Bookstores May Boycott New Amazon-Published Books 210
destinyland writes "Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers 'wary' as Amazon 'tries to have it all,' according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon's new line of books, complaining, 'They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.' A children's bookstore noted that 'the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I'd be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.' Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become 'digital downloading' stations — or a 'living history' museum where future generations can learn what a 'magazine rack' was."
Uh-Oh (Score:3)
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Re:Uh-Oh (Score:4, Insightful)
All these little demons are sitting at the foot of Exxon-Mobil. There's a universe of evil that is far more evil than can be written in a book.
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What's evil about Amazon business model here?
FWIW, I live in a state where Amazon does charge the sales tax. I still buy most (English) books from Kindle store. It's not the price that matters - it's the convenience.
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Responding to my own post. Reading that article and seeing how a bookstore is responding, it's an interesting dynamic. If it were any other publisher, the bookstore would jump all over the book, but the dynamics of Amazon competing by selling to the customer directly as well as being the primary force propelling the market toward digitalization is causing this reaction. If some other publisher would offer a lower price product that might move more copies, most retailers would jump all over it if it made the
Quality Control? (Score:3)
What bookstores? There's B&N. (Score:2)
What competing bookstores? There's Barnes and Noble, and a few remaining independents. Borders is in bankruptcy liquidation. ("Everything must go! 40-60% off! Store fixtures for sale.) Barnes and Noble is in financial trouble. [examiner.com] When they go, there won't be much left.
When the big guys give it up, the distribution channel dries up.All the warehousing and shipping needed to service little bookstores isn't profitable if the volume is too small.
Bookstores are going the way of record stores and video rental
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Bookstores are going the way of record stores and video rental stores.
Isn't this really more about publishers than bookstores, though?
If Amazon is effectively positioning itself as the entire supply chain from author to reader, a lot of middlemen are going to get cut out, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing if they no longer serve a useful purpose but cream a bit off the top anyway.
However, given that Amazon have little credible competition for two major sales channels (on-line ordering of paper books, and distribution of e-books), there is a very real danger here t
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Isn't this really more about publishers than bookstores, though?
It is. We'll probably still have a publishing industry, but it will publish the few mass-market titles that appear in racks at non-bookstore retailers, like drug stores and supermarkets. Everything else will be remote-order or on line only. For those books, the publisher has a very limited role and function.
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Personally I don't see physical books vanishing anytime soon. Until they provide contracts equivalent to what you can do with paper books, libraries will still have a need for physica
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They won't, just like 8-Tracks, Cassette Tapes, CDs, and MP3s have not killed off all Records and Small Record Stores.
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This is pretty much the fear of most people I know who are into books and know about amazon. This effect will be slowed down by libraries, but it will likely push through regardless.
The "tax excuse" for not adapting (Score:5, Informative)
They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage
No Amazon has an "unfair advantage" over an independent book store because:
a) It doesn't have sales staff who spend most of their time not actually doing anything.
b) Doesn't pay prime commercial rents on its facilities.
c) Has a collection so vast that no physical book store could compete.
d) Is a huge corporation so purchasing, HR, marketing, shipping etc is amortised by the sheer volume they sell.
e) Is a huge corporation and negotiates favourable tax breaks with state and federal authorities.
Amazon doesn't want to pay state taxes not because paying them would make them unprofitable, but because working out the taxes for 50 US states plus all the other countries they ship to (who would probably start demanding tax collection if Amazon caved to the states) is an unholy nightmare.
Bricks-and-mortar stores need to stop whining about on-line businesses not paying sales taxes, and need to start restructuring their businesses to deal with advantages that huge retailers like Amazon have. Here in Australia the b&m retailers are whining that imports under $1000AUD don't pay 10% sales tax, completely ignoring that those goods are generally 30% - 50% cheaper then the same product from a b&m store. A 3% - 5% price increase on those imports isn't going to save b&m stores.
Re:The "tax excuse" for not adapting (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2990 [cbpp.org]
So their opposition has nothing to do with the "OMG it'd be an unholy nightmare" scenario. Bezos has even said Amazon incorporated in Seattle specifically for the tax advantage, and Amazon's own shareholder's documents specifically identify sales taxes as a competitive advantage.
