for gutting the cost of books online and driving so many brick and mortar shops out of business. Now, the online retailer is both beating them and joining them, with the opening of its first physical bookstore today in Seattle.
Amazon Books, as the new store is called, will be like any other Main Street bookstore (remember those?), except that Amazon will use the troves of data it collects from its online customers to stock the shelves. That means its book displays will feature real Amazon book reviews, and the store will showcase books that have amassed the most pre-orders online. The books will also come with Amazon’s trademark low price tags.
It can afford those cut-rate prices, of course, because Amazon Books is as much a bookstore as it is a billboard. Amazon’s not suddenly betting big on the bookstore business, and it certainly doesn’t need the store to be a success in order for Amazon to succeed. It’s better to think of Amazon Books as a giant advertisement. If it makes a little extra money for a $294.7 billion company, all the better.
The one silver lining for the book enthusiasts forced to watch their industry turn into a gimmick is that, according to the Seattle Times, Amazon is hiring from other retail stores and libraries that may be struggling. Well, silver lining for those hoping for Seattle-area book store jobs. For Seattle-area book store employers, it’s probably not pleasant watching their employees get poached.
For now, Amazon says the store won’t be serving double duty as a warehouse or pickup center, and the vice president of Amazon Books, Jennifer Cast, tells the Seattle Times the company doesn’t yet have plans to open a second location. “We’re completely focused on this bookstore,” Cast said. “We hope this is not our only one. But we’ll see.”
Additional article: http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-opens-first-bricks-and-mortar-bookstore-at-u-village/
SJ ROZAN: Russo’s Open Letter
2014-07-13 11:48 AM
Open letter from Richard Russo on Amazon vs. Hachette
Richard Russo is President of the Author’s Guild. This is long but, if you’re wondering what’s going on, worth reading. I’d like to say he took the words right out of my mouth, but he uses better words.
“The primary mission of the Authors Guild has always been the defense of the writing life. While it may be true that there are new opportunities and platforms for writers in the digital age, only the willfully blind refuse to acknowledge that authorship is imperiled on many fronts. True, not all writers are equally impacted. Some authors still make fortunes through traditional publishing, and genre writers (both traditionally published and independently published) appear to be doing better than writers of nonfiction and “literary” mid-list fiction. (The Guild has members in all of these categories.) But there’s evidence, both statistical and anecdotal, that as a species we are significantly endangered. In the UK, for instance, the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society reports that authors’ incomes have fallen 29 percent since 2005, a decline they deem “shocking.” If a similar study were done in the U.S., the results would be, we believe, all too similar.
“On Tuesday, Amazon made an offer to Hachette Book Group that would “take authors out of the middle” of their ongoing dispute by offering Hachette authors windfall royalties on e-books until the dispute between the companies is resolved. While Amazon claims to be concerned about the fate of mid-list and debut authors, we believe their offer – the majority of which Hachette would essentially fund – is highly disingenuous. For one thing, it’s impossible to remove authors from the middle of the dispute. We write the books they’re fighting over. And because it is the writing life itself we seek to defend, we’re not interested in a short-term windfall to some of the writers we represent. What we care about is a healthy ecosystem where all writers, both traditionally and independently published, can thrive. We believe that ecosystem should be as diverse as possible, containing traditional big publishers, smaller publishers, Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble and independent bookstores, as well as both e-books and print books. We believe that such an ecosystem cannot exist while entities within it are committed to the eradication of other entities.
To read the rest, go to: http://journalscape.com/sjrozan/2014-07-13-11:48/
Filed under Amazon, publishing
Publishing Vs. Amazon: A Play in Five Acts – Insatiable Booksluts
Another view of the Amazon vs. Publishers battle
Publishing Vs. Amazon: A Play in Five Acts – Insatiable Booksluts.
Act I:
Amazon: Hey Publishing, we just invented a new thing that we think you’ll like. You know how after you make a book you have to pay a buttload of money to get it all printed and shipped and stuff? We figured out a way that you could not have to pay all that money and still sell lots of books.
Publishing: OMG NO WHAT IS THIS WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO DESTROY PUBLISHING
Customers: Hey! These ebooks are pretty cool! I can carry a bunch with me all the time and it sucks less when I have to move!
