The Bookseller.com

3rd December 2008

Philip Jones is the managing editor of theBookseller.com. He will blog with links and comment about the book business.

Is Amazon the new Google?

07.04.08

Google is probably well-used to being the bete noir of the publishing business. For Amazon it is perhaps a new feeling. But if the past week is anything to go by it might just have to get used to it.

In the US, Amazon.com has incurred the wrath of print on demand publishers, the Authors Guild, the Small Publishers Association of North America, the Publishers Marketing Association, and--perhaps more bizarrely--the UK's YouWriteOn, after it told print on demand publishers to use its own print on demand printer BookSurge, rather than rivals  such as Lightning Source.

In the UK, as Publishing News and the Times reported, Amazon.co.uk has threatened publishers who sell books direct from their own websites at a discount to use the website price for its invoices: a unilateral move that even the PA said was probably illegal.

In France, meanwhile, the giant web retailer has been busy attempting to undermine a 25-year anti-discount law. Amazon founder and c.e.o. Bezos has even sent an email in French to customers asking them to sign a protest petition. If Amazon loses the case, "France will be the only country in the world where Amazon's free deliveries will be declared illegal," he declared.

Amazon's long-time aim has been to become the web's Wal-Mart. It has long-since surpassed this goal, but its PR rarely strays beyond the customer-oriented "Save Money. Live better" mantra pioneered by the huge American retailer.

As the Authors Guild pointed out, Amazon rolled out its customers in its defence of the BookSurge edict: "Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of environmental spin on the move, claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that's another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon. We, and many others, think something else is afoot."

As one observer told The Bookseller last week, the move could be "the thin end of the wedge". "Will they eventually say to HarperCollins for example 'We don't want your physical books anymore. Instead we will print them at our centres'? If you look at what they have done with eBooks, they are selling them in their own format. Where do you draw the line?"

According to the Authors Guild, Amazon wants to own the supply chain: once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the "long tail" of publishing -- the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator.

And it does not stop there: Amazon.com already has control over an increasingly credible e-book device: the world's largest global bookseller does not sell digital books for other devices, locking out competition from Sony or Microsoft. It also owns the dominant purveyor of digital book downloads.

Bloomsbury chief executive Nigel Newton slammed Google for wanting to become the world's book brain with its digitisation programme, or "literary land-grab" as Newton called it. But in flexing its muscles across the globe hasn't Amazon revealed its plan to become nothing less than the world's bookseller?

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