Amazon versus Hachette: No Good Guys in This Fight

June 4, 2014

Lately, there has been a lot of press about the conflict between Amazon and Hachette.

Let’s examine the facts.

Hachette is one of the Big Five publishers sued by the U.S. Justice Department for collusion in price fixing with Apple.
Following the resulting settlement, Amazon began negotiating with Hachette for the lowest possible price for Hachette’s titles. Amazon has been known to sell items at a cost lower than what it pays, and it is an aggressive negotiator.
Amazon stopped displaying a preorder icon for upcoming Hachette titles, which it routinely makes available for other publishers’ forthcoming books.
The time it took to receive an order from Hachette through Amazon has expanded from three or four days to three or four weeks.

There are at least three ways to look at the conflict between these firms, for conflict it certainly is.

Amazon is the bad guy for applying pressure against a supplier to drive down its own costs. Amazon is using its platform to stress its value-add: “We help people find and buy things.” Clearly, Amazon does. But is it pushing so hard that poor, already-beleaguered publishers can’t survive?
Hachette is the bad guy. Indisputably, it is launching a worldwide publicity campaign against Amazon, the distributor trying to drive down Hachette’s profits. It’s possible that the shipping delay isn’t—at least not solely—Amazon’s fault. It could be Hachette’s deliberate slow-down. And as blogger David Gaughram pointed out May 26, Amazon shuns most contact with the press; Hachette is a sophisticated global communications company. Is it any wonder that most of the PR has been favoring Hachette?
This is an old world versus new world conflict: one publishing paradigm struggling against the other. That’s fun and interesting, but I want to underscore a key issue: At the end, someone in this struggle will make more money, or hold onto a profit margin. However, there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the victory of either party will be of any benefit to either libraries or consumers. Let’s be blunt: Amazon won’t sell ebooks to public libraries at all (other than through OverDrive), and Hachette currently charges libraries three times the consumer cost for its new ebooks.

Libraries were doing better with legacy publishers and print than we’re doing in the world of ebooks with either those same publishers or the ascendant Amazon. But rather than try to restore the past, it’s clear that libraries need to find a path to the future. Right now, neither Hachette nor Amazon is a library friend. Let them fight.

JAMES LARUE is a writer, speaker, and consultant on the future of libraries. He can be reached at jlarue[at]jlarue.com.

Tagged Under

Advocacy

Latest Library Links

20h

Genevieve Trainor writes: “The Guinness World Record holder for Most Prolific Book Thief is Ottumwa (Iowa’s) Stephen Blumberg. The 23,600 volumes he accumulated between the 1970s and his arrest in March of 1990 were all stashed in his 17-room home. Creighton University in Omaha, Nebraska, got involved with Blumberg as part of the FBI’s efforts to return the stolen manuscripts and rare books to their museums and libraries. Referred to as the Omaha Project, the information science proving ground involved four weeks, 44 catalogers and reference librarians and 600 volunteer hours to determine who might be the rightful owners.”

Little Village (Dubuque, Iowa), Dec. 4
1d

Casey Newton writes: “At the moment, no one knows for sure whether the large language models that are now under development will achieve superintelligence and transform the world. And in that uncertainty, two primary camps of criticism have emerged. The first camp, which I associate with the external critics, holds that artificial intelligence (AI) is fake and sucks. The second camp, which I associate more with the internal critics, believes that AI is real and dangerous. Today I want to lay out why I believe AI is real and dangerous.”

Platformer, Dec. 5
2d

Latia Ward writes: “One way to keep current with what students think of the library and its services is through Student Library Advisory Committee meetings. These meetings are a way to gather feedback and reinforce the library as a welcoming place. How do librarians create a welcoming environment within Student Library Advisory Committee meetings? Librarians create a welcoming environment through community, purpose, and dedicated space.” Also see part 1 of this blog post.

RIPS Law Librarian Blog, Nov. 13, Dec. 5
2d

Eleanor Hecks writes: “Few things are as frustrating to a user as when a site won’t respond. Unfortunately, it’s also an all-too-common scenario. Graceful degradation is a design approach that ensures the basics of a website will still function even if specific individual parts of it stop working. The approach removes single points of failure: just because one thing stops working doesn’t mean the system as a whole fails. A site following this principle fails in pieces instead of all at once, so the most important features remain available when some components encounter an error.”

Smashing Magazine, Dec. 6
3d

Camruinn Morgan-Rumsey and Lexi Lepof write: “On December 3, Knox County (Tenn.) schools received a list from the district of books to be removed from school libraries under Tennessee’s Age-Appropriate Materials Act. Knox County’s board of education voted in July, passing a policy to remove ‘explicit’ books from everyday student access in response to the new law. Some of the books on the list of nearly 50 titles might surprise parents. Among those to be removed are Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five.”

WVLT-TV (Knoxville, Tenn.), Dec. 4
3d

Joe Foley writes: “Copyright rules vary from country to country and have changed over time. In the US, works created between 1929 and 1963 that gave notice and renewed copyright have 95 years from their first publication date. That means that on January 1, 2025, a host of works from 1929 will enter the public domain. This means that copyright will expire on Buck Rogers, Captain Easy, Horace Horsecollar, Tintin, Hal Foster’s first Tarzan comic strips and, yes, Popeye.” Other notable works entering public domain in the United States include the Marx Brothers’ first film, The Cocoanuts, contralto Marian Anderson’s first record, and Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms.

Creative Bloq, Dec. 7; Everybody’s Libraries, Dec. 3, Dec. 7; Public Domain Review, Dec. 10
4d

Brittany Adams writes: “The digital landscape of libraries is expanding rapidly, with an increasing shift towards electronic resources and online services. As members of the library community, we’re witnessing a transformative era where physical collections are complemented—and sometimes replaced—by digital ones. This transition offers new opportunities for enhancing accessibility and engagement, but it also presents challenges, especially for young patrons and their families. It is essential to equip children and their caregivers with the tools and knowledge they need to navigate this evolving space confidently.”

ALSC Blog, Dec. 9

View more Latest Library Links

Amazon versus Hachette: No Good Guys in This Fight

Share

Tagged Under