Just to recap: Hachette and Amazon are currently negotiating over terms, a situation that entered the public consciousness when Amazon stopped accepting preorders for Hachette titles. This led to Stephen Colbert encouraging people to order Edan Lepucki’s novel California from Powells.com, and generally revitalizing the spirit of independent booksellers.

There have been numerous rumors about what Amazon wants from Hachette, mostly focusing on Amazon charging Hachette to have “buy buttons” on their books, demanding larger co-op payments (basically a kickback on books sold that’s then used to market other books from that publisher, a common practice with booksellers of all sizes for decades now), and a larger cut of ebook sales.

Who knows what’s true and what’s misinformation, but Amazon’s is an attempt to address the ebook part of this:

With this update, we’re providing specific information about Amazon’s objectives.

A key objective is lower e-book prices. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out-of-stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market — e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can be and should be less expensive.

It’s also important to understand that e-books are highly price-elastic. This means that when the price goes up, customers buy much less. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. [. . .]

So, at $9.99, the total pie is bigger – how does Amazon propose to share that revenue pie? We believe 35% should go to the author, 35% to the publisher and 30% to Amazon. Is 30% reasonable? Yes. In fact, the 30% share of total revenue is what Hachette forced us to take in 2010 when they illegally colluded with their competitors to raise e-book prices. We had no problem with the 30% — we did have a big problem with the price increases.

I highly doubt this is the only thing holding up the Hachette-Amazon negotiations. And, because I’m a dick, I think the suggestion to Hachette to split their ebook royalties 50-50 with the author (spoiler: they don’t do that now and probably never will) is a funny jab. But the thing that’s most interesting to me is the price elasticity bit of this.

Again, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt—Amazon is releasing these numbers to help sway public opinion while negotiating with a major publishing house. But, at the same time, if anyone has the data to plot out the impact of price on sales for ebooks, it’s Amazon. And something about this feels right to me.

There are a few things at play with the $9.99 thing that are kind of interesting to me, starting with the supply-demand math to figure out the ideal price point. With enough data, you can plot sales for books at various price points, graph this against the variable costs for producing the ebooks, and find the number at which you’ll make the greatest profit.

None of that is how pricing works in the book industry. At best, one might do a simple calculation involving fixed costs, advances, printing bills, distribution fees, marketing costs, projected sales, to come up with a price that will give you an acceptable profit margin. (E.g., if a book costs $45,000 to make and market, and you’re expecting to sell 10,000 copies, you could price it at $15, which will give you ~$56,000 after discounts and other fees.) Even typing that out feels really low-rent. Sure, every book is different, and audiences will pay different amounts for different things, but you’d like to think that by this point in publishing history, more of that is quantified and understood. (I don’t work at a Big Five publisher, obviously, so they might tell me that it is and that I’m full of shit, but I doubt it’s all that sophisticated when compared to most other industries.)

What makes this all difficult to figure out mathematically is the interplay between printed books and ebooks. If you price your ebook optimally, at say $7.99, how many print book sales is that going to cannibalize? There are ways to figure out how to optimally price the two goods—the print book and ebook—to maximize revenue, but again, I kind of doubt many publishers are trying to figure this out.

One reason there’s some resistance to this sort of thinking and calculating is because it would upend the current business model for a lot of big presses. The system of expensive hardcover, cheaper paperback, sub-rights sales, has worked so well for so long . . . What Amazon, through the wide adoption of ebooks, has done is create a pressure that shifts some of the profits from that model to the customer. Readers are now accustomed to discounts, to ebooks costing $9.99 or less, and never paying suggested retail value for these books.

Which is what I find really interesting . . . There’s a bit of a socio-cultural element to the $9.99 price, the feeling that this is what is “right,” that books shouldn’t cost more than that. Which is weird, and partially stems from the relationship to music prices—remember when CDs were $18 a piece? No one would pay that today with $10 iTunes albums and free streaming services—and partially to the idea that a lot of the money you pay for a book goes, not to the author, but to a handful of corporations along the way.

