Amazon The Monopoly

Re-post from March 28,2008

Trouble at Mill. Manufacturing of old had it that the mill owner owned the means of production and the mill workers toiled within an inch of their lives, lived in company barracks, spent scrip at the company store and if they had anything left they banked at the company bank. Amazon is a latter day mill owner. The company is attempting to tie their client/POD publishers to them to the exclusion of other relationships the client publishers may have through Amazon's web of administrative, financial, distribution and content tools. As a practical matter, it is becoming harder (and may be financially impossible for many small POD publishers) to maintain separate relationships with Amazon and all the rest of the publishing community.

The blog world is enraged at the moment over Amazon's new policy on POD. The company is effectively telling POD customers that if you want to sell your POD products via the Amazon store you need to be on our platform using our tools. If that means all your titles need to be converted then that's your problem. This is not a situation where these POD publishers can say 'I'll just go some place else'. Amazon has sucked them in because of all the wonderful tools they offer the publishers and of course the sales penetration. In announcing the Booksurge/ CreateSpace merge in August 2007, Amazon's senior v-p, North American retail, Jeff Wilke said, "The new CreateSpace Books on Demand service removes substantial economic barriers and makes it really easy for authors who want to self-publish their books and distribute them on Amazon.com." As it turns out this is true, but there are some significant caveats.

The Wall Street Journal was kind (and misleading) in its assessment of this Amazon initiative:

"Amazon.com Inc., flexing its muscles as a major book retailer, notified publishers who print books on demand that they will have to use its on-demand printing facilities if they want their books directly sold on Amazon's Web site. The move signals that Amazon is intent on using its position as the premier online bookseller to strengthen its presence in other phases of bookselling and manufacturing.

Amazon hasn't been merely a book retailer for some time. While many in the industry - PND included - can't help but have admiration for this company they have amassed a level of market influence across the publishing value chain that should concern everyone. Today, the issue is focused on a small (ardent and vocal) minority of POD publishers who's entire livelihood in many cases is dependent on the Amazon retail expanse. The WSJ should know better. Without being too dramatic, the release of Windows 3.1 heralded a period of intense exclusion at Microsoft: If you didn't play ball with them you essentially had no marketplace. Perhaps at first blush the publishing industry doesn't appear to have any correlation to the software world but with the migration to 'platform' based publishing (a publishing version of iTunes for example) we are seeing the germination of a world where there are only one or two legitimate channels to the consumer. If their actions in the POD world over these past two months are anything to go by then Amazon definitely has monopolistic tendencies.

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 19): HuffPo's Aggregation Model, Espresso Books, FT on the state of Publishing +More

From the Columbia Journalism Review a long review of how Huff Po came to define the news aggregation 'business' (CJR)

Before its purchase by AOL in February 2011, HuffPost was not a property that had produced much in the way of revenue; it had posted a profit only in the year before the sale—the amount has never been disclosed—on a modest $30 million in revenue. Aside from scoops from its estimable Washington bureau, it did little in the way of breaking stories, the industry’s traditional pathway to recognition.
Huffington Post, which had mastered search-engine optimization and was quick to understand and pounce on the rise of social media, had been at once widely followed but not nearly so widely cited. But that is likely to change now that it can boast of a Pulitzer Prize for national reporting—the rebuttal to every critic who dismissed HuffPost as an abasement to all that was journalistically sacred.
Arianna Huffington liked to boast that the site that bore her name had remained true to its origins. The homepage’s “splash” headline still reflected a left-of-center perspective; it had thousands of bloggers, famous and not, none of them paid; and while there was ever more original content, especially on the politics and business pages, the site was populated overwhelmingly with content that had originated elsewhere, much of it from the wires (in fairness, an approach long practiced by many of the nation’s newspapers). But Huffington Post had evolved into something more than the Web’s beast of traffic, blogging, and aggregation. These days, Arianna Huffington has a regular seat at the politics roundtable, which speaks not only to her own facility on TV but also to the prominence her organization enjoys.
Power can be felt, even if it defies measurement. By the winter of 2012, Huffington Post could lay claim to a widely shared perception of its growing influence—the word Huffington prefers to power, which, she says, sounds “too loaded.” For better or, in the eyes of its critics, worse, Huffington Post had assumed the position of a media institution of consequence.

Taking a look at the Espresso Book Machine at Powells (Mercury)

When I was at Powell's, before I went up to look at The Machine, I spent a few minutes talking myself down from buying a Poe Ballantine novel published by local house Hawthorne Books. I almost bought the book half because I want to read it, and half because it was pretty—Hawthorne puts out lovely books with distinctive covers and classy French flaps (when a soft-cover book folds in on the sides like a dust jacket). It's often suggested that with the increasing popularity of ebooks, publishers should/will move toward the McSweeney's model of publishing, which emphasizes "book-as-object." The Book Machine is a step in the opposite direction, back to book-as-collection-of-paper-that-has-words-on-it.
Mercury Film Editor Erik Henriksen—a regular Kindle user—expressed extreme bafflement at the existence of such a machine. I'd use it, though: Despite owning and liking a Kindle, I still have a stubborn preference for reading in print, and all other things being equal (price, convenience, availability) would always take a print book over a digital one. Plus, being able to create physical copies of hard-to-find/out-of-print titles is pretty amazing in its own right.

