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Monday, October 17, 2011

Books Amazon Runs Every Aspect of the Publishing Business Now

Posted by Paul Constant on Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 4:33 PM

This was in The New York Times over the weekend. Who could have possibly seen this coming?

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers...Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.

“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.

After years of poor management—no vision, no willingness to stand up for independent bookstores—it's really hard for me to muster any sympathy for the publishing industry. Amazon is not going to be the only publisher in the world (there will always be small, feisty publishers willing to run with adventurous books that Amazon would never touch) but corporate publishers are going to have a hard time surviving.

Comments (9) RSS

Oldest First Unregistered On Registered On Add a comment

I'm curious to see what the quality of the writing and editing is, along with the quality of the design and the books themselves.

Posted by sikandro on October 17, 2011 at 4:49 PM

@1, yeah, me too. Publishing isn't as easy as it looks. Anyone with deep pockets can throw out a big stack of garbage, but it has to sell. Plenty of real publishers have gone under due to poor publishing decisions, let alone a newcomer that doesn't really know anything. Given that it's Amazon, they probably have a commitment to absorb massive losses until they get established, but I wonder how long that will take.

I could foresee them turning into the leading romance novel publisher, though.

Posted by Fnarf

on October 17, 2011 at 5:05 PM

E:book::Horseless:Carriage

Posted by Supreme Ruler Of The Universe

on October 17, 2011 at 5:43 PM

I think you're writing the publishing industry's epitaph a tad too soon, Paul. Besides what @ 1 and 2 say, there are too many titles being published for any one company to monopolize. It'll only happen if Amazon acquires Harper Collins and some other big houses, and I don't think they have either the coin or the inclination to do that.

Now, this may well herald a dramatic turn in the publishing revolution that the eBook and Kindle kicked off, for the reasons quoted in the NYT article)...

Posted by Matt from Denver on October 17, 2011 at 5:50 PM

Evolve or die.

Posted by sonder on October 17, 2011 at 5:54 PM

@2--
it's true it is not as easy as it looks, but you can always hire the experienced. look out for a lot of ex-new yorkers wandering around south lake union in the year to come.

Posted by ex-nyc on October 17, 2011 at 5:54 PM

Okay, admittedly my book publishing career only went from 1996 for about 10 years, but my Amazon sales were miniscule, compared to brick and mortar stores.

So: will Amazon only sell online, or also push hardcopies through stores?

Posted by judybrowni on October 17, 2011 at 8:39 PM

Publishers and Record Labels stopped adding value commensurate with their markup decades ago. Kill them all.

Posted by nullbull on October 17, 2011 at 11:11 PM