Amazon vs the Publishers: The War of the Words
Barnes & Noble’s lone literary-fiction buyer, Sessalee Hensley, could make (or break) a book with a large order (or a disappointingly small one). If you talked to a publisher in the early 2000s, chances are they would complain to you about the tyranny of Sessalee. No one used her last name; the most influential woman in the book trade did not need one.
.. One of the interesting things about Amazon in its early years was the number of bad ideas it had. It was a bad idea to sell heavy home-improvement equipment on the Amazon site and charge a pittance for shipping, and it was a bad idea to consider storing merchandise in the apartments of college students living in Manhattan, so that the students could make deliveries in their neighborhoods. (The company had enough trouble worrying about theft at its warehouses; how was it going to monitor the apartments of kids?) Some people even thought that selling books was a bad idea.
.. But with e-books there were no manufacturing costs, no warehousing costs, no shipping costs, no returns. Even at a lower price, the profit margins were higher. Some revenues, it turns out, are better than others. “I’ve been in this business a long time,” one publisher told me recently, “and it’s always been that one house was up one year and down the next, whereas another house was down one year and up the next. But for all the houses to be up at the same time, year after year? I’ve never seen that. And the number-one reason is the Kindle.” The Kindle was doing what Amazon had claimed all along it would do: it was making publishers money.
.. Amazon’s self-published authors’ books were particularly inexpensive, and also something else: they were a particular kind of book. In publishing terms they were known as “genre” books: thrillers, mysteries, horror stories, romances. There were genre writers on both sides of the dispute, but on the publishing side were huddled the biographers, urban historians, midlist novelists—that is, all the people who were able to eke out a living because publishers still paid advances, acting as a kind of local literary bank, in anticipation of future sales. Some pro-Amazon authors boasted of the money they’d earned from self-publishing, but the authors of books that sometimes took a decade to write knew that this was not for them—that in an Amazon future they would be even more dependent on the universities and foundations than they already were.
.. In this way, the Amazon-Hachette dispute mirrors the wider culture wars that have been playing out in America since at least the 1960s. On the one side, super-wealthy elites employing populist rhetoric and mobilizing non-elites; on the other side, slightly less wealthy elites struggling to explain why their way of life is worth preserving.
.. Amazon’s supply-chain engineers have calculated that it’s more efficient for the items to be randomly dispersed, because as the next person in the supply chain—the “picker”—walks around to fill someone’s order, the scanner in her hand will tell her where the closest item is and then the fastest way to get to the next item after that. The job still requires a tremendous amount of walking—it has been estimated that some pickers end up covering as many as 11 miles a day, on punishing hard concrete—but it is a very efficient system.
.. In some respects it is also a dispute between the East Coast and the West Coast. It is definitely a dispute between hyper-capitalism and cultural conservation. But in the end it is a dispute that comes down to different visions of the future of the written word