benjipwns
Banned
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119769/amazons-monopoly-must-be-broken-radical-plan-tech-giant
We have met the enemy and it is us wanting more people to get more goods for their money in two days or less.
Put me through multi-billion dollar legal proceedings if old.
To justify this approach with publishers, Amazon portrays them as deserving of rough treatment. One ex-Amazon employee told The New Yorker’s George Packer that the company views publishers as “antediluvian losers with rotary phones and inventory systems designed in 1968 and a warehouse full of crap.” In the mid-2000s, the company famously launched an initiative called the Gazelle Project to extract better terms from small publishers. Its moniker was derived from a Bezos suggestion that his team pursue its prey as a cheetah tracks a “sickly gazelle.” (Lawyers a bit more sensitive to antitrust laws renamed it the “Small Publisher Negotiation Program.”Or as one executive charged with dealing with the book industry confessed to the reporter Brad Stone, “I did everything I could to screw with their performance.”
In their desperation, publishers have tried various gambits to alter this dynamic. They have attempted to fight size with size—a misbegotten notion that led them to collude with Apple in blatant violation of price-fixing laws. And in the same spirit, they have accelerated the old tendency to seek safety in mergers. Just last year, Random House joined Penguin to form a mega-house, which controls 25 percent of the book business, in the dim hope that this new brawn would insulate them from Amazon’s harshest demands. But even a giant corporation ultimately has to bend to the will of their big buyer. That’s been the iron law of Walmart, which imposes its terms on the largest corporations in the world. As the New America Foundation’s Barry Lynn has described, “Walmart ... has told Coca-Cola what artificial sweetener to use in a diet soda, it has told Disney what scenes to cut from a DVD, it has told Levi’s what grade of cotton to use in its jeans, and it has told lawn mower makers what grade of steel to buy.”
So, no matter how large they grow, publishers will continue to strip away costs to satisfy Amazon. And more attention will fall on a strange inefficiency at the heart of the business: the advances that publishing houses pay their writers. ]This upfront money is the economic pillar on which quality books rest, the great bulwark against dilettantism. Advances make it financially viable for a writer to commit years of work to a project.
But no bank or investor in its right mind would extend that kind of credit to an author, save perhaps Stephen King. Which means that it won’t take much for this anomalous ecosystem to collapse. Amazon might decide that it can only generate enough revenue by further transforming the e-book market—and it might try to drive sales by deflating Salman Rushdie and Jennifer Egan novels to the price of a Diet Coke. Or it can continue to prod the publishing houses to change their models, until they submit. Either way, the culture will suffer the inevitable consequences of monopoly—less variety of products and lower quality of the remaining ones. This is depressing enough to ponder when it comes to the fate of lawn mower blades.
We have met the enemy and it is us wanting more people to get more goods for their money in two days or less.
Put me through multi-billion dollar legal proceedings if old.