If I buy California for $26, Edan Lepucki probably earns about $2.00 back on her advance. The rest of that goes to the bookstore, the publisher, the agent, the distributor, etc. And although there are always exceptions that make bank as writers, paints a bleak picture with the median income for writers in the £11,000 range. (Highly respected author Will Self is quoted in this, so we’re not talking about your neighbor’s kid who wrote a “book” and is now a “writer.”)

For bookstores to remain in business, prices have to stay rather high, ebooks can’t cannibalize sales too much, and people have to shop at real life stores. This is another motivating factor for publishers to resist the $9.99 ebook pricing scenario—to give bookstores a fighting chance.

I wonder about the customer perspective though. We’ve grown accustomed to $7.99 monthly fees from Netflix, to paying $1.99 for an app, to streaming music for free or buying a song for $.99. It’s hard to convince someone that an ebook is equivalent to two months of Netflix or 100 extra lives on Candy Crush.

I know this is meandering, pointless, and a reiteration of things I’ve written before, but I feel like the future of books depends in part on how society treats the activity of reading. Things aren’t the way they were—people seem to treat me with zoo-like curiosity when I read a book in a bar over a pint or glass of wine (bear in mind that this is Rochester, not NY or Seattle or Minneapolis)—and won’t ever return to those times. But there’s also a sort of hyper-active drive among techno-enthusiasts who want to create all sorts of new upstart e-reading services to cash in on the changes in our reading habits. Recommendation websites, platforms to allow people to self-publish stories in a serial format, etc. These sorts of companies are helping to disassociate ebooks from printed books, move them into a different category of goods, where you make a decision whether to buy a $3.99 ebook or a $3.99 app, rather than one $15 book instead of a different $15 book.

I have more thoughts and questions about this—like how individuals think about their spending money, and whether more books can be sold by getting them into this “app category” where people are more willing to spend money, rather than in the “books category,” where a semi-expensive purchase comes with a 10-hour commitment in order to enjoy what you bought—but I’ll save it for other posts.

From

Bookish, the struggling social network funded by three of the big five publishers, has been acquired by start-up online retailer, Zola Books. The news comes after lingering questions about the fate of Bookish, a venture which was announced in May 2011, did not go live until early 2013, and went through a string of CEOs as it struggled to gain traction.

That may be the harshest, diplomatic statement I’ve ever read in PW. Basically, Bookish took a million years too long to launch, and when it finally did, it’s product was pretty shitty. And although I’m sure the families of Bookish employees actually buy books through the site, no one else does.

Joe Regal, founder and CEO of Zola, told PW that both the Bookish name, and the URL, will stay intact in the coming months, and that he hopes to “keep the best parts of Bookish alive in one form or another long after that.” In terms of Bookish’s staff, Regal said he expects to keep “about half” of the company’s existing employees [. . .]

Which basically means that the Bookish era is over, except for the recommendation algorithm (which is supposedly good? a statement that I can’t possibly believe) will be incorporated into Zola’s site. And something about social networking.

I’m not sure I’d ever use Zola, but at least they allow users the option of giving the Indie Bookstore of your choice Bookish never did that.

OK, enough with this. But you should check out this post about Bookish’s launch. It’s pretty funny. And ranty. Here’s a snippet:

When I first heard about Bookish, the word on the street was that it would be a “Pitchfork for Books.” (See this post on Melville House that echos this belief.) I believed/hoped that this would be a site in which 3-5 books from a dozen different categories (fiction, business books, sci-fi, health, etc.) would be reviewed on a daily basis. That it would serve that critical “discovery” function in which readers (especially those not reading best-sellers) could find out what’s coming out and if they should seek it out.

THAT would be extremely valuable to readers, and would have the potential to become a “taste-making” book site that is respected by a wide range of readers. A site that could take over for the loss of newspaper reviews and position itself as more reputable than most blogs. Also, by actually focusing on books instead of publishing news or gossip, it would be pretty damn unique. Something for readers, not just insiders.

