Is there such a thing as “Amazon Rangement Syndrome” (no “de” in front of “rangement”)?
I’ve seen a couple fairly-high-profile posts lately questioning the idea that Amazon is bad for business. Not just grumbling author bloggers (though there have been some of those) but actual folks with academic or journalistic reputations.
For starters, here’s Simon Rowberry in The Conversation (reblogged here) discussing a research project into Amazon’s process of democratizing data about books. Amazon started out using the standard ISBN catalog from Bowkers, but as it became able to obtain more information about books than Bowkers had, it moved to its own “ASIN” identification number—and began making much of that information available to the public for the first time in the bookselling industry.
For the first time, users could access data about what publishers had recently released and basic information about forthcoming titles. Even if customers did not buy books from Amazon, they could still access the information. This change benefited publishers as readers who can quickly find information about new books are more likely to buy new books.
Rowberry has a related slide deck here, though there isn’t much information about the presentation itself. There’s also a list of Rowberry’s academic publications, many of which look potentially interesting, though you have to subscribe to a service to read them. Still, it’s interesting to see an actual scholar with citations coming right out and saying Amazon isn’t necessarily so bad after all.
Perhaps not as academically respectable but impressive nonetheless, The Observer has a look at the Authors United controversy concerning Amazon (via The Passive Voice), which points out that “while bestselling authors may not like 2015’s new normal, Jeff Bezos’ world is better for readers and writers en masse.”
The article points out that the number of new titles published per year has duodecupled since 2002—that is, increased by 12x from 250,000 to 3 million new book titles per year. Revenue has also grown “steadily, though not as dramatically,” which means that small presses and self-published authors are using the increase to cut into major publishers’ revenues. Which makes it…remarkably easy to see why bestselling authors would be upset, doesn’t it?
Authors United would have a point if they could show that Amazon had ever shut down a publisher because of the content of what it was publishing, but there’s no sign of that. In fact, Brad Stone’s book, The Everything Store, is up for sale on the site now, and it’s probably the most critical and widely read critique of the company to date.
Yet, Amazon is happy to sell it to you.
Basically, the people complaining about Amazon think their bread is buttered somewhere else. The funny thing is, most of the people who aren’t them seem to feel differently about it. Nice to see some of them speaking up
Bowker has been dreadful at least as far back as 1999, when I bought a block of 1,000 ISBN numbers from them. They’re a classic illustration for what happens to a company given a monopoly. I can give you a long list of how their “we don’t care, we don’t have to’ attitude makes working with them a pain. It’s so bad, I typically assign ISBNs to books without bothering to update their database. If you wonder where the really stupid COBOL programmers of the 1970s went after the arrival of the PC, the answer is Bowker.
To say that Amazon’s ASIN’s numbers offer advantages that Bowker’s ISBN’s don’t is roughly the equivalent of a paunchy 50-year-old comparing himself to a 400-pound couch potato, and saying, “Hey, in comparison to him, I’m in great shape.” Almost every tech company on the planet does what they do better than Bowker. In my corporate loathing list, Bowker sits alongside Comcast and for much the same reasons.
I’ll repeat this again and again until even the most dull-witted of Amazon fanboys wake up. Amazon is not your friend. Outside the narrow $2.99-9.99 price window, it pays you half what the iBookstore pays. And inside that window, it charges what I suspect is the most hideously bloated data fee on the planet aside from pricey satellite data. Although almost all of that data travels over Internet fiber, the fee is over three times what cellular companies charge for wireless data.
I’ll never understand people who idolize those who abuse and mistreat them. Abuse me, and you’re regret it, as one set of Manhattan lawyers discovered. Abuse these fanboys, and all they can say is “Please Amazon, can I have some more gruel.”
Paying only 35% on all ebooks outside the $2.99-9.99 price range is certainly serving tasteless gruel to authors. You need know no more about Amazon than that to know they’re not an author’s friend. All other chatter is pointless.