But in fact, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that Amazon already collecting state sales taxes. In this year's shareholders' call in June, Bezos told investors that "in more than half of the geographies where we do business - certain states, as well as Europe and Asia - all together, more than half of our business is in jurisdictions where we already collect sales tax or its equivalent, like the value-added tax."
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Amazon has bricks and mortar in a lot of places, so of course they have to collect there. It's one of the reasons I buy a lot of stuff at other online retailers.
So while the state-tax issue helps Amazon, it's also helping a number of mom-n-pop online resellers.
Borders? Computer Library? They're still fucked.
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But in fact, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that Amazon already collecting state sales taxes.
He may like to say that, but they avoid it at all costs. Recently, when California tried to ensnare Amazon by requiring payment of state income taxes, Amazon shut down all affiliate connections it had to stores in the entire state, disrupting huge amounts of small businesses. Ultimately, many are predicting that it will actually lower state tax revenue, not to mention the loss to the California economy.
Amazon will conform when it absolutely has to, but it's quite misleading to emphasize how much Amazon
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It's not an unholy nightmare: It actually relatively simple. Third party vendors will do most of the heavy lifting for you. I've worked at companies that charged tax in 50 states with no issues, very little actual code to support said taxes, and no more than a few extra clerks to handle giving the actual tax back to the states. Home Depot does it. Barnes and Noble does it. Catalog companies do it wherever they have presence. Why in the world can't Amazon do it?
It's an issue of not just having an even bigger
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You forgot one:
f) Their customers get to visit local stores, examine the books there to decide which they want to buy entirely at the local store's expense, and then go buy it from Amazon anyway because it's cheaper.
Personally, I buy books I care about (presents, for example) from a good local store precisely because I value the customer service they offer and being able to browse. But every time I go in these days, it seems like someone is standing holding their iWhatever and ordering off Amazon right ther
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FYI: they pay taxes to other countries they ship to. If they didn't their goods would simply get impounded in customs.
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FYI: they pay taxes to other countries they ship to. If they didn't their goods would simply get impounded in customs.
Amazon UK don't charge tax on shipments to me; if customs decide I need to pay tax I have to collect it at the post office and pay there.
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That would be because it pays VAT in UK, and under EU rules that is the tax that needs to be paid for sales inside EU.
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And Amazon UK won't ship Kindle to me. They just say go to US site (which calculates taxes right there when ordering and charges that on your credit card and authorizes to courier firm to do the tax/toll handling).
This from Finland.
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As I mentioned in my post Australia doesn't charge sales tax on imports under $1000 AUD (because it was costing more then it was generating). AFAIK most other countries charge import duties to cover the missing sales tax which the reciever has to pay to get their package.
I would bet Amazon only pays sales taxes to countries where it was a business presence.
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Possible, but then again amazon has business presence in pretty much all major countries.
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Not sales taxes, but large corporations frequently state/country shop to get deals on payroll taxes, corporate taxes, utility pricing and the like.
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I see your point that book shops should quit whining and do something instead. You're absolutely right. But why should Amazon get a free pass when it comes to sales tax?
Here's an idea. If sales tax is killing your business, maybe you could... drum roll... petition your politicians to get rid of the sales tax.
If most people are buying from Amazon solely to avoid sales tax then clearly it's a highly unpopular tax.
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But why should Amazon get a free pass when it comes to sales tax?
Please refer to Article I Section 9 [wikipedia.org] of the United States Constitution.
Are you American? If so, you should be ashamed of yourself for not fucking knowing this shit. Seriously. What happened to teaching civics in school?
sure thats a start (Score:2)
in my state, books are taxed, magazines aren't
in my state, sugar soda is taxed, bread isn''t
you have to maintain a list of what is, and isn't taxed, in each zipcode...
Cutting out the middleman (Score:2)
This is good news. Hopefully, Amazon will start publishing school textbooks, too, at a fraction of the overinflated price that conventional publishers currently charge.
Better yet, publish them as e-books and sell Kindles to school boards.