But that sort of book discovery isn’t sexy anymore. The Age of Screens is also the Age of Big Data. An editorial vision has been replaced by an algorithm. Why hire 20 editors to curate reviews and cultivate a reading community when you can get readers to piss away spend their time entering in gobs of information about which books they’ve read, bought, and liked, and then crunch that data and recommend that the next book they read is Hunger Games?

(My luddite tendencies are at full-force today.)

Looking at Bookish, it’s clear that it’s definitely NOT the Pitchfork for books. Before getting into what it is, I need to explain a bit more about why it WOULD NEVER be the Pitchfork for books. And why it’s kind of evil.

First off, this site (and it’s rather corporate, lame name) is funded by Simon & Schuster, Penguin, and Hachette—three of the largest publishers in the country. (Especially if you consider Penguin being Penguin + Random House.) Can corporate publishers really ever be the “taste-makers” in the sense that Pitchfork is? Absolutely not. In fact, no publisher can/should. An independent group of smart readers evaluating all the books coming out and highlighting ones from commercial, indie, and university presses can have an editorial vision that gets passed along to readers. And even if Bookish has a separate staff, its editorial objectivity has already been compromised.

We created Amazon Source to empower independent bookstores and other small retailers to sell Kindle e-readers and tablets in their stores. We crafted two unique programs with two different kinds of stores in mind, but retailers in select states can choose whichever program they prefer. Through the Amazon Source portal you can order inventory at wholesale prices, communicate with our account management team, and download professionally-designed marketing and merchandising assets to help drive your sales.

Not sure whether e-readers or tablets would be interesting for your customers? You can find out by participating in a completely worry-free trial. The first order you place through Amazon Source can be returned within six months. If you decide that e-readers and tablets aren’t the right fit for your store, we’ll buy back any tablet, e-reader or accessory that was on your first order, no questions asked.

OK, first off, I think most bookstores are going to see this as a huge slap to the face. We can help make money—and more market share—for the company that’s destroying our margins and making our lives that much more stressful??? Fuck. And. No. So, it’s unlikely that this will ever work.

But, at the same time, it’s not too dissimilar from the program whereby indie sell Kobo devices? But replacing Kobo with a device that dominates the markets?

Is there any benefit here? Well, this is Amazon’s claim:

We designed this program with bookstores in mind. The Bookseller Program offers a discount on the price of Kindle tablets and e-readers, plus the opportunity to make a commission on every book your customers purchase from their device, anywhere, anytime. With the Bookseller Program, you get a 10% commission every time one of your customers buys an e-book from a Kindle tablet or e-reader that they purchase at your store. This program allows you to give your customers a choice between digital and physical books, offer them access to a wide selection of e-books, and profit from every e-book they buy on their new device, from your store or on the go.

Buy Kindle devices at a 6% discount from the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.

Buy Kindle accessories at a 35% discount from the Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price.

Earn a 10% commission on the price of every e-book purchased from customers’ Kindle devices.

(I believe the 10% commission only lasts for the 2 years following the purchase of the Kindle.)

It’s not even worth parsing this, but 6% of the MSRP for Kindle devices? First off, which Kindle is this—the one with ads for Amazon products, or the one free of ads? And what’s to prevent Amazon from selling you, the bookseller, a Kindle for $100 then dropping the price on Amazon.com to $95? Even if a store gets 6% on the sale of these devices, THEY’LL STILL BE MAKING NEXT TO NO MONEY.

(Again, not worth going into, but there is a second program that doesn’t include the 10% commission, but sells the devices to booksellers at a 9% discount.)

From a reader perspective, does this make sense? I suppose so, sort of. If I could tie my Kindle to Talking Leaves, and give them $.80 for my purchase of Diary of a Wimpy Kid 8 (or whatever it was my daughter bought last night), a tiny chunk of the huge black mass of guilt and self-loathing that is my soul would fall away.

But $.80??? That’s not really going to help Talking Leaves. Especially if they would’ve made almost $7 if I had bought the physical book from them.

