Save Us From Amazon.com

The New York Times is the finest newspaper in the U.S. I’m sort of a newshound and, given the economic crunch of today’s beleaguered print news industry, the Times is about the only major daily standing that provides the breadth and depth of reporting that can satisfy a newsaholic like myself. I read the paper cover to cover almost every day, which is exhausting given the scope of its coverage. And, sure, many are turned off by its liberal bias, but in this day and age, that bias seems to make more sense as the current conservative doctrine has pretty much run off the rails.

So this is a long-winded way of saying that every now and then this blog will feature an article from the Times. In this instance, the article is about how Amazon.com is abusing its market dominance to black mail Hatchette Books, a major New York publishing house.  As the article says:

 “The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.”

“In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons’s new novel, “The Girls of August,” coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition.”

This is SOP for Amazon, which will go to all lengths to bleed the competition and establish virtual monopolies. It has even affected my humble self-publishing enterprise. Try to find my book, One Page a Day on Amazon—no easy task.

The reason is that Amazon wants exclusivity from its self-published authors, something called Amazon KDP. By not distributing your book to other retail outlets, such as Apple, Barnes and Noble, Kobo, Smashwords, etc., your Amazon KDP book will be provided with various promotional support and will magically appear in more reader searches on the web site. 

By not granting exclusivity, your book is buried in Amazon’s search engine. (Have you found One Page a Day yet? Now try to find it at Barnes and Noble.) Since I opted for a wider distribution, my Amazon sales are minimal.

But this is about the article and the risk we run by letting organizations become a little too big and powerful. It’s okay that Amazon has a commanding market presence and offers great deals, but at what point does it become the only game in town—where it can set all the terms and conditions and thereby squeeze those providing creative content and limit the choice of its customers to the products and services willing to accede to Amazon’s hegemony and censorship protocols?

Omnipotent semi-monopolies have already conquered the cable TV and wireless telephone industries and consolidation is doing the same thing in the airline industry. I’m sure that’s Amazon’s desired endgame—it shouldn’t be ours.