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The middle men always bitch when they are cut out. It goes to show a natural monopoly won't last long if it's abused. The music and book publishers abused their position for so long they actually thought they were indispensable. They thought wrong.
Borders bankruptcy and Amazon (Score:2)
There is a borders within a half mile walk from my apartment. It's in a high densitiy urban setting along with a plethora of other shops, two movie theaters, numerous restauraunts, etc.
Everytime I'm out on a leisurely stroll, I go in and browse throught the Philosophy, Religion, Politics, History, and IT sections. They very rarely have anything I want to read. With the bankruptcy, I've been stopping in more often as they get new shipments from their warehouse. After four visits, they finally had one title I
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So what we're actually seeing is the death of mass-market booksellers in preference to mega-mass-market Amazon
fix'd
Brilllian plan (Score:2)
"Hello Mr Bookstore Owner, I'm looking for Big New Amazon Thriller."
"Oh, you can't buy that here. We don't sell Amazon books. Amazon are evil."
"So you're not going to sell me the books I want to buy?"
"No. If you want to buy Amazon books you'll have to buy them from Amazon, or the bookstore down the road which does stock them."
"Well, guess I won't be buying anything from you in future then."
With policies this retarded it's no wonder so many bookstores are going bust.
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What bookstore has ever had every book you ever wanted?
You'll buy what you find there. You'll go elsewhere if they don't have it. In one out of a few million instances, Shopper A will try to order Book B through a particular outlet C. And if they say "we don't have it and we can't even get it," shopper A will move on to outlet D and come back to outlet C because it's still better than outlet D.
Thing is, outlet D is Amazon, and there aren't many that are better at just being an outlet.
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What's evil about Amazon offering writers to publish books directly through them, rather than through some extra middle-man?
Oh, and there will be a bookstore. It'll be called "Kindle store".
The book is in the mail (Score:4, Interesting)
When on this subject, I always recall that great movie "You've Got Mail", where a small "Shop Around The Corner" is out-foxed by a big chain. "Can we save the Shop Around The Corner?" Asks Kathleen Kelley and the crowd goes wild. Of course, while offering verbal encouragement, the crowd continues to not offer its business. Is that evil? Uncharitable? Unwise? "I've heard Joe Fox compare books to olive oil", says Kathleen Kelley. Kathleen Kelley is a walking encyclopedia on the subject of children's books and can offer you advice on what to read with your kids. Kathleen Kelley hosts a reading hour to get kids interested in reading. Kathleen Kelley knows who you are and always offers service with a smile. Is it worth it?
The Shop Around The Corner employs four people: the owner, Kathleen Kelley, and two college students. Let's peg decent wages for them at, say, $100000, $60000, and 2x$20000. In New York, you can barely live on this. Let's add rent on the place at $20000/year, and other miscellaneous expenses of $20000/year on business license, electricity, insurance, whatever. That comes to $240000/year, $960/day. "Is that why it costs so much?" "That's why it's worth so much." The store is open, say, 12 hours a day, 8am-8pm. That's $80/hour, or $1.33/minute. How fast can you check out? Friendly service with a smile takes time.
Small shops can get away with higher markup. The books, after all, are already there, so there's an expectation of immediate satisfaction which can tolerate a higher price. Let's say $10 markup for hardcovers and $2 on paparbacks, which is just barely on the line between making a profit and losing your customers. If an average customer buys a hardcover and two paperbacks, each checkout nets you $14. You need to get a customer like that every 10 minutes to get the aforementioned income level. Now, if you've ever been to a small bookstore, you'd know that they are usually empty. I don't know if people hate books, or what, but I've never seen more than ten people in a store at once, and that's a crowd. That was twenty years ago. I imagine now things are even worse. I can not imagine how anyone can run a small bookstore profitably.
What exactly do you get at "Shop Around The Corner" that you do not get on Amazon? Customer service. If you are the kind who likes to chat, to ask advice, and to receive books from a real human being, that must be invaluable to you. Only, can't you get better social interaction by spending time with your friends? Ok, there's also advice about what to read. After all, Kathleen Kelley knows everything. Well, that's why we have friends who tell us what we might like, book clubs, review sites, and amazon lists and recommendations. Ok, but isn't it nice to pick up a real book, feel the binding, smell the pages, and flip through it to see if what's inside? A nice thing to have indeed, but is it really worth a $10 markup?
