March 24, 2010

Is a consensus growing about Amazon?

by

Not that Amazon.com seems to give a damn — if it did, it would be trying to counter a sensational string of wickedly bad press that’s been going on for months now — but it seems that even when the behemoth from Seattle behaves for a day or two and doesn’t do anything thuggish, it just gives people time to assess, well, how fucked up the company is ….

Take the still-building story MobyLives first reported on days ago — the one about Micahel Lewis‘ new book getting tons of one-star reader reviews from readers who admit, well, that they’re not readers — they’re cretins who haven’t read the book but who are pissed off because Lewis’ book isn’t available as an ebook yet. A series of childish tantrums, in other words, that a thing hasn’t been made in the format or at the price an individual desires (yet), and that Amazon has chosen not to take down as meaningless and unnecessarily harmful to everyone’s better business. By doing nothing Amazon seems to be doing something, and the criticism has been growing.

Take this commentary at Newser:

Michael Lewis has written an acclaimed best-seller about the financial industry, but you wouldn’t know it from the customer reviews on Amazon.com. … It’s yet another example why Amazon must change its policy, writes Paul Carr. The reviewers are punishing Lewis for a decision made by his publisher. This is “bullshit of the lowest order,” and things like this happen a lot with the Amazon reviews, writes Carr at TechCrunch. The problem is easy to fix: Allow only people who have actually bought the book to publish reviews. This makes them what they should be: assessments of the work in question rather than a soapbox for “assorted haters with an axe to grind.”

Then there’s the fact that Amazon is still playing a ridiculously tough game of hardball — threatening to remove buy buttons — with publishers who dare to strike deals with Apple for the new iPad. (See the earlier MobyLIves report.) As a commentary at Motley Fool puts it,

when the dust settles, I think you can count on most publishers getting to use the agency model that they seem to prefer, and which Apple has given its blessing to. With the iPad about to hit the scene, and e-readers from Sony (NYSE: SNE) and Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) already putting a bit of competitive pressure on the Kindle, Amazon simply can’t afford to alienate its content partners by dictating the industry’s business model to them.

“At the heart of the matter,” says a report at Bizmology …

… is Amazon’s identity crisis. It started as a simple online bookseller, and much like its namesake river, it grew into an enormous torrent of goods. But even then, Amazon is not content to be a retailer, and it developed the Kindle to more efficiently deliver content. Even though the Sony Reader and other models had already been available, the Kindle, backed by Amazon’s marketing might, quickly gobbled up market share.

So now we have the Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Barnes & Noble nook, and finally, and most ominously, the Apple iPad. Amazon is no longer the only big dog. There’s a lot of competition out there, and Apple has a proven track record in this arena.

Amazon enjoyed the market lead for years and executed brilliantly for most of that time. It has a great deal of leverage, but to its own surprise, not as much as it thought it had. Now the lesson is being hammered home — being first is great, but you have to take a look behind and see what’s gaining.

And what’s gaining, it seems, is a consensus that the company is, well, out of control.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.

  • http://www.oldrectorynorton.net Jo Ward

    Amazon must have really fantastic IT staff, otherwise it could not have grown like it has and Mr Bezos might never have been heard of. Using Amazon has become a comfort thing – it delivers the goods efficiently – it is trustworthy, seemingly.

    But this Bezos chap he was only 30 years old when he started Amazon – too young to realise what damage he could do the entire ‘book’ world by selling at wholesale price to the consumer. But the ‘people’ supplying him were not so young and naive and they really are the ones to blame for the mess the book trade is now in.

    Bezos might have got the notion that books were expensive when he had to purchase them for his education and so he came up with the idea to set up a company and sell them cheap. But for publishers to fund the big discounts they then had to increase the cover price and now educational text are more expensive to produce and new and established writers are either not being published or are not earning enough to feed themselves not to mention the bricks and mortar book stores that are going out of business by the hour. So Mr Bezos you have not achieved what you set out to achieve and unless you start playing from a more level playing field you single-handedly might be responsible for destroying all creativity and maybe even the book trade itself.

  • http://www.oldrectorynorton.net Jo Ward

    Amazon must have really fantastic IT staff, otherwise it could not have grown like it has and Mr Bezos might never have been heard of. Using Amazon has become a comfort thing – it delivers the goods efficiently – it is trustworthy, seemingly.

    But this Bezos chap he was only 30 years old when he started Amazon – too young to realise what damage he could do the entire ‘book’ world by selling at wholesale price to the consumer. But the ‘people’ supplying him were not so young and naive and they really are the ones to blame for the mess the book trade is now in.

    Bezos might have got the notion that books were expensive when he had to purchase them for his education and so he came up with the idea to set up a company and sell them cheap. But for publishers to fund the big discounts they then had to increase the cover price and now educational text are more expensive to produce and new and established writers are either not being published or are not earning enough to feed themselves not to mention the bricks and mortar book stores that are going out of business by the hour. So Mr Bezos you have not achieved what you set out to achieve and unless you start playing from a more level playing field you single-handedly might be responsible for destroying all creativity and maybe even the book trade itself.

  • Matthew W

    The Bezos genius is all about cash flow.

    Amazon get books on 60+ days credit from suppliers, but take immediate advance payment from the customer. Think of all those pre-orders, and all of those ‘estimated delivery 2-3 weeks’. It’s all interest-earning money-in-the-bank. Anything they don’t sell is returned, risk-free.

    The push for eBooks from Amazon is about reducing stock holding and logistics costs whilst maximising revenue.

    Amazon, let us be clear, doesn’t care one bit about books, publishing, reading or culture.

  • Matthew W

    The Bezos genius is all about cash flow.

    Amazon get books on 60+ days credit from suppliers, but take immediate advance payment from the customer. Think of all those pre-orders, and all of those ‘estimated delivery 2-3 weeks’. It’s all interest-earning money-in-the-bank. Anything they don’t sell is returned, risk-free.

    The push for eBooks from Amazon is about reducing stock holding and logistics costs whilst maximising revenue.

    Amazon, let us be clear, doesn’t care one bit about books, publishing, reading or culture.

  • http://drbenharris.com BEN HARRIS

    amazon youtube facebook too big catching people under the wheels
    youtube has a phone you call it tells you NO SUPPORT
    WHAT THE FUQ IS THAT

  • http://drbenharris.com BEN HARRIS

    amazon youtube facebook too big catching people under the wheels
    youtube has a phone you call it tells you NO SUPPORT
    WHAT THE FUQ IS THAT

  • http://www.booktaste.com Cathy Macleod

    Amazon is now too big, too complex and too greedy. For publishers large or small there are better options available (Smashwords, Booktaste, Sony, B&N, iPad etc). It’s a situation Amazon cannot ignore forever.

  • http://www.booktaste.com Cathy Macleod

    Amazon is now too big, too complex and too greedy. For publishers large or small there are better options available (Smashwords, Booktaste, Sony, B&N, iPad etc). It’s a situation Amazon cannot ignore forever.

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