Sure, booksellers are aware that more and more people are reading ebooks and that they’re not getting any part of this market, and some of them wish they could capture a part of it . . . but this isn’t the solution.

It’s a fucking genius move from Amazon . . . if stores were to go along with it. In that case, Amazon gets more Kindles out into the world, customers feel slightly more encouraged to buy ebooks from Amazon, thus moving some of their spending money from the local indie bookstore (because really, wouldn’t you just rather buy something from home rather than drive all the way out to the store, which may not have the book, but will definitely be less comfortable than one’s couch . . .), to Amazon.

I can’t wait to read Dustin’s take on this over at Moby Lives/Melville House, but I’m just going to stop here, since I don’t think this is a program that booksellers will get behind, and will be a foggy memory a couple years from now.

It does dovetail nicely into what I was planning on talking to my students about in our “Intro to Publishing” class today. Namely, indie bookstores, the long tail, ebooks, and how Amazon can continue expanding and generating more revenue ($75 billion last year!).

Amazon has unveiled a new US initiative to bundle print and e-books, called Kindle MatchBook.

The online retailer is to offer customers the opportunity to buy Kindle editions of print books bought from Amazon.com for prices said to range typically from $2.99 down to completely free.

The offer will set to be available not only on newly published titles, but also titles bought as far back as 1995, where the books are signed up to the scheme.
Russ Grandinetti, vice-president of Kindle content, said: “If you logged onto your CompuServe account during the Clinton administration and bought a book like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus from Amazon, Kindle MatchBook now makes it possible for that purchase—18 years later—to be added to your Kindle library at a very low cost. In addition to being a great new benefit for customers, this is an easy choice for publishers and authors who will now be able to earn more from each book they publish.”

First of all, even if you did buy it when Clinton was in office do not buy the Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus ebook no matter how cheaply Amazon makes it via this program. Please. Save yourself.

Now, there are a number of angles to this announcement, but let’s start with some obvious, pro-reader ones: FINALLY WE HAVE BUNDLING. This is something most people with an e-reader and a love of physical books have wanted for a while—and something that music labels have been offering. In terms of music, if makes total sense (to me) that if you buy the vinyl of an album, you get a code so that you can download the mp3 version as well, allowing you to listen to the music while sitting on your couch, or while running at the gym. Basically—and this is a very important point—the music manufacture is selling you the content not the container.

As things currently stand in the book world, if you bought a copy of Javier Marias’s The Infatuations because you love Marias and are willing to shell out $20 for the hardcover version, and then, say, you wanted to take this with you to read Iceland, but, due to the fact that you’re schlepping other stuff, you don’t necessarily have the room for more than your Kindle, you’d have to pay an additional $12+ to get the eversion. Essentially, publishers are treating these two different “containers” (the physical book, the ebook) as separate items to be purchased separately.

But that’s madness. Putting aside the fact that basically no one reads these days anyway, it’s crazy to put your customers in a position where they have to choose between buying either a print version or an e-version of a book when the fixed costs to you (the publisher) are accounted for in the purchase of either one of these. Instead, offer three options: the print book for $20, the ebook for $15, or both for $23. I’d probably choose $23, or maybe $15, but I would NEVER choose to pay $35 to get both. And when a customer has so many other entertainment options, it seems like the smartest thing to do is to make things simple and keep them happy.

Dustin at Melville House pretty much disagrees with me:

We’ve discussed this before, and indeed, our own Dennis Johnson is less averse to the idea of bundling ebooks than I find myself. but it bears repeating: the problem with ebook bundling is that consumers have no real sense of what a book should cost. Readers don’t know what, specifically, they are paying for when they buy a book. If you tell them, as Amazon has repeatedly done, that ebooks are worth a dollar or less, of course they’ll believe that. After all, there is no paper to pay for.