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice. You just need the book. Amazon gets you the book with minimum overhead, so you can spend that money you saved on something you like instead of on keeping Kathleen Kelley in business. Oh, by the way, the author of the book is surely more important to you than she is, and the authors get 40% royalties when they publish on Amazon, and maybe 10% elsewhere (if they haggle real hard). Isn't it better to reward the creators rather than useless, but nice, middlemen?
Re:The book is in the mail (Score:4, Insightful)
The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice.
I dunno. At the bookstore I used to buy from when I was living in England there was this hot twentyish blonde chick who was unable to do up the top half of the buttons on her blouse and would lean over when running your credit card through the machine.
You don't get that at Amazon.
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The bottom line is: you go to the bookstore to buy a book. You don't need to go there to socialize or to ask advice. You just need the book.
This is a very limited view of what shopping is for many people. Not to stereotype, but while many men go to stores knowing exactly what they are going to buy ahead of time (or having a very small range of well-researched options), most women and many men also like to browse. They like to find surprises. They like to try things out. They might like expert advise, particularly on a topic they are unfamiliar with.
This style of shopping is becoming less common as internet sales go up. But there are lots
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A humorous footnote. Mega-corporation AOL paid $5 million to the producers of the film so they'd change its title to AOL's catch-phrase -- "You've Got Mail" - proving once that even movie-goers themselves have to surrender to the whims of corporations.
Headline generalize much? (Score:2)
From what I can see, the actual story is that one bookseller has considered boycotting Amazon in response to one strong-selling Amazon book.
Headline makes it sound like this is an industry-wide trend, but then again, this is Slashdot...
while( ! article.isWorthwhile() ) { article.generalize(); } article.publish();
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s/gener/sensation
FTFY
Let's not "go digital" (Score:2)
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reading a webpage on the screen is fine, reading a whole book is not.
That's what ereaders are for.
do bookstores matter? (Score:2)
So if bookstores choose to boycott Amazon-published books, leaving Amazon to sell the books themselves like they do most other books, doesn't this make brick-and-mortar bookstores even less relevant?
Get Over the Sales Tax Thing (Score:2)
Amazon.Com does NOT have a sales tax advantage in the eyes of the law. Yes they do not collect them, but individuals are still required by law to pay use tax on them unless the item is tax-free per state guidelines. So if the state is losing money, it is because Amazon's customers are committing tax fraud.
Books stores have a great use, if they'll do it. (Score:3)
I have a Kindle and I like having an e-reader.
I think digital is the way to go for hippie reasons, making it easier to move when I go to another apartment, and for dozens of other reasons.
Libraries are getting under-utilized now that so much reference information is online.
People who like reading typically LOVE coffee shops. (which is why Borders had Seattle's Best, Barnes and Noble has Star Bucks and Books-A-Million has Joe Mug)
WHY DO THEY HAVE TO BE DIFFERENT?
In the future (as in tomorrow) I would LOVE to build a multi-story Library/Coffee Shop/Bookstore. Have all the racks upon racks of print books upstairs (the actual library section), have the first floor full of sofas, overstuffed chairs, print magazines, shelves upon shelves of "take a book leave a book" racks (coffee shop near my place has one) for people to anonymously trade print books and magazines, have a movie viewing room, maybe a bike service section outside. It should appeal to hipsters and college students to no end, make people upset about the disappearing bookstores happy (especially if we keep retail physical media going), make the people who are upset about libraries disappearing happy, and it should be self financing through media sales and overpriced coffee.
Just thinking out loud here.
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I sure hope you don't use Kindle for environmental reasons. If you do, you should do more research on what it takes to make a single unit.
Re:Can't blame them (Score:4, Informative)
Of course I can blame them. As a former author the entire system was geared against the author. I have talked to several authors who have shifted to the new self-publish ebook paradigm eg Amazon. They love it. They get to keep more of their own money, and with Amazon they get a half decent DRM. And you got to give credit to Amazon they preserved with the Kindle and it is doing well.