Publishing: NO THEY ARE NOT COOL, PAPER BOOKS FOREVER, WE KNOW YOU JUST WANT TO STEAL OUR CONTENT OFF OF THE INTERNETS. CAN WE TRIPLE THE DRMs PLEASE
Customers: ……
Act II:
Amazon: Hey Publishing, we want to buy a buttload of books from you and we aren’t even going to return a bunch of unsold books like other bookstores do, and in return do you think you could give us a good deal since you’re going to make a lot of money? And also because like, every other industry that we work with works with us at a wholesale discount since we spend so much money with them and all.
Publishing: OMG NO WE DO NOT WANT TO SELL YOU A BUTTLOAD OF BOOKS WE HATE YOU. WHY ARE YOU TRYING TO DESTROY PUBLISHING
Amazon: Hey just FYI we are also going to publish some books by people because we think it looks like a neat business to get into. Competition is awesome right? I mean, it’s mostly celebrities and authors that are doing all the work themselves anyway.
Publishing: YOU ARE MURDERING US TO DEATH STAHP. NOBODY SHOULD BUY BOOKS PUBLISHED BY AMAZON BECAUSE ONLY WE ARE ALLOWED TO PUBLISH.
Bookstores: We hate Amazon too because nobody else should be allowed to sell books, especially if customers like going to them better. We will not sell Amazon’s books even if customers want to read them.
Publishing: YEAH WE HATE YOU AMAZON
Bookstores: Do you still love us, Publishing? We promise that we will only sell paper books and not any from Amazon.
Publishing: YEAH YOU ARE MY BOO.
Act III:
Amazon: Hey Publishing, since it only costs you like a fraction of a percent actually to
For the rest of the play go to: http://insatiablebooksluts.com/2014/06/27/publishing-vs-amazon-play/
Filed under Amazon, publishing
Amazon Is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – The Daily Beast
Amazon Is NOT the Vladimir Putin of the Publishing World – The Daily Beast.
by Nick Gillespie
In its battle with Hachette, Amazon is being compared to Putin and the Mafia—by critics who want you to pay more for books.
Can you believe those…those…those…sons of bitches at Amazon? After launching almost 20 years ago and making virtually every book—new, used, dead-tree, electronic, audio, and I’m guessing any day now, olfactory—available to everyone in America at good-to-great prices, the company’s true character now stands revealed. It’s not pretty, folks. Despite a huge market share, Amazon apparently still wants books, especially the e-books that everyone agrees are the future of the medium, to be cheaper than what publishers and big-name authors want you to pay for them.
Just who the hell does Amazon think it is? Maybe a bare-chested tyrant who used to work for the KGB? Amazon is “like Vladimir Putin mobilizing his troops along the Ukrainian border,” a proprietor of an “e-book discovery site” tells The New York Times. “A bully,” offers Richard Russo, the novelist and president of the Authors Guild (which knows exactly how to bully mere “writers”). Amazon, says author James Patterson, who published 13 detective books last year, is waging “war” and doing unspeakable things for which “the quality of American literature will suffer.” No, wait. That’s all wrong. Amazon isn’t like a Russian despot waging a war, says Dennis Loy, proprietor of the small publisher Melville House. It’s more like “the Mafia.”
Filed under Amazon, book publishing, publishing
Stephen Colbert Gives Jeff Bezos the Finger — Twice
Stephen Colbert Gives Jeff Bezos the Finger — Twice.
Amazon is messing with the wrong guy.
A few days after best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell came out against the online retailer for raising prices and delaying shipments of his books because of a dispute with publisher Hachette, Colbert has done the same. Colbert’s plaint, however, is funnier.
During a segment on Wednesday night’s Colbert Report, Colbert announced he was “mad prime” at Amazon for its latest actions. In particular, Colbert mocked Amazon’s suggestion that consumers in the market for his books should buy a used copy.
[Editor’s note: I think writer Sherman Alexie is correct. This is a battle between two big companies and the person(s) to support are the authors, who are getting smashed by both sides in this battle.]
Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/05/stephen-colbert-amazon/#:eyJzIjoiZiIsImkiOiJfbDN3ZHQ3eDIza3NsOXdmZCJ9
Filed under Amazon, book publishing, publishing
Booker's Blog 