Unlike the ever-astute readers of MobyLives, the general book buyer might not imagine, for instance, that the price of materials—the weighty stuff of a book, paper etc.—for an average hardcover book from a major publisher will rarely make up more than 15% of the eventual price of the book. Books cost what they do because the services to produce them are expensive, not the paper. Editors, designers, even marketers like myself, all cost money. And while people can and certainly have argued that publishing is broken and all of those professionals that make a book attractive or worth reading or help you find it in stores are essentially obsolete, it is impossible to argue that the value they add to a book is somehow moot if that book is digital. Ebooks from publishers benefit from the hand of an editor as much as their print editions, and that benefit is reflected in the price.

The problem I have with his logic is that he’s not taking into account the fact that this discounted ebook version is only available to customers who also buy the print version. If Amazon was reducing all ebooks to $2.99 or free, then he’d have a point. As things stand, there are like 10 gazillion $.99 books available on Amazon—the vast majority only slightly better than Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus—and that’s not even what we’re talking about. Instead we’re talking about Amazon providing a benefit that a lot of high-volume readers are going to value greatly.

Let’s look at this from a publisher point of view for a second though: We (meaning Open Letter) just looked at the royalty rates for signing our books up for this program. If you decide to enroll a title into MatchBook and sell it for $2.99 or less (with the purchase of the original), you the publisher receive either 70% or 35% of each sale depending on which royalty program the ebook is already enlisted in. That’s not bad at all . . . So, if we sell a copy of Inga Ābele’s High Tide, which retails for $15.95, and the Amazon customer decides to get the ebook for $2.99, we receive an additional $2, $.75 of which goes to the author/translator, and, more importantly, one more copy of the ebook is out there, and one reader is happy that they can read the Kindle version on the subway and the print version at home. (Or, because people are devious like this, that person could give away the print version as a gift, meaning that we lose a potential—emphasis on potential—sale and gain a second reader.)

There’s always an anti-Amazon tack to take on things like this, but personally, as a reader and a small press publisher, I’m totally on board. The one area in which I think this will have a negative impact is on independent bookstores and their agreement with Kobo.

Not too long ago, as a way of getting into the ebook and ereader market, the American Booksellers Association signed a deal with Kobo that let indie stores sell Kobo devices and receive a percentage of sales made through the devices they sold. I’ve heard good things about the devices and the small, but semi-significant, stream of money coming in from this. (I’ve also heard booksellers tell me that this has fuck all to do with their core business, and that indies should focus on their strengths instead of trying to get a piece of Amazon’s ebook pie.)

Anyway, unless Kobo works out something soon—be it or a special code or whatever—it’s going to be that much more difficult for your average reader to go with a device/system that doesn’t allow bundling, compared to a very ubiquitous one that does. Hopefully they will figure this out ASAP though, since it only makes sense that you could buy the book in person, pay a couple extra bucks at the register, and download it to your device immediately.

One last thought about “content” versus “containers”: Amazon is extremely good at viewing things from this angle and finding ways to integrate the reading experience in all of its forms. Starting this October, for some titles (I assume), you’ll be able to buy the print book, then add on the ebook for $2.99, and add on the Audible audiobook for an additional $2.99. Then you can listen while you exercise, have it sync with your Kindle version for the subway ride home, then pick up the physical book when you want that (superior, in my opinion) experience. All the same book, the same content, for one reasonable price, in contrast to having to buy three full priced versions (totaling what, $45?) for the opportunity to better integrate reading into parts of your daily life.

¹ When I first saw this “MatchBook” terms showing up in my email, I thought that it was some new discovery tool, and if not that, some sort of Amazon dating service: “Seeing that you gave Death in Spring five stars on GoodReads, you might like to meet Carrie, who gave Satantango five stars. LOVE AT FIRST BOOK.”

From the “Montreal Gazette:”:

Under the scheme, booksellers, whether big-box retailers or hole-in-the-wall independent bookstores, would all have to sell new books for a predetermined price during the first nine months after their release. Retailers that want to put certain titles on sale would be allowed to knock no more than 10 per cent off the price.