The fact that independent bookstores go downhill is not a surprise, and they have to adapt and think of other ways to make money.
Re:entire system was geared against the author (Score:5, Interesting)
You are quite right!
Slashdot has spent a lot of mindshare on the evils of the Music biz, but not too far behind that the book industry was pretty nasty too.
However I will go out on a limb and say that Borders deserved to croak for missing the boat TWICE. Not only did they goof giving the online side to Amazon, but they missed the REASON Amazon was beating them - centralized selection. But come on gang, can we admit to ourselves how totally crappy it is to order a book on amazon and have to wait for it to be delivered?!
What Borders missed the chance for, and the media blanked the stories about, is Print On Demand. It's been carefully slammed as "eew, why would you do that?". But books are digital, right? All Borders (or Barnes & Noble - they should have had a vision meeting and worked on it *Together!*) had to do, was invest in a beautiful untouchable-quality POD system. "Can't find that obscure book that only did a 7,000 copy small press run? We'll print it for you in an hour!" (You do need the hour, getting a book that doesn't fall apart does need time for the pages to be cut and fit and glued right.)
The shelf selection would be a Lead-In sample, just to get people thinking of what they want. The POD could also fix gaps in series etc. On and on. And yes, the systems are here - Harvard University Bookstore has one. In my hand are three sample Google-Books editions of some very rare Buddhist books, one of which answered a theory question I had for five years. A year ago they had some cover art licensing gaps, so it has only a blue white text cover, but that's irrelevant. The book is REAL, and equal quality to standard paperbacks.
So THIS is the true casualty of the Intellectual Property bickering. But the forces that be missed the chance. POD is coming, and the first company to nail it will re-write publishing.
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POD is coming, and the first company to nail it will re-write publishing.
To be fair, POD has been coming to rewrite publishing for the last twenty years or so. But I tend to agree, if I could go to a bookstore and walk out five minutes later with a decent printed copy of any book in existence at a reasonable price then I'd go there a lot more.
POD? Don't think so. (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as an owner of a literary agency as well as a fellow with many thousands of physical books in my library, IMHO POD had its market potential nuked by the same forces that are impacting normal print. That is (a) the ability to carry an entire library in a Kindle, iP[od|ad|hone], general purpose Android device, other dedicated readers like the Nook, your home computer, laptop, etc; (b) the ability to put a title you want to read in your hands in seconds, (c) the ability to read what would have been a heavy volume on a relatively light device. Print (not POD) also suffers from (d) the eBook and POD ability to get a book from "last word written/edited" to the sales channel in what is effectively zero time.
Good POD devices are expensive; and demand, like demand for any physical book, is dropping as more and more people hop on the eBook bandwagon. This makes payback for the POD device an uncertain proposition for the host business.
The entire book business is in flux. One reason authors are interested (and understandably so) in Amazon's all-in-one model is the horrible royalty conditions the legacy publishers have imposed upon eBooks. With a normal book, the tradition is an advance, then royalties. With an eBook, the approach so far has almost always been give the publisher the book, they'll charge all costs to its account, and when it pays them off, they'll come with a (very small) royalty. There are several consequences to this, one of which is critical. For an established author who isn't top tier (meaning, can't demand an up front royalty), income from the previous traditionally published book fades away in the normal fashion as buzz for it dies down, but income for a new eBook via the same route won't even start for a year or more -- and in the meantime, the publishers still expect the author to do a great deal of the marketing out of pocket. That's a very tough situation to find yourself in, particularly if you are trying to make it as a full time writer.
Re:POD? (Score:2)
The point of POD is that you have your library of electronic books, but you want the Old School feel if holding a book - you print the one you need. You can certainly give the file to the POD operator in the store.
