Crisis averted, book-nerds! Amazon and Hachette have come to an agreement, which means that (hopefully), emerging authors will not have their young careers ruined because their books weren’t available for pre-order on Amazon. Paul Constant at the Stranger weighs in on this shadowy readin’ detente:
But there’s one interesting nugget buried in all that blah-blah-blah press release stuff—an admission that “Hachette will have responsibility for setting consumer prices of its ebooks.” Laura Hazard Owen writes for GigaOm that this is “the return of agency ebook pricing about two and a half years after the Department of Justice first sued Apple and publishers for conspiring to set ebook prices.” This means that Amazon won’t be able to sell Hachette e-books at insanely low prices, which is bad news for e-book sales, which are already slowing down tremendously from the early days of Kindle’s popularity. This is good news for independent bookstores, because it means e-books are not going to see the astronomical adoption rate that mp3s did during the big iPod boom at the turn of the century. They’ve won a few more years to fend off the fate that has befallen most record stores.
Constant argues that we shouldn’t take this truce as a reason for going back to Amazon. He cites Amazon’s impact on Seattle pretty specifically (e.g., using the city as a guinea pig for an actual delivery-by-drone program, WTF AMAZON), but Amazon’s more systemic problem (cutting off access to specific media for money-grubbing reasons) applies to us too! It’s hard to fathom why anyone who lives in Portland would need to buy from Amazon—we have so many bookstores and a vibrant small press scene to boot, AND Powell’s ships. Back in August, Erik Henriksen wrote a handy list of ways to not buy things from Amazon for the fall Agenda. Now might be a good time to revisit it.
I see this as a battle between two behemoths. Neither comes out looking very good. As a consumer of e-books I tend to slightly favor Amazon’s arguments as it will keep my cost lower, but nobody is going to the poor house here except for maybe the authors…and they’ve been screwed over for years by big publishing houses. Sure, I’d prefer to shop local for most anything else, but when it comes to e-books (my preferred medium), Amazon is the least of the evils out there, IMO.
A few lines of discussion below a block quote from someone who has somehow made a living out of putting a few lines of discussion below a block quote? Mind blown.