Books, books, books! The American Booksellers Association, a trade group that represents small bookstores (not Barnes and Noble and the other big guys), has asked the Department of Justice to investigate whether or not Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Target have “[devalued] the very concept of the book” with their ongoing price war. Well, they’re actually asking for an investigation into their selling practices. That is, because Amazon wants to outsell Wal-Mart, and Wal-Mart wants to outsell Amazon, they both sell the latest book (think Stephen King, Dan Brown, etc.) for some really low price, like $10. When you consider that the average hardcover “should” cost something like $20-$30, just based on the wildly outdated economics of book-selling, then you understand why the ABA is so upset.
Here’s what the ABA is thinking: it represents The Little Guy, the indie bookstore on Main Street, USA that doesn’t have the clout of Barnes and Noble or Borders. If these big guys keep trying to undercut each other, it lowers the price Main Street can set for a book. Why would someone pay $30 for a book when they can buy it for $10 from Wal-Mart? The problem becomes, after Main Street goes out of business, that limits the amount of information (books) out there. And what if some author releases a crazy book about some controversial topic, one that Wal-Mart refuses to carry because it doesn’t want to “offend” its customers or whatever? Now there’s no Main Street bookstore to turn to, and that information never gets out there. Then the marketplace of ideas suffers, and we’re all worse off. That’s the ABA’s thinking, at least, and it’s not entirely unreasonable, I don’t think.
If you want, this topic could easily balloon into a much deeper, philosophical discussion on the entire book industry—remember, Barnes and Noble said the other day that the book industry is still bigger than Hollywood, video games, etc.—but other, better people have already begun to tackle that debate.
And why is this on CrunchGear? Yup, e-books. You can make the argument, and the ABA has done just that, that it was the initial release of the Kindle that got this whole dangerous price war started. Amazon needed to jumpstart the public’s acceptance of e-books, so they did the inverse of what game companies do when they release a new system: game companies make money on the software and lose money on the hardware (at least initially), while Amazon was selling these e-books for something like one-third their “actual” value. Gotta get those Kindles out there!
So that’s basically it. The ABA is concerned that a price war, started by the introduction of the Kindle, will eventually limit the number and quality of ideas available to y’all. You’re free to disagree, and I get the feeling that many of you will.
With that kind of thinking, the book industry will be following the same tracks of the music industry. The ABA should be embracing technological advancements and revisit their proposed business practices.
I for one have been buying more books as a direct result of the prices being lower on Amazon. I will go to the book store, find the book I want, then buy it from my mobile phone on the Amazon mobile store.
The Google Edition initiative is equally exciting.
Lower cost books means more books being sold and more people reading. I’m not sure how that’s a bad thing.
I don’t disagree with such thinking in the case of small bookshops. However, those ideas will still get out there. It’s just that distribution will move online. Small e-presses, online indie presses, vanity presses, etc, will fill in the gap and some of them even sell on Amazon.
IMO, there is already too much talk in the book world about how large stores like Walmart are killing writing careers because they don’t bother to pick up midlevel authors. And I do not want fewer ideas out there. I just think that there are so many more outlets and avenues for ideas to be heard.
Creative destruction can have collateral damage in the short term. Lower prices: good for everyone. The medium is changing.
The new Tablet from Apple should further improve the opportunity for small and mid-level authors. This is simply fear of change, but this is the opportunity for more with less.
Small indie bookstores have to change their business model or perish. Time for some creativity rather than business as usual…
I want to buy a few new books so I just went to Amazon to see if any of them were on this $10/$9 price war list. turns out, no.
Of the top 50 bestseller’s (actual books, no ebooks), I’d say less than 10 hardcovers were $9/$10. Of them included Sarah Palin’s new book (yuk). Otherwise, mostly fiction.
I think this price war thing has been made into a bigger issue than it really is.
I just wish my school books were cheaper. And I don’t care how they make them cheaper either. The little indie school book shops charging me 150 dollars for an english book I will use once, then offer me 25 dollars back, can eat sh!t.
All hail Amazon.
It’s changing regardless of what you think, so start changing along with it or die out along with everyone else.
This issue is a tad bit blown up me thinks. This is the natural movement of things, trying to stay static isn’t natural at all. Get with the program people or you’ll miss the train.
I’d like a poll of how many people responded with “its the technology train and you better get on it” actually would lose their jobs and have their salaries cut, because someone invented a technology that only made it cheaper to distribute content, but not cheaper to create it.
How many huge artists have actually come from these so called indie ventures?
I pretty much only buy books from Amazon (I live in Australia). Softcovers over here routinely go for AUD$30 with hardcovers being around AUD$50.
If you are talking tech books (eg, software), they are usually half the Australian retail price delivered to my door . . . from another country.
Yeah, bookseller have their finger on the pulse alright.
That’s all part of the free enterprise. Without it we would have a dictatorship. Perhaps the publishers should lower their price and try to help by selling more books. Get their profit by quantity.