Writers, publishers and arts personalities including Michel Tremblay, Dany Laferrière, Guy A. Lepage and Denys Arcand are pushing for the measure as the only way to save independent bookstores, which are fighting for survival in an era of online shopping, e-books, big-box retailers like Costco and giant chains like Chapters/Indigo.

The provincial writers’ union says the move is needed to protect Quebec’s book industry, which employs 12,000 people and accounted for nearly $800 million in revenue last year.

In other words, the new Jonathan Lethem book, Dissident Gardens, which lists for $32.00 CDN, would be sold for C$28.80 (a 10% discount off that list price) at your local supermarket (as if a supermarket carries anything but 50 Shades and The Kite Runner . . . then again, I assume Montreal Costcos are much hipper than those found in River Falls, WI), at your local independent bookstore, at Chapter’s/Indigo, and at Amazon.ca. Currently, it’s listed for C$20.06 on Amazon.ca.

This pricing would last for the first 9 months following publication, after which time, the discounts could increase.¹

Fixed Prices—which are extremely popular in Europe, especially in France, where most everyone involved in the book and culture industry points to these laws as the driving force behind the diversity and stability of French book culture as a whole—are commonly promoted by publishers, authors, and indie booksellers as a way of “leveling the playing field,” and is generally attacked by neo-con economists and conservatives as an “impediment to the free market.”

These arguments are all pretty standard and are rehashed in about every article, and clearly are driven by each party’s desire to survive: indie stores want protection so that you buy the new Game of Thrones book from them for more than they paid for it (remember the Harry Potter days when those books were loss leaders for most stores?), and AmaCostMart wants to sell a zillion copies of 14 select best-sellers for next to nothing while customers also buy cheese or a Segueway.

Before getting into the real knotty part of this, I’ll declare my bias here: I’m always all for fixed book prices. Part of this comes from personal interest, since fixed book prices also benefit small presses. (With these laws in place, bookstores, which stock 6,000 unique titles to TargetClub’s 300 max, are more likely to carry diverse titles from a range of presses. In the über-capitalist model, they tend to try and pimp the same 14 books that everyone is selling everywhere, which doesn’t help Open Letter.) But in addition to that, I think a fixed book price law is the cleanest way to protect the “cultural” part of book culture. At the moment, readers (the handful that exist) are faced with the choice of buying a book for the lowest price possible, or supporting a local business that, due to economic constraints, isn’t as literarily diverse as it could be, or as financially sound as one would hope. (In Rochester, this is a false dichotomy: I can buy Dissident Gardens for $16.77 or drive to Barnes & Noble in the dreaded suburbs and buy it for $27.95. Supporting that particular B&N, which means supporting the B&N Corporation, not that particular store, has absolutely no cultural value to me. So I’ll take the $11 discount. Or, you know, get a free signed copy from BEA . . . .)

Once you eliminate price as a driving factor in decision making, campaigns illustrating the benefits of supporting local cultural centers/bookstores could gain much more traction.

Readers are the most complicated piece of this puzzle though. On the one hand, these laws are designed to protect them by ensuring that they have access to a wide range of books, along with the cultural benefits that a physical bookstore can provide (readings, place for reading groups, writing workshops, general interaction among human beings) that a Wegmans can’t (yes, Rochestarians, I just went there). On the other hand, they’ll have to pay more for books, and if there’s one thing most people don’t like it’s books.

Again from the Montreal Gazette:

Despite more than three decades of government intervention, Quebec has the lowest reading rates of any Canadian province. Only 46 per cent of Quebecers read regularly, compared with 54 per cent for all Canadians, according to a 2005 survey by the Canadian Heritage department. Broken down by language, 57 per cent of anglophones in Canada read regularly while only 43 per cent of francophones do so.

In 2005, the average Quebecer spent $37.10 a year on books (excluding school books), compared with a high of $50.16 in Ontario and a low of $25.72 in Newfoundland/Labrador.

And:

critics say the proposal is not only futile but would actually kill book sales, especially of made-in-Quebec books.

