February 6, 2012
Two more giant retailers join boycott of books published by Amazon
by Dennis Johnson
Maybe it’s an instance of live by the sword, die by the sword: After years of ruthlessly battering retailers with relentless and drastic predatory pricing, Amazon finds its foray into book publishing being greeted by a wide-scale and growing retailer boycott.
Late Friday, just days after the country’s biggest brick-and-mortar chain, Barnes & Noble, announced it would not sell books published by Amazon because its “actions have undermined the industry as a whole” (see our earlier report), two more giant chains announced they were joining the boycott: the 200+ stores of the country’s second biggest bookseller chain, Books-A-Million (BAM), and Canada’s number one book retailer, Chapters Indigo.
BAM seems not to have released a statement but rather made the announcement via a phone call to Publishers Weekly, which in turn broke the news with a one-sentence report that notes only that the boycott includes books published by Amazon’s “beard” imprint at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New Harvest. (See our earlier report.) There’s no indication the company made any further statement about its action.
The move by Chapters Indigo, on the other hand, came with a statement that made everything clear, as a Globe & Mail report details. Noting that B&N’s move had “stunned and cheered” the American book community, the report neatly sums up the significance of the three major chains joining forces with the independent booksellers who first announced they wouldn’t sell books from Amazon:
The simmering feud that began with Amazon’s plan to “cut out the middleman” by moving into publishing heated up over the Christmas shopping season when the company ran a promotion encouraging customers to scan products they want in physical stores and automatically buy them from it at a lower price. With the chain stores’ response this week, it erupted into full-scale war.
Ah, but what’s a war without a call to arms? Indigo’s statement says that’s what B&N’s statement was, and they issued a ringing endorsement of their own:
“In our view Amazon’s actions are not in the long-term interests of the reading public or the publishing and book retailing industry, globally,” Indigo vice-president Janet Eger said in an e-mail, adding, “Indigo Founder and CEO Heather Reisman has congratulated Barnes & Noble for taking a leadership stance on the matter, and offers kudos.”
I say, don’t forget this started with some independent booksellers, and kudos to them and all who joined them.
Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.
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16 Comments
Denis and Melville House,
Thank you for writing these kind of posts, for being honest and straight-forward, for caring so much about the book industry and all of us readers. You are beginning a conversation, you are spreading the conversation, you are getting us fired up and I know that there are a grand number of us that stand with you and all those in favor. The book industry is in a pivotal moment right now, a moment of change and I am glad that there are those in the industry that genuinely care and those are the players that will matter in the end.
My apologies for not spelling your name correctly, Dennis.
I still don’t understand why Amazon would be worse than the current monopoly of NYC based publishers looking to Hollywood to tell them which handful of authors to get behind. I dont’ need a bookstore, I need an Idea store. Amazon is providing that. The physical book is merely the container.
B&N has bet their future on knick-knacks for the container, not the ideas.
Because the ecosystem is actually bigger than you describe. It’s not just Godzilla vs. Mothra. There are thousands of other indie publishers and booksellers who are threatened by Amazon as well. And you can say what you want about the big publishers — and I probably agree with much of your criticism of them — but at least they have plenty of competition. Amazon’s threat is in being a monopoly. — Dennis Johnson
Thanks for this, and I agree with you that it’s a pivotal moment and there are lots of people ready to scale the walls. The time is now. –Dennis Johnson
Customer: “Do you carry this book?”
Myopic Retailer: ”No, we don’t.”Customer: “Oh. Can you special-order it for me?”
Myopic Retatiler: ”No, it’s published through Amazon, so we’re boycotting it.”
Customer: “I see.”
(Customer orders from Amazon, and forever thinks of Retailer as placing its own policies ahead of serving its customers )
Yeah, that’s a BRILLIANT strategy.
At the very bottom are the independent bookstores and their biggest threat is in the giant chains of bookstores because it is easy. People go to what they recognize, what is easy and instead of asking themselves if any independent bookstores exist in the area, they just go to B&N and that causes local establishments that usually have customer service that is beyond anything B&N can provide to suffer. Then there are the giant chain bookstores and their biggest threat is Amazon. Amazon in a way is the enemy of our enemy, the giant fish eating the fish that eats the tiny fish. And not only is Amazon a threat to bookstores, but now it is a threat to publishers. Their motive is not provide ideas, not to provide a place where people that love books can safely go. They are the dictators attempting to mass slaughter everyone that oppose their way of being, and their way of being is to dominate, to make money, and to eliminate the competition in every which way. Their motive is domination of the bookstore, of the publisher, and of everything else that is a buffer between the consumer and them. They cannot be an “idea store” when they just as easily sell televisions and electric razors as they do books. They are the monster and the monster is hungry, it needs more food, it needs more and more to shove inside its mouth and it will be ruthless in its search to eat as much as possible.
This is just great. I wonder what CreateSpace is going to do? Since they market our work exclusively through Amazon (and also being an affiliate, if not actually owned by them), then I guess we’re screwed.
I’m speaking only from my personal experience here — but it wasn’t as if I had much of a choice going with CS. I had been sick and tired of being rejected by snobby agents who invariably told me, ‘love your work, but sorry we can’t help you’. If that godawful hack job twilight can get published, why can’t I?
Then there’s these greedy subsidy publishers who want to charge me an arm & a leg just for printing – besides their inflated ‘value plans’.
Then there’s the lawyer with the Nashville ProBono Society, who seemed to take great pride in telling me, ‘you shouldn’t have to pay to be published’, yet isn’t interested in hearing from me otherwise.
If Melville House will consider a review, then I’d be willing to submit my work. I didn’t spend twenty years on this to release junk.
About time. Amazon’s business model is not in the long term interest of anybody. Except Amazon muckety-mucks.
Actually, CreateSpace is connected to Ingram and two or three other sellers…
This smacks of “Cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face!” Amazon is not going away so Barnes and Noble had better get over their “penis envy”. This is pretty much the “Over 90 somethings boycotting iPhones!”
Thank you for a great article that gives some hope. B&N, BAM, and Indigo can’t expect to survive continually bringing a a knife to a gun fight, or worse yet not showing up at all. It makes me happy to see them defend themselves.
Frankly, Chapters’ move here is nothing short of
hypocritical. Chapter’s claim of predatory tactics is a joke – they’ve used
many of the same tactics to weaken domestic competitors here in Canada. Chapters’ dominates the Canadian retail book
sales scene with something on the order of 90% of the market. This is more
about Chapters trying to maintain its own near monopoly in the Canadian
marketplace and less to do with Amazon’s business strategy/tactics.
Well, I don’t think anyone’s completely comfortable siding with giants who’ve been so tough to deal with. But there’s predatory, and then there’s predatory. Amazon takes things to a whole new level, and it’s hard not to be thrilled to see nicer bullies stick up for what’s right. That is, as bad as you think Chapters is for Canadian readers, Amazon is much, much worse.
Plus, I have to disagree with you regarding Amazon’s threat to Chapters — they most certainly have hurt their brick-and-mortar business, and are absolutely creaming them online. — Dennis Johnson
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Also, the thought of Amazon taking out B&N, etc. as well as the Big Six…well that thought keeps me up at night.
yes it really need to be continued.