:: Publish and perish ::

Monday, September 29, 2003

I remember seeing an interview with Michael Moore several years ago where he haughtily warned (as he does often, right or not) that half of all books sold in the U.S. were sold by two companies: Borders and Barnes & Noble. In addition to their mega-stores, each owned chains of smaller stores (Waldenbooks, B. Dalton, &c, &c) which allowed them to rack up massive aggregate market share. In and of itself Moore noted, this wasn't a particularly bad phenomenon - what worried him was the increasing willingness of publishers to take potential books to these chains to gauge the amount of orders the two would place, and whether they would promote the prospective work in-store. Since they comprised such a mammoth percentage of the wholesale market, if both declined to carry a book it was tantamount to a veto of any work which publishers were considering.

Now the same effect is being seen here. In the short-term, this is good news - fragmentation weakens the influence of the aforementioned "big two" - but in the long term the trend toward an Amazon monopoly results in dangers far more egregious than the erstwhile duopoly, giving a single entity the power to decide what will and will not be given the chance to succeed. Even more frighteningly, at some point it would make economic sense for Amazon to just cut out the middlemen and publish authors directly (a likely path would be to purchase one or more existing publishers). Don't get me wrong, there's nothing inherently evil about a company that signs authors, provides editorial services, publishes the material, and then sells the physical work (see: McSweeny's et al), but if they're the only (mainstream) game in town, it's a problem.

Posted by morland @ 07:35 PM

:: Comments ::

You are such an f_ing communist.

Posted by: Alex on September 30, 2003 08:18 AM

I infer that the term '&c' is some variant or relative of the abbreveation 'etc', derived from Latin's et {and} & cetera {the rest}. But, I must admit that never before have I seen the combonation of Ampersand and the letter, C in such a way.

Is your server stressed to such limits that the marginal cost of one character prohibits standard abbreverations? Or, is this an example of lingo of the mobile mind and mobile phone, deconstructing the english language to its bare purely functional form? I think whatever benefit is gained with less characters is lost with the added keystroke (shift+7).

Morland is not bound by MLA standards, certainly. But, such leaps away from traditional terminology seems abrupt and as such, I must protest. Morland is a bastion of English vocabulary, a parapet of proper parlance.

Perhaps it's all idle talk intended to charm or beguile.

Posted by: Al on September 30, 2003 11:22 AM

Am I wrong to assume that the Amazon model is more open to diverse interests than the big 2 bookstores? I had the impression that the Amazon network can find and sell you any book in the US, including rare and out of print, which they will find from various mom and pop stores throughout the country, whereas the "duopoly" tend to only carry big publishing house books that promise high sales. Yes, amazon can make or break a book, but I have yet to see them only obtaining big sellers on their electronic shelves.

Perhaps I'm taking a more selfish view to the mess - I still want to be able to get my wierd 17th century English history books and I don't care if the rest of the world finds them as interesting or worthwhile as I do. At least Amazon allows for fringe markets, and possibly encourages them (early-modern history nerds purchase from all over the country).

Posted by: Anna on September 30, 2003 12:50 PM

Weird. I didn't expect this entry to generate such a flurry of comments, especially from people with given names beginning with "A".

Alex- your disparagement is ill-hurled. Deride my leanings if you must, but considering the swamp of ideological lassitude that constitutes your political passion, I find it hard to ignore the hypocrisy of your statement.

Al- " &c " is indeed equivalent to "etc.". It has fallen out of use of late, but was in favor towards the very beginning of the last century (Theodore Roosevelt used it frequently) and the end of the 1800s. Since one of my mottos (which appear in a randomly shuffled order in the header of my blog's incarnation as of this writing) is "single-handedly bringing back the 1880's", I've decided to incorporate more archaic and anachronistic vernacular into my writing. Or at least I felt like doing so when I wrote that.

Anna- You have a good point regarding Amazon being a salubrious environment for niche books, but I was not asserting anything to the contrary, instead focusing on the potential change in behavior on the part of major publishing houses as sellers. Previously, they focused on two major outlets to decide whether sales would be sufficient to warrant publication. Eventually, if the trend in question continues, they will use a brief meeting with a single outlet - Amazon staff - as a litmus test for total eventual sales success. As the only major buyer in the market (which I guess would technically make it a monopsony, not a monopoly - not quite as bad, but still scary), such brief meetings would effectively allow Amazon to decide which authors under consideration by said publishers would be given deals and which would not.

Fringe markets will always thrive given a distribution network like Amazon's. Whether the good derived from this counterbalances the potential harmful impact of its monopsonistic status is a complex question, and one I am not prepared, nor qualified, to answer. I suppose it ultimately lies in the hands of the publishers.

Posted by: morland on September 30, 2003 01:51 PM

Whatever. Better dead than red.

Posted by: Alex on September 30, 2003 03:31 PM

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