In the May 2008 Issue:

Beyond Rachel Ray

"Jeff, Open the Pod Bay Door"

New York Comic Con: Where's the Chick Lit?

International Best: Agencies in Bloom

Bookview

Publishing Trends is a subscription based newsletter. Sometimes we post our stories with the issue. Sometimes not. To get the all of the articles listed above subscribe today!

"Jeff, Open the Pod Bay Door!"

FROM PUBLISHING TRENDS (MAY 2008)

Like Dave, the leader of the mission to Jupiter who finds himself alone and locked out of his spaceship (in Stanley Kubrick’s still astonishing 2001: A Space Odyssey), the publishing industry finds itself confronted by a technological marvel, Amazon.com, that has become cold and menacing. Some publishers have, by their account, received the following call: “If you don’t use BookSurge for print on demand, we’ll turn off the ‘buy’ button on your books.” (Turning off the “buy” button may be the first iconic threat of the new millennium.) And this may only be a first step, with attempted domination of eBooks and eAudio to follow.
Publishing blogs have exploded in outrage, the Authors Guild is exploring legal issues such as Robinson-Patman and antitrust, and the multi-year marketplace pressures from Google and B&N appear relatively mild by comparison—although their demands and the soft-ball regulatory environment of the current administration have set the scene for Jeff Bezos’s bold thrust. (As per Tim O’Reilly’s blog, the letter sent out by Amazon is a bit milder, offering to accept an ultra-short run of five books on each non-BookSurge POD product.)

The problem is that Amazon.com sells a lot of books and can only grow in that regard. As one publisher said at a recent meeting, “They’re my biggest customer!” Geez, publishers, please get a grip. Amazon.com is not your customer. The just plain folks who buy and read your books are your customers. Amazon.com, like all retailers, is your channel partner, along with other supply chain partners like printers and distributors.
But Amazon.com knows you don’t think this way, and it’s more than happy to profit from your decades-long outsourcing of customer relations. The blossoming of author Web sites is a good thing, but you still have a lot of catching up to do.

The problem with thinking of retailers as your customers is that it leads them to think of you as a mere supplier, a provider of commodities, whose cost is to be driven as low as possible and whose role in determining pricing is to be undercut. Despite the warm fuzzies of the Amazon.com Web site, Bezos is buying books by the yard, just as he is buying flat-screen TVs, clothing, and lawn furniture. He may have been all smiles years ago at the AAP annual meetings, with his pleading, California-guy expression, but he has always been a business wolf in surfer clothing, not a book person. Don’t fool yourselves. And whose product is he selling? Yours. Whose data feeds is he taking for the Amazon.com Web site? Yours. Whose customers is he learning about? Yours. Carpe Librum, guys, no need for victimhood here.

It’s fascinating to look at the difference with Steve Jobs and Apple. No question about it, Jobs has gone mano-a-mano with music and movie executives about pricing. His underlying vision, however, was to take an unmet consumer need and fill it by thrilling the customer, respecting the artists, and opening up the marketplace, not constricting it. (And he has, thereby, saved the music industry from its idiotic self.)
It would have been really easy for him to say, “You want this cool new stuff? You must buy an Apple computer to use with it.” Instead, he made iTunes and the iPod compatible with PCs, thereby cruising easily to market domination. (Test: How many of you have bought a Microsoft Zune?) In fact, Apple sold more music in the first quarter of 2008 than the previous #1 music retailer, Wal-Mart. And the ability to use an iPod for Podcasts, TV, and video is a natural extension based on consumer interest, not a wild grab-bag of all the commodities Jobs could lay a hand on like the behemoth Amazon.com Web site.

When I was growing up, Sears was the retailing giant in my world. It sold everything (once upon a time you could even buy a house there). And it provided free parking, friendly salespeople, wide aisles, and even soda fountains—not the threat of a strip search—when you entered its portals.

PT thanks Lightspeed’s Jim Lichtenberg for his reporting and opining.

---
Read other articles from this issue (May 2008 ):

Beyond Rachel Ray

"Jeff, Open the Pod Bay Door"

New York Comic Con: Where's the Chick Lit?

International Best: Agencies in Bloom

Bookview

©2008 Publishing Trends