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I understand the point. The problem is, as I said, that the POD equipment is expensive, "real" books are dropping in popularity (regardless of how they are produced) and that generally speaking, the "feel" of a real book is more troublesome than the "feel" of an eBook. Personally -- and I readily admit this is just an opinion, but it *is* an opinion from someone who reads about a book a day -- real books seem to be to be more a matter of nostalgia than actual functionality; most of us reading today grew up
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I learned a lot from books I picked up from bookshelves in my home when I was a child just by browsing. There were classics which no one had read in twenty years, there were engineering text books that my father had kept (presumably he had opened some of them in the prior twenty years since he got his degree!), there were reference works -- a potpourri. I could pick up a book that
Re:entire system was geared against the author (Score:4, Interesting)
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Digital readers are only going to improve in quality and drop in price. Right now there is zero reason for fiction to exist in a physical form except as a rapidly disappearing anachronism. As readers improve, technical and other large format boo
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Harvard University Bookstore has one.
The Harvard University Bookstore is run by Barnes & Noble College Booksellers, Inc. Of course, Barnes and Noble College Booksellers was a separate company from Barnes & Noble, Inc until 2009 (although Len Riggio. the chairman of Barnes & Noble, owned controlling interest and was chairman of Barnes & Noble College Booksellers as well).
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However, there is a monopolistic danger if Amazon becomes the one major player in publishing, and controls all aspects of the chain from advances to the e-reader.
They can't (yet) prevent others from competing in the same market, but they do have a huge customer base as a bootstrapping advantage.
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You can only have a monopoly with government backing. If Amazon becomes the only player it will be because they are serving the authors and customers the best. As long as the government doesn't create artificial barriers to entry than it is not a problem. As long as Amazon runs their business well they will succeed. If it goes to their head and they start to abuse their place thinking they have no competition they will be sorely mistaken.
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You can only have a monopoly with government backing.
No, you can have monopolies for other reasons too... limited supply, networking effects, barrier of entry etc. You need to regulate the market to ensure competition, remember that monopoly is the best possible state for a private company to be in... competition is for the benefit of the purchasers, not the producers.
An example is phone communications. If there were no regulations, the best way to earn money would be for the top companies to merge and
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You do realise that when enough of book stores go down, demand for books will eventually follow? Bookstores create demand by letting people window shop, read, touch real books.
As amazon has proven, virtual shop will have something that is tailored for your preferences. Which for next generations means mostly games, videos and music. Creating supply creates demand in entertainment, and vice versa - reducing supply reduces demand as customers simply spend their entertainment budget elsewhere.
Now, publishers h
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You do realise that when enough of book stores go down, demand for books will eventually follow? Bookstores create demand by letting people window shop, read, touch real books.
I've bought way more ebooks in the last year than I did physical books the year before.
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The argument is that for every one of you, in ten years there will be ten youths that will have no contact with books, and won't buy any, because they never ran into a bookshop and browsed it in their lives. Not that it undercuts the number of the current clients.
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Amazon used books is made of win.
Sometimes you can find a good paperback fiction book for 1 penny with 3.99 media mail shipping.
$4.00 US for a book to be shipped to the house.
How awesome is that?
Borders can bite my shiny metal ass.
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Has world really gotten to the point where "eventually" in context no longer means proper long term of half a century or more, but is instead "here and now!"?
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They get to keep more of their own money, and with Amazon they get a half decent DRM.
There's no such thing as 'half decent DRM'. I'm pissed off that Amazon don't tell you whether books for sale there have DRM, because I was caught by my first DRM-infested book purchase there this week and had no way to tell before I bought it.
Kindle DRM pisses off your readers and, according to a quick Google search, is useless against pirates because it appears to be easy to remove if you don't mind downloading dubious and possibly illegal software.
The only people who benefit from Kindle DRM are Amazon, be
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and with Amazon they get a half decent DRM.
What a major advantage!
Re:Can't blame them (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Can't blame them (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Can't blame them (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly why I bought a Kindle. (And I haven't bought a print book since.) I was blessed with a borders two blocks away from my house, it was four floors, each floor was very large, and it was often open until midnight. The only thing better I could ask for is for the damn place to have some books. A few years ago the best science fiction authors got together and made a list of the 100 best SF books. I had read many of them, but many I hadn't. So I made my list of 25 books and went down to Borders and started looking. They didn't have one.
