By Porter Ander­son | @Porter_Anderson

From April 26, 2012

Part of my series of columns on pub­lish­ing, Writ­ing on the Ether, appear­ing Thurs­days at the invi­ta­tion of Jane Fried­man at JaneFriedman.com

Spring­time for Amazon

As the mar­ket evolves, Ama­zon is becom­ing a home for readers.

Say what? “A home for read­ers?” The Evil Ama­zon? Did the jun­gle drums just miss a beat?

There is so much for read­ers to do on Ama­zon – so much book-related con­tent for them to peruse before buying.

There it was again. I could swear I just heard a friendly word for Seattle.

We have to ask our­selves, with the col­lapse of phys­i­cal retail for books, which com­pany will book sup­pli­ers want to deal with most? Just as iTunes sup­planted record stores, Ama­zon is sup­plant­ing book­stores. Of all the book­selling options out there, only the remain­ing indie book­stores and B&N are more “book­ish.” Should they even­tu­ally col­lapse (or trans­form or get sold), Ama­zon will be the most book­ish place for read­ers to go to buy books.

You’re not hear­ing from some Prime-drunk refugee of the Bor­ders wars here. These are the thoughts of Laura Daw­son, Firebrand’s reign­ing Queen of Meta­data, one of our best-regarded pub­lish­ing spe­cial­ists, and she’s pack­ing knit­ting nee­dles, don’t cross her.

 

In Why Ama­zon Will Be the Good Guy, Daw­son is echo­ing a jazzy new coun­ter­point to the shrill call of the poison-dart frog we’ve heard so relent­lessly in deep­est, dark­est Amazonia.

A new slant on the aggres­sive retailer is begin­ning to be felt. And this angle doesn’t always turn up along the same lines of debate, which indi­cates that a sub­tle but broad-based recon­sid­er­a­tion may be under­way. Dawson’s not drop­ping a stitch:

In the late 1990s, the Amer­i­can Book­sellers Asso­ci­a­tion sued Barnes & Noble and Bor­ders over what they felt were unfair trade prac­tices… B&N was the king of the dis­count. And for “book­ish” folks, this was a source of fric­tion – the cheap­en­ing of books made them seem com­modi­tized, and our beloved inde­pen­dent book­stores were going out of business.

Hun­ker with me here. This is an argu­ment many can’t see yet.

Ama­zon has been regarded as less than entirely “book­ish” since its incep­tion, when Bezos made it clear that books were just the begin­ning (and only because books were the eas­i­est prod­ucts to build a store around).

 

Imme­di­ately there’s col­le­gial push-back in Dawson’s post’s com­ments start­ing here, from another favorite expert, Joe Wik­ert of O’Reilly Media. After all, Daw­son has just asserted:

When any com­pany is gen­er­at­ing the bulk of sales for pub­lish­ers, they are by def­i­n­i­tion “the good guys.”

There may be a pretty prac­ti­cal truth to that line. What do you think?

 

Keep lis­ten­ing. There’s more than one line of think­ing being updated on Ama­zon at the moment. You hear it between the blind hate-Amazon mon­key chat­ter and the reluc­tant growls of slow-moving traditionalists.

The night­mare nar­ra­tive being spun by the pub­lish­ing echo cham­ber is trag­i­cally unaware of how Ama­zon works. Maybe it’s because pub­lish­ers imag­ine that Ama­zon will do what they would do if they had Amazon’s mar­ket power.

That art­ful zinger is launched by another of our community’s well-respected fig­ures, Eric Hell­man. In Publishing’s Ama­zon Pow­ered Future, Hell­man pro­poses one of the most intrigu­ing rays of light to make it through the rain­for­est canopy, swat­ting aside the fre­quently heard fear that once most com­peti­tors have lan­guished, Ama­zon will jack up its now-low prices. The empha­sis here is his:

Ama­zon won’t extort huge sums of money from pow­er­less con­sumers. Instead, they will ruth­lessly bring effi­ciency to every process involved in pub­lish­ing. And then they’ll invite every­one to use their ruth­lessly effi­cient services.

What Hell­man is say­ing is that the the real profit cen­ters for Seat­tle lie in scale-enabling sys­tems, the for­mi­da­ble tidal pow­ers such as Ama­zon Web Ser­vices, which ebb and flow accord­ing to sup­ply and demand. He has climbed way up to get a much airier view of Amazon’s cor­po­rate basin than most of us book-grubbing ground-dwellers have done.