Warren Adler op ed in (you guessed it) the HufPo on The Coming Battle of eReaders (HuffPo):

There are thousands of categories that e-books support, running the gamut from instruction to politics and every thing in between and beyond. Works of the imagination, meaning fiction, cover numerous genres aimed to specific reader requirements. The so-called mainstream novel, the work I have labored to define, is the toughest category to monetize, especially in today's environment, which tempts creative writers to replicate and attracts the self-published.
The mainstream novel is also challenging to the author, who must be branded as a serious contributor in order to attain enough status to attract interest and sales where outlets for recognition and discoverability are shrinking.
While it was easy to make a prediction about the future of e-books it is no simple matter to predict the fate of the serious novelist in the ever-accelerating rough and tumble world of e-books. I suspect that most authors in this category will have to shoulder the task of relying on themselves to publicize, advertise, promote, and project his or her authorial name and titles, whether his or her books are published by a traditional publisher or via self-publishing. Authors of this material will either have to learn how to promote their own works or risk the ultimate curse of artistic endeavor... obscurity and dismissal.

I wasn't sure whether to pull this reference to the FT on the current landscape in publishing or not.  eBooks are big, Technology is a driver, publishers being sued, etc, etc.  You be the judge (FT):

As deep-pocketed tech companies tout ebooks to sell Windows 8 devices or Kindle Fires, iPads or gadgets running Google’s Android software, reading habits will change further, with profound consequences for retailers, publishers, authors and consumers.
The pace of change is already dramatic. According to PwC, the consultancy, US consumer ebook sales will grow 42 per cent to $2.5bn this year, or 11 per cent of the American consumer books market. But this may understate the growth. The Association of American Publishers said on Friday that ebooks accounted for 31 per cent of all adult trade sales in February, up from 27 per cent in the same period a year ago, with their share of the children’s and young adult market jumping from 10 per cent to 16 per cent in a year.
In Europe, ebook sales will grow 113 per cent, PwC estimates, but will end the year as less than 2 per cent of the market. In Asia, ebooks will be more than 6 per cent of the market by December, it predicts.
However, this comes at a heavy cost to print. Adult hardback sales fell 17.5 per cent last year, according to the Association of American Publishers. In the UK, The Publishers Association said this week that consumer ebook sales leapt 366 per cent in 2011 to 6 per cent of the total, but print declines left the total market down 2 per cent.

Joking about textbook prices (Link)

From my Twitter feed this week

The Man Who Revitalized 'Doctor Who' And 'Sherlock' http://n.pr/KsTaYF

BISG’s Making Information Pay Conference:Beyond “Business-as-Usual”;The Age of Big Data,by Lorraine Shanley /PubTrends http://bit.ly/IHI6sK

A universal digital library is within reach http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-samuelson-google-books-and-copyright-20120501,0,2442760.story

The PND (Cairns) Photo Archive Vol 1: 1960-1980

As frequent visitors to PND will know, I have been posting images out of my family archive for about two years now. As it turns out, I've mixed images that were taken early on - that is, they are truly from the family archive versus some I've taken as an adult relatively recently. For most of you, I suspect that distinction has been missed but for me I've been really interested in the images my father and grandfather took between 1960 and 1980.  In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Blurb book of some of the images I really thought were special.  In the Blurb viewer below you can see the entire book and I hope you like it.  You can even buy it although it is expensive and I really don't expect anyone to do so.  I am thinking of creating a smaller (cheaper) format so let me know if you are interested.

From The Archive: 1960 - 1980 by James T., Michael A. and Michael P. Cairns

In our attic at PND Mansions (UK) I came across a large box containing almost all the slide images taken between 1960 and 1980.  While a few were still in their original boxes most were all in a jumble having been removed out of carousels after some long ago family slide show.  So, I gathered all these images together and at first tried to select only the ones that looked interesting.  Quickly, I decided to take the entire collection and have them all scanned.  I was tempted to purchase a slide scanner and do this myself but my practical side quickly convinced me this would be a time consuming nightmare.

After one false start, I found an online site named ScanCafe where I sent all the images (in several batches) and had them scanned.  This works really well and I would recommend ScanCafe if you are looking to do something like this with a lot of images.

If you are like me and like organization I can't underestimate how long it can take to reorganize a mass of images that have been thrown together.  Remember, in my case all my images were a jumble but I quickly learned the better organized these were in advance of sending the faster I was able to put them into better order when they came back.

I am very happy with the way this book turned out.  I plan on doing three or four more over the next few years as patience dictates.  I think I have selected the best images from this period (not including any family photos you might notice) and as a set of images that describes my first 20 yrs I think it's a pretty decent representation.  And that's a pretty awesome cover.