Not a single one of the 25 best SF books in the world. They had a few that I had read, but none that were on my list. Looking further entire legendary authors were unrepresented. Harry Harrison had nothing. From Piers Anthony to Vernor Vinge, nothing. Alfred Bester had nothing, Niven had one book. Ursula Le Guin, one book. The Herbert section was mostly the awful Dune books Frank Herbert's son has vomited out and had copies of half the originals.
And of these four floors, one floor was mostly music. (Who buys that in a store anymore either?) Kids books area was huge but it was 80% toys. The staff was smart and knowledgeable, but they'd often recommend books they didn't have in stock.
And on the other side of it, I've been an author. I know how badly publishers treat them. It makes the music industry look charitable. Glad to see authors getting their due.
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amazing selection
That just blew my mind.
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online book purchases DO NOT require broadband. That's the whole point of the kindle 3g.
3G is "broadband", not in the FCC sense of 4 Mbps but at least in the sense of being a lot faster than dial-up.
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What do you think 3g is, and do you have any idea how many areas of the U.S. do not have it; not even wireless coverage at all for that matter?
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Plus most ebooks are 500kB so you could download it over a 9600 baud modem in a few minutes.
The USA is a sovereign state (Score:2)
Sorry, those were Federal, not state, programs
I was referring more generally to a compulsory political institution that maintains a monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a certain territory [wikipedia.org]. This includes both sovereign states and states within a federal system.
Skin-tone illustrations (Score:2)
Why does browsing a few web pages and downloading a 400-800kb file require broadband?
From the summary: "I'd be nervous if I were an adult book publisher." I imagine that books with a lot of skin-tone illustrations are bigger than 800 kB.
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context was clearly about books not for children in general, as opposed to pornographic books in particular, but your kind of response is to be expected the way the quote/summary was worded.
By the way, you could easily have sexually explicit text-only works.
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I'm sure they'd tell me that not much has changed from their perspective in the past few years.
(Ice is one of the things you can get delivered by supermarkets where I live)
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Just ask the people who deliver ice to houses.
In that case it was different methods to get the same product; Ice. A textbook and an eBook are NOT the same product. I have yet to find an eReader I like as much as a book, even for pleasure reading. But for reference reading, nothing comes close. Bookstores need to recognize that they can work as a niche, and fill that niche, not pretend nothing has changed.
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So the majority of bookstores pass into history and the remainder becoming, book printing and binding centres. Laser printers make localised book production cheap enough and of course, how much you are willing to pay for the binding is your choice http://www.wharley.com.au/Index.htm [wharley.com.au].
So you buy your electronic version and take it to the book production facility of choice and have them produce it http://www.aboutbookbinding.com/index.html [aboutbookbinding.com], you can even make it yourself.
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Actually, they're not. Cable companies have reported extremely weak pay to view sales, low enough to impact their revenues in a very visible way last year. There was an article about it on slashdot, look it up.
Re:Sauce for the goose... (Score:4, Interesting)
The summary attributed that quote to (an owner/employee) of "A children's bookstore...". I don't think he or she was speaking of the same type of "adult" books you (and some of the people who replied to your post) think she meant. I believe she meant "not children's books."
Of course, you may have been making a sarcastic comment, in which case, "never mind!" ;-)
On a personal note, I bought one of the first Nooks sold by Barnes and Noble. At the time, it was (IMHO) better than the Kindle. I still use it everyday.
The best feature? I can order a mystery novel sitting on my couch at 3:00AM and before I can exit the Nook Store and get over to My Library (on the Nook), the entire book is already there waiting for me. The original Nook has both WiFi and (free) 3G. Because books are not very large (even books that are compilations of other books) the download time in either case is about the same (at home, or places with WiFi hotspots, it always uses the WiFi). Otherwise, it uses 3G.
The second best feature: I have "low vision." Before my vision started to decline, I used to read about 40 books a year. Over the last 10 or so years, that went down to about 4 per year. Since I got the Nook, I'm making up for lost time. In the last two years, I've read about 80 books per year (all on the Nook). You see, my Nook (as with most eBook readers) lets me change the font size (as well as the font face) so I can actually read the book without straining too much. Can't do that with a paperback.
