The Kindle debates: The search algorithm issue, sex and book cover vanity, and the K machine’s threat to book ads

By David Rothman

Three pesky Kindle issues, unrelated, show up in TeleRead today.

• Issue One: Is Amazon skewing search results to favor itself and the Kindle over nonVIP authors and small publishers? Will self-published writers and tiny presses even suffer heavily at times if they do offer Kindle books? Is Amazon discriminating against paper editions on occasion to push the K machine and related titles?
• Issue Two: Is the Kindle putting literary novels and even lit-minded daters at an unfair disadvantage? Without the usual cover visible to all, fellow strap-hangers can’t see that the romance-minded are reading Jane Austen rather than James Patterson.
• Issue Three: Is Amazon shafting its affiliates not just by cutting out payments in some cases, but just by playing up the Kindle? Will the K machine’s built-in shopping capabilities reduce the need for ads on affiliated Web sites? And what about ad outlets in general, including daily newspapers, which have given the Kindle an avalanche of free publicity with virtually no attention paid to the troublesome DRM and standards issues?

Issue one: Is Amazon skewing searches against nonVIP authors and small publishers?

Does Amazon will favor big boys over the rest—especially in stealthy or hard-to-spot ways? And along the way, is it boosting the Kindle at times at the expense of authors and small publishers? Here’s one reason why I’m curious.

Just for the fun of it, go to Amazon.com and search for Solomon Scandals within All Departments. You’ll find only mention of the $4.76 Kindle edition of The Solomon Scandals, not the trade paperback edition of my Washington newspaper novel, now priced at $12.71 on Amazon. At least that’s the situation as I write this at 1:10 p.m. on April 26, 2009.

Within the Books limiter, if you skip the “The,” Amazon promotes the Kindle edition with mention of the paperback only in small type (see partial screenshot above).  Add “The” to the title within All Departments, not Books, and the paperback will appear the way it should, as a second, separately listed item. Use quote marks around The Solomon Scandals within All Departments, and you’ll directly see only mention of the Kindle edition. Meanwhile in many if not most situations, I’m missing out on the potential paperback buyers who think it’s enough to type just Solomon Scandals or who put quotes around the title, with or without the “The.”

Accidental or deliberate? I don’t know—except that this sucks

So here’s the issue. Is Amazon deliberately steering people to the Kindle edition because it thinks it can optimize its own revenue over the long term or short term, or is this just a little accident with my particular book? I don’t know and am not accusing Jeff Bezos and colleagues of singling out me in particular. Furthermore, I suspect that Amazon’s internal revenue maximization would be the main reason for deliberately skewed searches, if they exist—not the Kindle per se. And, yes, I know that Amazon has a legal obligation to serve shareholders.

Just the same, given that many paper bookstores are watching Amazon, according to independent marketing expert Steve Weber, I’d prefer that all relevant searches reveal both the E and P editions as separate items under all circumstances. The main Barnes and Noble site can make its Scandals listing come up with or without the “The” or the quote marks; why can’t Jeff’s techno-whizzes at Amazon address that shortcoming and others? I doubt that the reason has that much to do with the fact that B&N sells only a paper edition. Amazon either goofed or is filling its coffers at my expense.

While we’re at it, how about Amazon’s search results for The Rules of the Game, former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr.’s newspaper novel which, unlike mine from Twilight Times Books, is published by a large publisher, Random House—in both paperback and Kindle format, and with a much-bigger promotional budget? Even without the “The,” it comes out within All Departments as well as Books, and quote marks won’t make the paper edition invisible. And guess what? For whatever the reason—maybe because Amazon sees the paper edition as the biggest revenue source—Amazon tends to play up Len Downie’s hardback rather than the Kindle edition.

Now back to the possibility of “deliberate.” Steve Windwalker has written of “the need to address a bizarre, uncharacteristic, unethical and legally questionable approach to Kindle content promotion and publishing platform support, in which Kindle staff have shown a bias toward mainstream publishers while failing to provide even rudimentary support for independent authors and publishers, and may, if other reports are to be believed, be employing the kind of two-tier royalty approach that could eventually lead to federal scrutiny.” Pretty strong stuff, and I take it seriously because it’s coming from Steve. I’d love to know what Steve thinks of my current experiences with The Solomon Scandals.

