Susan Hawthorne, Director, Spinifex Press
Amazon this week made a land grab for the intellectual property of small and independent publishers.
Amazon has switched off the ability to sell Kindle titles which are distributed by IPG (Independent Publishers Group). When the period for the renewal of the contract between IPG and Amazon came around, Amazon wanted to change the terms of the contract – but not in IPG’s favour. As Mark Suchomel, President of IPG points out:
“IPG’s terms are … acceptable to everyone else in the book business … If half the accounts weren’t buying from us, I’d have to question it, but everyone else is [accepting our terms].”
Spinifex is one of a considerable number of independent Australian publishers distributed by IPG. While Amazon’s actions has had media interest in the USA, the silence in Australia is deafening.
When colonists arrive in a country they quickly grab what they can. They make land grabs. Via their distributor, Amazon is attempting to get those publishers who work through IPG to make a direct deal with Amazon. But IPG does more than distribute eBooks. They also distribute print titles, do marketing and for some, help in selling rights. Amazon doesn’t offer these services.
Small publishers sit somewhere between large multinational publishers and self-publishers. Amazon is also wooing self-publishers, most of whom are authors who have little clout. Amazon can sell these books more cheaply because self-publishers do not have overheads and because self-publishers are a dispersed workforce. It is the piecework approach to outsourced publishing. In addition, many have little experience of publishing. Amazon, I expect, would like small publishers to sign the same contracts as self-publishers, but small publishers operate on a different business model.
Amazon is using a divide-and-conquer strategy and it’s unlikely a small publisher signing up to Amazon on its own will have anywhere near the clout of a large distributor – and who knows what terms Amazon will begin to offer small publishers in the event that distributors like IPG are taken out of the picture. Nor do small publishers have the clout of publishers such as Macmillan and others who were able to stand together against Amazon in early 2010.
Macmillan and the other major publishers won that battle because this was a fight between two reasonably equal partners. Are small publishers to be cast to the wind?
Here is how Amazon framed the battle with Macmillan:
“Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.”
So here we are: Amazon, like Dymocks in the argument about parallel importation, is driving a wedge between consumers and publishers. Most consumers want cheaper goods, but when the long term effect of that is to drive those same businesses to the wall, it is not in the interests of consumers to think only of prices. Small publishers offer an alternative to the mainstream. Our biggest struggle is to survive. The shift to eBooks is costing everyone working in publishing a great deal of time and money.
Every eBook that is produced by a small publisher has to have all of the following done by the publisher: acquisition, editing (both structural and copyediting), typesetting, interior design, cover design, conversion of files to multiple eBook formats, creation of metadata, uploading of files to multiple distribution channels, promotion (including creating media releases), contacting media, using social media, organizing events, paying of royalties, negotiating contracts and so it goes on. These are the value-add services that a publisher provides.
While the large publishers get to set their own prices, small publishers – already faced with lower returns – are expected to allow Amazon – another business – to set their prices for them. IPG’s battle with Amazon is important because it suggests that this might be a first step in subduing the colonised.
While some have said that this is an individual fight about terms of trade, I do not believe it is that simple. It reminds me of the moves by Coles and Woolworths with farmers (my parents were farmers). Without some kind of industry response, Amazon will keep on pushing and pushing and later we will ask: why did no one speak out when this began to happen to the small – and some not so small – players?