Finally, if you take your Nook into a B&N store, it will immediately connect to their in-house WiFi and display "coupons" for money off on coffee, accessories and even books. Friday is "free eBook day" (you don't have to be in the store to take advantage of this benefit -- just press a button on the touch screen and it's downloaded to your Nook).
Barnes and Nobel is still around because they have embraced the changes the Internet has wrought in the retail book selling market. The Nook was their gutsiest move yet, but they've done other creative things to stay competitive (like compete successfully with Amazon's pricing for books bought online and a $25USD per year Members program that is very similar to the $75USD per year Amazon Prime program). And, by the way, Barnes and Nobel had a "self-publishing" mechanism in place years ago (c. 2000). Still do, I believe.
Nope, I don't work for Barnes & Nobel. I'm a software developer. Just a very satisfied customer.
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All that the "independents" in my area offer is the same junk as in the supermarket "best-sellers" list or remaindered copies of over-hyped books.
Ask them to order-in something different and they claim "that is out of print" and perhaps I would prefer some garbage written by Jeremy Clarkson as that is also filed in the Transport section.
Let them die.
Go visit Powell's Books in Portland. Then come back and tell me you will eat your words. Most people do not understand what a real bookstore looks like, one that is devoted not to playing the corporate money game, but instead to disseminating knowledge and culture. Go to bookstores in Paris' Latin Quarter. When I was there, these stores were full of people. Philosophical works were displayed prominently; Voltaire, Rousseau, Sartre were easy to find, while empty vapid corporate writing was difficult to
Re:Well, what do they offer? (Score:4, Insightful)
You seem to be so smart!
And yet you're too stupid to realize why your comment is dumb.
A bookstore like you describe can't survive unless it's in an area where people actually care about those books. Small town bookstores sell the crap you mentioned, because it SELLS. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre DON'T.
Signed,
someone who owns a comic book store in a small city and who is constantly nagged by so-called experts for focusing on manga (which sells) instead of used 80s comic books (which don't sell).
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Small town bookstores sell the crap you mentioned, because it SELLS. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre DON'T.
You sir are a troll. I think you will find you and I have profoundly different world views. I suspect that in your worldview, society exists as an exercise in commerce. We humans are born, we become educated so that we can earn and then we consume. In this worldview, a book, say by Rousseau, exists as a way to make money. People buy it for whatever reason, be it amusement or education, and the bookseller/author/publisher make money. The fact that, Rousseau's "The Social Contract" for instance is one o
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No, I simply stated that book STORES exists as an excercise in commerce. It's in their interest to make profit off the goods they offer, and yes, the worth of a product is measured in the profit it makes. That's why a re-edition from philosophical classics are dirt cheap. Because they're not covered by copyright, because few people are interested in them (be it because of lack of interest, or the fact that their ideas, as you stated, are an integral part of our "civilization". And this is the first point wh
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And yet you're too stupid to realize why your comment is dumb.
A bookstore like you describe can't survive unless it's in an area where people actually care about those books. Small town bookstores sell the crap you mentioned, because it SELLS. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Sartre DON'T.
Bookstores sell what people want. You're right. But also sometimes people buy what is being sold.
Basic principle of marketing -- you can accept what the situation is and just give people what they think they want. Or you can find new markets by convincing people they want something they didn't realize they needed before.
Our society is currently somewhat anti-intellectual. A bookstore that tries to fight that (through novel advertising and promotions) would be refreshing to some. Would it make a lot
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"Perhaps I am a bit of a luddite, "
Yep, nailed it.
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Who is the sales tax supposed to benefit? I pay property taxes to pay for my schools, police, fire, ect. The sales tax is a tax for the state to generate money to service business interests like courts ect. If the store is out of state it seems the state they qree located in should complain not where they deliver the box.
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Amazon does collect sales tax in the states where it has business presence (excepting special deals with local govts).
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Actually, you may not have to. Sales tax is collected at point of sale,
use tax on income tax forms, and at least in MA there's an exemption
for the first $2.5k (or so) purchased.