 

And even as Hell­man calls to us from his high perch, there’s news of Ama­zon Sup­ply launch­ing, what Michael Kanel­los writes up at Forbes as Another Step Toward B2B, and describes as:

A beta site ded­i­cated to sell­ing office equip­ment and indus­trial sup­plies to busi­nesses. Ama­zon Sup­ply offers more than 500,000 prod­ucts, accord­ing to the com­pany, includ­ing hose clamps, roller chain sprock­ets, drill bits, sheet alu­minum, brass and other items. The site grew out of Small Parts, a sup­plier of equip­ment for sci­ence labs, Ama­zon bought in 2005.

How are we going to keep them down in Seat­tle, now that they’ve seen the Micro Essen­tial Lab 94 Hydrion Spec­tral Insta-Chek Wide Range pH Test Paper Dis­penser, 1 — 14 pH, Sin­gle Roll?

Stomp­ing around our small clear­ing called pub­lish­ing really may not be this giant’s great­est ambition.

 

And one of our very best heads, Brian O’Leary is also lead­ing the porters and this Porter toward “Dr. Hell­man, I pre­sume,” In A More Likely View.

O’Leary writes:

Hellman’s work is always worth a full read, and I encour­age you to take some time with his post.

Me, too. Quot­ing Hell­man at length, O’Leary comes to this intrigu­ing conclusion:

This is the rea­son pub­lish­ers can’t beat Ama­zon: they aren’t even play­ing the same game.

pH Test Paper Dis­pensers, remember.

O’Leary goes back to Hell­man for a sec­ond post. In What Are We About?, he cred­its Hell­man for out­lin­ing “how pub­lish­ers are fun­da­men­tally mis­un­der­stand­ing the retailer’s long-term com­pet­i­tive strat­egy.” And he ends by asking:

If Ama­zon is all about scale, what are we about?

Need­less to say, there are dis­agree­ments on the for­est floor.

 

In After­math — notes on the Ama­zon post, another fine observer of the realm, Bal­dur Bjar­na­son, weighs in with seri­ous qualms. They don’t nec­es­sar­ily go head-to-head with Hellman’s con­cep­tu­al­iza­tion. But they indi­cate a mis­trust of Seattle’s model.

Ama­zon is tak­ing risks every­where. They are treat­ing their sup­pli­ers, pub­lish­ers, badly, essen­tially behav­ing like monop­o­lists before they have an actual monop­oly. Their share price is mas­sively over­val­ued by any mea­sure. The more they rely on their pri­vate ebook for­mat for some sort of lock-in, the more they cut them­selves off a grow­ing ecosys­tem of ebook pro­duc­tion and devel­op­ment tools, which requires them to make their own devel­op­ment tools, which fur­ther dri­ves down their margins.

 

And our friend jour­nal­ist Philip Jones of The­Fu­ture­Book and The­Book­seller is skep­ti­cal of what he sees as Hell­man con­flat­ing Ama­zon Web Ser­vices and Ama­zon Pub­lish­ing. In Scale and syn­ergy do not drive pub­lish­ing, peo­ple do, Jones writes:

I’ve heard time and time again recently that Ama­zon is all about scale, and it is this that will kill off pub­lish­ers… But I am not sure pub­lish­ing books is scal­able, or will be greatly impacted by it: at least not on the cre­ative side.

Oh, and in case you’ve felt the Depart­ment of Jus­tice is los­ing steam with its law­suit of the “col­lud­ing five” and Apple, out­go­ing Act­ing Asst. Attor­ney Gen­eral for Antitrust Sharis A. Pozen wants to dis­agree with you. She was speak­ing (full text) at the Brook­ings Insti­tute:

At its heart, this case is about pro­tect­ing com­pe­ti­tion, not com­peti­tors. And most impor­tantly, it is about lower ebook prices for consumers.

 

Con­fab images: Mis­souri Writ­ers Conference

The series of hand­some ecru slides you see in this edi­tion of the gas are from Ether-eal host Jane Friedman’s deck for her recent pre­sen­ta­tion at the Mis­souri Writ­ers’ Guild Conference.

Fried­man spoke, as did another sis­ter in the Ether, Christina Katz.

In keep­ing with a back-to-basics trend you might pick up on in the writing/craft sec­tions of the Ether, Friedman’s approach is an excel­lent exam­i­na­tion of what to do — and what to avoid — on a manuscript’s first page.

And if you ever won­der why writ­ers can seem so crazed about the dif­fi­culty of their pri­mary task (that would be writ­ing, Yuvi Zalkow will remind us a bit later), con­sider that all the points on these slides are meant to go into a mar­velous Page One so that the reader does what? — blows right through it and turns eagerly to Page Two. Where the bat­tle is fought again.

Jane’s the one in the flak jacket. Here is her com­plete slide deck.

Click to read this week’s full Writ­ing on the Ether col­umn at JaneFriedman.com.