In the mid- to late 1990s, when online bookselling was in its infancy, Barnes & Noble and Borders were busy expanding their empires, often opening stores adjacent to long-established community bookstores... The death toll tells the tale. Two decades ago, there were about 4,000 independent bookstores in the United States; only about 1,900 remain. And now, even the victors are imperiled. The fate of the two largest US chain bookstores—themselves partly responsible for putting smaller stores to the sword—is instructive: Borders declared bankruptcy in 2011 and closed its several hundred stores across the country, its demise benefiting over the short term its rival Barnes & Noble, which is nonetheless desperately trying to figure out ways to pay the mortgage on the considerable real estate occupied by its 1,332 stores across the nation...Much more at the The Nation.
The bookstore wars are over. Independents are battered, Borders is dead, Barnes & Noble weakened but still standing and Amazon triumphant. Yet still there is no peace; a new war rages for the future of publishing. The recent Justice Department lawsuit accusing five of the country’s biggest publishers of illegally colluding with Apple to fix the price of e-books is, arguably, publishing’s Alamo. What angered the government wasn’t the price, but the way the publishers seemed to have secretly arranged to raise it...
Amazon’s entry into publishing’s traditional casino is a sideshow. More worrisome, at least over the long term, is the success of Amazon’s Kindle Single program, an effort to encourage writers to make an end run around publishers, not only of books but of magazines as well... For me, the problems become worse as Amazon moves from ‘just’ being a big player in selling books to vertical control of entire sections of the industry. It all gets a bit Big Brother. It’s easy to imagine Amazon muscling existing publishers out of the picture altogether and inviting authors and agents to deal directly with them. What would that do for the richness and diversity of our culture?”
03 June 2012
The power of Amazon
From an essay at The Nation:
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My mother and I have both worked for Waterstones in England which has been struggling recently. I received an email from her yesterday saying they had shut down our local branch. This comes after Waterstones moved into the town and shut down many of the independent bookstores.
ReplyDeleteIf Amazon muscles existing publishers out of the picture, Amazon itself becomes a publisher. The model doesn't necessarily collapse. Anyone can write an ebook and put it online to download, but that doesn't mean they'll be good at getting people's attention. The industry is still going to need editors and marketing. I suspect we'll start to see a model where 'publishers' (for lack of a better name) pick out good manuscripts, provide editing, then run a website that is part digital book store and part literary magazine to draw customers. Hopefully the big players won't get a stranglehold on this by locking down ereaders to their books only.
ReplyDeleteIt's nearly impossible to get a publisher or agent to look at your book, so I'm finding it hard to feel too sorry for them. Perhaps this will provide at least a 'foot in the door' for struggling writers.
ReplyDeleteI'm not seeing how cutting publishers and traditional bookstores out of the loop is going to imperil cultural richness and diversity, given that publishers and traditional bookstores are a bit of a bottleneck in getting creative work from producer/author/artist to consumer/reader...
ReplyDeleteAgreed. This could be like the youtube of the music industry... which brought Justin Bieber to fame.
DeleteOh... wait... Well, it would be much easier to get stuff published this way. We'll leave it at that.
I hate to say it, but they are doing it to themselves to a degree. Books have been priced so high it is crazy. I love to support my local bookstore, but I can't afford to buy all of my books there. And books are not very well made today. Even without the pressure of Amazon, things were not going to last.
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