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UPDATE, 2/6/10: As of last night sometime, Amazon has returned the Macmillan books back to their shelves for regular purchase through the website. Authors can now receive the full benefit of seeing their books for sale on the internet's largest resaler. This is a good thing.
Has anyone tried buying Jonathan Mahler's The Bronx is Burning from Amazon.com this week? How about Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out? Tim Kurkjian's Is This a Great Game, or What?? Praying for Gil Hodges? The Final Season?
If you have - or if you only just now clicked on those links - then you'll notice that, as of this writing, none of those books are for sale through Amazon. Sure, most of them give you a "Buy Used or New" option, but those are all third-party sales. Amazon gives you no method of buying these books through itself. And it's not just these five books. There are hundreds and thousands more books currently unavailable for purchase at Amazon.com; these are just a few of the baseball related books affected.
But why is that? There are many, many websites talking about this right now, and many of these are written by industry insiders and authors, so I won't pretend to be an expert. Instead, I'll defer to my main source of information on this, award-winning science-fiction author John Scalzi:
"It appears (if this article is correct) that Amazon has pulled Macmillan books from its online stores because it’s unhappy with Macmillan’s desire to up the price of their eBooks from $10 to $15. Macmillan, I’m assuming, wants to raise the price because it will make more money that way; Amazon, I’m also assuming, wants to keep the price lower because it has Kindles to sell, and low eBook prices is a fine motivator for convincing people to part with the $400 (or so) that Kindles cost. And looming over all of this is the iPad WHICH WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING AS WE KNOW IT FOREVER AND EVER AMEN, and for which, allegedly, Apple will allow booksellers more flexibility in setting their pricing (i.e., you’ll pay $15 for a new book at iBookstore)."
Macmillan, as I'm sure most of us are not aware, is a large publishing company. It's not like this is some small, local publishing firm that Amazon is trying to strongarm. This is a big corporation that is responsible for thousands of authors. By pulling all Macmillan books, Amazon has undermined the earning power of each and every one of those authors. Again, let me defer to Scalzi:
(Click "Read More" to continue reading.)
But as I said: I’m lucky. Other affected authors are not so lucky. Many if not most of these folks do not have the financial cushion I do, and the sales that they are getting cut out of here are going to make a real and concrete difference to them when it comes time to tally up royalties, and when they’re trying to sell that next book. I have friends who are deeply worried right now about what this thing is doing to them, and they should be worried, because it’s going to hurt them if it drags out. Amazon is not the entire sales universe, to be sure, but it’s a significant chunk, especially for genre writers who build their communities online and sell a large percentage of their work online (and thus through Amazon) because of it.
I said it snarkily yesterday but I’ll tell it to you in earnest today: Amazon was moving against Macmillan when it pulled those books, but in doing so it also moved against Macmillan’s authors. Amazon thought it was sniping at a corporation, but in fact it unloaded a shotgun into a crowd of writers. It wasn’t smart, and although I know the world isn’t built to accommodate this particular concept, neither was it fair. There’s a lot of collateral damage here.
Now, I'm not an author and I read way less than I would like to (I just finished Moneyball a couple of months ago, and that's only because I was doing nothing else on my flight), so maybe I'm not going to be Macmillan's John Connor or anything. But this is a pretty crappy situation that Amazon has forced onto a large number of authors, and I don't think it's getting any play outside of the writers' blogosphere. It seemed like something worth sharing.
If anyone is wondering what can be done about this, if anything, I, once again and for the final time, defer to Mr. Scalzi:
How to do this is simple enough: Remember there’s more to bookselling than Amazon. Offline there are brick and mortar bookstores — go visit one. They like visitors. Tell them I sent you. Online there is Barnes and Noble. There’s Powell’s. IndieBound will hook you up. Specialty bookstores have their own web sites. You can often buy books online from the publishers themselves. Hell, even Walmart.com sells books.
...
Here’s the Macmillan site — I give it to you not as a show of support for Macmillan but because it has all the books, imprints and authors affected by this thing. Find a book you like and want, and then go to any retailer you want, who will sell you the book, and then buy it. It will matter to the author. And I personally would appreciate you supporting these people who are my friends and fellow writers, who could use a break in all of this. Give it some thought today, if you would. And pass the idea along. Thanks.
The link to Macmillan's site is above. From there, you can find a full listing of their baseball books or of their sports books in general. Their list of authors can also be found on the website. There isn't much we can do about two faceless corporations squaring off over a few bucks a book, but there is certainly something we can do for the people most affected by the standoff. If you have the means, spend some time looking through those lists of books and authors and see if anything strikes your fancy.
In the meantime, here are some Barnes & Noble links to the books mentioned above: The Bronx is Burning; Eight Men Out; Is This a Great Game, or What?; Praying for Gil Hodges; and The Final Season.
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