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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: 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.