SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday May 22 2017, @06:02AM (2 children)
I have already run across this on Amazon.de. At the time, I was mystified - so here's the explanation. Actually, I'm still mystified. Amazon has gone to the trouble to build up this huge, well-oiled logistics chain...and now they don't want to use it?
Anyway, as a consumer, it's a nuisance. First, I went to Amazon to buy a book, partially because I trust their logistics chain. Third-party sellers, not so much - they are often slow, package things poorly, etc.. This is especially true, since I order from .de but live in .ch - I have had third party sellers accept an order and then refuse delivery when they discover they have to pay international postage. Others show up in the "buy box", but then comes the red text on the right "this item does not ship to your location". Yet Amazon itself ships here with no problems. Lastly, if I'm buying multiple items, I generally expect them to ship together, not in a zillion different packages.
Mind, it's nice to have the broader selection provided by third party sellers. I've bought unusual items (including, for example, out-of-print books) from them. They offer things that Amazon itself does not. But I want to *know* when I'm buying from someone else - I don't appreciate having it happen in stealth-mode.
A completely different comment: TFA goes on and on about how the publishers aren't getting paid by the third-party sellers, even though those sellers are shipping books printed by the publishers. The problem is that publishers are still relying on an utterly antiquated logistics, which has lots of holes in it. Maybe they need to modernize? They shouldn't be sending out product that isn't paid. The old practice of having bookstores rip the covers off of books that they didn't sell (rather than sending them back) was always stupidly wasteful. It turns out that lots of these unpaid, "damaged" or "destroyed" product are being sold after all. The dinosaurs are wishing the mammals would just go away; evolving is sooooo much trouble...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @10:29AM (1 child)
A footnote -- some small publishers are no longer selling direct to Amazon. The terms and other problems in dealing with Amazon are just too much trouble for these companies. Sorry, I don't have a reference, but I have discussed this with my small engineering press and they have withdrawn certain titles from Amazon. Of course Amazon still sells the books used, mostly from what I can see through third party sellers.
For just one example, Amazon insists that the publishers pay return shipping for unsold copies, which doesn't make any sense to me. After all Amazon can control this in several ways without beating up on publishers: With their predictive capability they can order just-in-time so they never have too many books in stock. With their giant international reach (and access to cheap logistics), Amazon can always move books to another market.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday May 22 2017, @11:12AM
Yes, Amazon does have an awful lot of power over publishers. There's not much way around that. That said, there are other solutions for the specialty press (for example, scientific reference books that sell very few copies). For example, I would think that this would be an ideal application of print-on-demand.
Also, frankly, eBooks.
Some publishers are pretty stupid about this: I just had a publisher send me a printed book that I don't even want! I specifically asked for an eBook, because I am not going to carry around printed books for all of the courses I teach. Just not. Of course, their electronic copy comes with DRM, which requires a special program in order to read it. So, should I ever get the damned eBook, the first thing I will have to do is strip the DRM, so that I can use it under Linux.
Sometimes, it's like the old, established publishers are *trying* to go out of business...
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.