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Very recently, Amazon made a small, barely noticeable tweak to the way it sells books. And that little tweak has publishers very, very worried.
The change has to do with what Amazon calls the "Buy Box." That's the little box on the right-hand side of Amazon product pages that lets you buy stuff through the company's massive retail enterprise.
[...] It used to be that when you were shopping for a new copy of a book and clicked "Add to Cart," you were buying the book from Amazon itself. Amazon, in turn, had bought the book from its publisher or its publisher's wholesalers, just like if you went to any other bookstore selling new copies of books. There was a clear supply chain that sent your money directly into the pockets of the people who wrote and published the book you were buying.
But now, reports The Huffington Post, that's no longer the default scenario. Now you might be buying the book from Amazon, or you might be buying it from a third-party seller. And there's no guarantee that if the latter is true, said third-party seller bought the book from the publisher. In fact, it's most likely they didn't.
Which means the publisher might not be getting paid. And, by extension, neither is the author.
Understandably, both publishers and authors are deeply unhappy about this change.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 2) by Arik on Monday May 22 2017, @01:15AM (2 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @02:40AM (1 child)
> How can that number possibly be large enough to have the effect?
Again from the article:
It goes on to say that buyers can find sellers nonetheless. If that's correct, a seller needn't have a large supply of books to create a problem.
> [...] start marking them 'not for resale' which you'd think they would be doing from the start [...]
I don't know why they haven't been. At a guess, perhaps reviewers prefer to receive copies that are not stamped "not for resale" precisely because the reviewers wish to sell on those books, and are perhaps inclined to give more favourable reviews as a result.
(Score: 2) by FakeBeldin on Monday May 22 2017, @03:13PM
I agree that Amazon should clearly distinguish between one seller being out of stock and an item being out of stock for all sellers.