Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according to two industry executives with direct knowledge the discussions. NYTimes
Look, I know it looks like a good thing for you. Amazon wants to sell you ebooks for $9.99 (default price) no matter what the physical book costs, and they want to do it the day the hardcover comes available.
Except–Amazon wants to sell you ebooks for $9.99 no matter what the physical book costs. They want to dictate to the publishers what they will sell and when.
You know how books work. The hardcover comes out, and it’s shiny and expensive and you have a choice. Pay for the hardcover, or wait for the paperback. You could even wait longer, and find a used paperback for a couple bucks. If you buy the hardcover, my friends, you are not paying for the fancy book. That’s just sweetener. What you are paying for is the right to read the book now, when it’s hot. Like the thrill of seeing a movie opening weekend, though you know the movie theater will be packed, people will be annoying, and parking will be awful–not to mention that you’ll pay four times what you would if you waited for the cheap theaters.
Publishers, for some odd reason, don’t want to undercut their own profit margins just to help Amazon sell more Kindles. But Amazon, you see, is a big bully.
Amazon removed buy buttons from thousands of books, giving writers a giant sucker punch recently, in their battle with MacMillan.
Amazon ‘delisted’ thousands of GLBT books through a “simple error” by a low-level employee in another country. The only GLBT-relevant books left behind were the anti-gay ones.
Amazon reached into Kindles and deleted ebooks it had no right to sell, without warning or even comment–though they had already broken the law, and deleting them didn’t change that.
Amazon has a limit on how many times you can download an ebook–and they don’t tell you that.
If Amazon decides you have become too much of a pain, say by returning one too many physical books you ordered, they can de-activate your account and your expensive Kindle becomes a paperweight.
Amazon wants to sell you anything you need, but they want to decide what you’ll pay for it, and they want to decide what you need. They built Kindles with the ability to delete books remotely, and to turn off the text-to-speech function and to do who knows what else.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust them or anyone else with that kind of power over me.
The only time I buy from Amazon anymore is when I find something cheap on the marketplace. I’m not sure what kind of profit they make off of that, but when I’m buying books for less than a dollar and they have to pay their sellers, it can’t be much.
I don’t agree with a lot of Amazon’s practices, but unfortunately they are the biggest supplier out there. For me, buying from the marketplace is a way of sticking it to the man. What am I supposed to do if they’re the ONLY resource for getting a book I need?
I hate double-edged swords.
I know! I hate it because they’re my source for music–ironically enough because they don’t pull the DRM horseshit with the music. If iTunes had been first out there with ebooks, Amazon would probably be DRM-free to compete, and that would be marginally better.
Powells.com is a great place to buy books, for the record, though they are rarely as cheap as Amazon. Every time Amazon has a big #fail, though, Powells has a sale. XD