After posting the piece on agency selling the other day, I’ve watched the twittering and blogging on this run amok. I have some further thoughts (of course, cause I’m opinionated that way), but nothing really worth writing at length about. At least until all of them are added up. So here you go with a mostly unordered list of thoughts, opinions, etc about the whole mess.

• Most authors seem to be coming down on the side of Macmillan on this. A lot of readers seem surprised in their comments that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Macmillan is asking for higher prices on their behalf for stuff. And Amazon has cut off money for them. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. Readers should not assume that an author’s interests are equal to their own interests.
• Many readers (though I have no idea what the percentage is) seem to be siding with Amazon. A lot of authors seem surprised that this would be so. I roll my eyes at this. Amazon is selling items to them at lower prices. Macmillan is asking them to either pay more money or wait longer. People respond to incentives, and they generally vote with their pocketbook. The increased money they might get comes out of the readers wallets, even if a billion people along the supply chain take their cut.
• Capitalism does not mean you sell at the cost of production plus a fair markup. I read an ostensible economist assert that readers who say they should get books at a price they are willing to pay is not capitalism. No, that’s exactly what capitalism is, if you add in that the seller has to agree to the price too. Cost of production has an impact on whether the producer agrees to the price, but even then it’s not determinative. If I spent $10 to make something but can only get $5, I may sell it at $5 just because it’s better than not selling it and getting $0.
• Because of the latter, I tend to skip all the scribblings about how much it costs to produce an ebook. I’m not basing whether I will pay $X for a book based on whether someone else makes a profit. I’m basing it on the utility to me.

• An ebook’s utility is very different than a regular book’s utility. I get the same story. I think, I’ve never compared any of the ebooks I’ve acquired with the paper copies. I get space saving and portability. But there’s a lot I don’t get: the ability to loan, sell or give away the book. I don’t get protection from book loss, computer problems being much more common than fires, floods. I don’t get the ability to signal like a paper book gives me. When you step into my apartment, you know I am a reader as well as whatever you can glean from my collection. There’s no equivalent with ebooks. I also don’t get to be a collector. I’m not as much a books as fetish object kind of guy as many, but I still like to have a few signed copies and I keep a few books around just for their artwork. What I’m willing to pay depends on what priorities I give to each of these utilities, not how much it cost someone else to make the damn thing.
• I give a lot more importance to the change in retailing models than most others do. I don’t know a single retailer that has achieved dominance in a market when they are unable to set their own prices, unless they’ve done it through means that are unavailable to Amazon. Tobias Buckell countered with Apple is an agent in their iPhone app market, where they are dominant. But that’s because they are a true monopoly there at the moment. Amazon can’t do that with ebooks.
• A lot of people, including myself, have been reading tea leaves inappropriately. So far, we have a couple of statements from Macmillan and a buried post from Amazon. Both of these entities have strong incentives to lie to us.
• Amazon is a recognized place for books. Every other place plays second fiddle to them. I include Powells links in my reviews, but I’ve seen less than 5 clicks and no sales from them. People reading my backwater blog click through to Amazon on the order of one or two hundred every month, and I usually see one or two purchases from every month.
• The user experience and blogging tools for Amazon put every other site to shame. For book information, really only LibraryThing even comes close. Only Amazon offers product previews for bloggers (if you don’t have Adblock, hover over an Amazon link on my site to see). Only Amazon offers detailed reporting. Only Amazon offers Site Stripe for bloggers. Only Amazon offers quality recommendations for users.
• Authors and anti-Amazon people pushing alternative sites to link to should coalesce around one alternative. Places I’ve seen pushed include The Book Depository, bn.com, Indiebound, and Powells as well as a slew of local bookstores. The promotion is too spread out to get any of them critical mass to be a viable alternative for bloggers linking.
• Why the hell hasn’t any of these sites or others offered extra incentives to sign up as affiliates right now? Seems like a huge missed opportunity to me.
• A lot of author commentary comes across like celebrities who work all their lives to be famous and well recognized and then complain about how they don’t have any privacy. Authors work hard to get Amazon to sell lots of their books, and now complain that Amazon is so dominant.
• Amazon is not a monopoly. They have no more than 43% of the book market. They are dominant.
• To tea leaf this, I wonder if the solution will result in something along the lines of Macmillan’s pricing model but Amazon’s retailing model. Merchant model is kept so Amazon can price as they want generally. But they also agree to limitations on pricing items, particularly a time-based price lowering.

• I’m not so sure that cheap ebooks will cannibalize physical copy sales early on. The price conscious already have the option of waiting and getting the books used or in paperback. The price conscious folks aren’t generally buying the expensive early editions.
• The primary value to a reader from a publisher is in signalling. The publisher communicates to the reader that this book is worth reading because they’ve sunk money into it. I seriously doubt a self-publishing model will be generally workable even in a world of cheaper production for everyone. If nothing else, the publisher of quality work will command bigger prices for their time, and won’t work for less. So their books will cost more.
• In an ebook world, I wonder if a stock exchange marketplace model would work or is where the agency model would end up. Purchasers won’t want to go to different destinations for each publisher for their books. They want to go to one place to purchase multiple books. The retailer and their web site acts much like a broker does for stocks. The retailer places orders for their customers on ebook exchanges, of which there really are only a handful. People can sell their used ebooks there too. And publishers can control the price by releasing copies into the market at the going rate. (i.e., the distribution right in copyright law becomes the right to release new copies into the exchange) Just musing…
• Really only tangentially related to all of this but I’m gonna throw this out there too in this post. I don’t owe independent stores my money just because they are local or independent. I shop at stores that provide services that are of value to me. Either they have good prices, or good selection (broad or focused both are possibilities), or other amenities to make it worth my time, money and effort. I don’t owe an author, publisher, or retailer money or allegiance either.

I’m not really siding with Amazon in the whole matter, though I have taken somewhat of an anti-Macmillan tone. Basically in my mind, it’s all a business dispute and not really about morals or fairness so much as a negotiation about who gets what. Authors took risks by getting into the business, and there’s no guarantee that they succeed. There’s not even a promise that their work not be held hostage to outside interests. That’s just the way business works. On the other hand I think they should rail against Amazon for business reasons (even using the language of fairness). It would be dumb not to. It would be dumb to send traffic to Amazon when Amazon ain’t selling the authors’ product. Amazon has no right to continue to make money either, or to continue to be a dominant player. I’ll shed no tears for Amazon should they lose this battle. Nor does Macmillan have any hold on me either. There’s no right or wrong, just the market. Now I sound like a goddamn libertarian.