Books vs. washing machines: Amazon’s interests at odds with writers’ and publishers’?

Examples like the above show, if nothing else, the potential of Amazon’s interests to clash with those of publishers and writers. I just wonder what under-the-hood skews might be happening without my even knowing about them. If consumers don’t know about Amazon’s possible hidden biases, could this be even be FTC fodder (just like the DRM disclosure issue, potentially)?

Also, what happens if or when Amazon becomes more aggressive in using books listings to promote nonbook products? Will a mediocre novel get more play than a good one, because the related listing will sell more washing machines?

I’d welcome thoughts from others on Amazon’s search. What’s going on, or not going on?

Issue Two: Will the Kindle hurt literary novels because snobs can’t see the covers?

Snobbery and romance, in a lit context, are nothing new to readers of the New York Times or of the TeleBlog. What’s more, Sara Nelson (photo), former Publishers Weekly editor, addressed the topic in So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading.

Now the Times’ Joanne Kaufman has revisited the issue in With the Kindle, Can You Tell If It’s Proust?

No evil Amazon conspiracies found here. But I do wonder if, yes, this could hurt sales of literary novels that depend on the snobbery factor.

What’s “literary,” however? That’s tricky. Accurately or not, I recall reading that Mencken shrugged off The Great Gatsby as simply a novel of the season, nothing more.

Furthermore, maybe it’s good to diminish the snobbery factor as a way of meeting people—Sara Nelson married a nonbook lover, which in a way reflects well on her since, in that respect, she wasn’t depending on the other person’s glow.

For people, however, who do think you can tell a “book” by its cover, maybe a future version of the Kindle can come with a little E Ink panel you can pop up on the subway to show people the cover. Or more likely, how about a way to identify and communicate with fellow e-book users in the geographical vicinity, after ascertaining what they’re reading and in fact what’s in their libraries? Notice I said “fellow e-book users”? I’d love for there to be meet-up standards for libraries on all machines. Hello, IDPF or the ePub-Interop list? For once, can you beat Amazon to the punch on this one?

Issue Three: What about Amazon’s treatment of affiliates? And the Kindle’s long-term effect on newspaper book sections?

“As of May 1, 2009,” reports Marketing VOX, echoing the news elsewhere, “web retail giant Amazon will cease paying referral fees to Associates that use pay-per-click programs on search engines to send traffic to amazon.com, amazon.ca or endless.com.” Is that unfair or just thrifty, especially considering that Google, a partial rival of Amazon, is benefitting from some revenue here (disclosure: I’m a very very small Google shareholder, for retirement purposes)? Offhand, I’d side with Amazon.

But wait. There’s also another issue, which some have raised. The Kindle itself is a shopping device and will become increasingly more of one as its interactivity grows easier to use and more powerful. You can bet that Amazon will leverage user reviews to the max.

So as books shift from P to E, where does that leave outside, ad-dependent sites if the Kindle gains in popularity? Will Kindle ads, not book ads, be the key here? And what does this mean for books in general if it makes less sense for independent sites to feature ads for them? Here at the TeleBlog we’ve been steadily running an ad for All the King’s Men, one of my favorite novels, but you can bet that Kindle-related advertising makes far, far more business sense.

The issue extends beyond affiliates, as others have noted. If the move to E continues and a higher and higher percentage of all book promotion happens within the Kindle, what will this mean long term for the ad revenue of the few remaining book sections in American newspapers? E-books contribute just a fraction of total book revenue. But this could rapidly change once a tipping point is reached.

What’s more, in-Kindle advertising could harm book-related sites such as The Millions, which has broached the issue, among others, in a thoughtful series to which April Hamilton’s Publetariet pointed.

A well-deserved Amazon tilt—in the TeleBlog itself: We generally link book titles to Amazon listings because they include review snippets and reader comments. Amazon has more information in one convenient place than others do, an opinion apparently also shared by The Millions. If Google or others can package as well, then we’ll link there. We try to place readers’ interests ahead of anything else.