Fixing prices and limiting discounts to 10 per cent would result in a 14.2-per-cent drop in book sales, while sales of Quebec titles would plummet by 17.6 per cent, the Institut économique de Montréal warns in a recent study.

Another random side-effect could be the increase in sales of ebooks. Which Kobo would love, but which likely would have next to no impact on independent bookstores. So the whole idea could help preserve Quebec’s book culture (which is what I think could happen), or turn everyone into ereading fanatics in love with John Locke novels (or something like that).

*

Two final thoughts: I’ve read a number of post-apocalyptic books recently (including the first two parts of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy on audiobook and Brandão’s And Still the Earth) and one of the constants in this futuristic worlds is the total disregard for reading specifically, and culture generally. It’s all rational science, free market money hoarding economics, and a total disinterest in the human condition as related through words and images. None of this seems far-fetched to me, given the fact that less that half of the people in North America (probably less than a third, to be honest) read books on a regular basis. (Probably 90% of these readers read 50 Shades, The Hunger Games, etc., which is totally fine, but in terms of statistics, I think that less than 10% of North Americans read books outside the best-seller lists on a semi-regular basis.) And I think something is lost because of this. Be it an understanding of others, a source of information and ideas that stimulates you to think, a way of keeping the part of your mind alive that’s capable of imagining things, etc.

I think it would be interesting if all the anti-Amazon people like Melville House, the Big Four/Five/One, etc., would stop trying to take down a corporation for being a corporation (one that hits a lot closer to home than the far-more-evil Monsanto or GE or Citibank), and instead focus on some sort of fixed price legislation in the U.S. Sure, it’ll never pass because as a people we pride ourselves on selling out the future for short term economic gain, but is it really any more impossible than believing a blog post will cause everyone to stop buying things via Amazon Prime? I think that would be a more interesting debate, and one that could spill out into how other forms of media are consumed, such as music and online streaming applications, movies, newspapers and pay portals, etc.

¹ I’m not sure if the proposed legislation would include a post-nine-month cap or not.

If there’s one thing to say about this, Manjoo brings the provocation right from the get-go: “Don’t Support Your Local Bookseller: Buying books on Amazon is better for authors, better for the economy, and better for you.”

That sound you hear is the sound of 99% indie booksellers exploding simultaneously. And for that last 1%? Check this:

I was primed to nod in vigorous agreement when I saw novelist Richard Russo’s New York Times op-ed taking on Amazon’s thuggish ways. But as I waded into Russo’s piece—which was widely passed around on Tuesday—I realized that he’d made a critical and common mistake in his argument. Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires hundreds of local residents), Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”

That’s simply bogus. As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books. With his creepy laugh and Dr. Evil smile, Bezos is an easy guy to hate, and I’ve previously worried that he’d ruin the book industry. But if you’re a novelist—not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry—you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner.

Yep. “Crushing that precious indie on the corner.”

Before getting in to Manjoo’s argument, I just want to highlight some of the terms and phrases he uses in relation to bookstores and their fans:

“least efficient”
“least user-friendly”
“most mistakenly mythologized”
“cultish”
“moldering”
“precious”
“frustrating consumer experience”
“paltry selection”
“no customer reviews”
“no reliable way to find what you’re looking for”
“dubious recommendations engine”
“difficult to use”
“economically inefficient”
“my wife—an unreformed local-bookstore cultist”
“supposedly sacrosanct”
“hectoring attitude of bookstore cultists”
“allegedly important functions that local booksellers”
“poofy couch”

If I didn’t know better, I’d say that a bookstore must’ve stole Farhad’s girlfriend at some point in time. This is vitriol, or in schoolyard parlance, them’s fightin words.

Manjoo’s anti-bookstore argument mostly revolves around price—the idea that you can get 2 books on Amazon for the price of 1 that you can get at the local bookstore, and jumps from that to the conclusion that the only reason bookstores sell books at list price is because they are riddled with inefficiencies.

He does at least try and understand why some people like bookstores:

I get that some people like bookstores, and they’re willing to pay extra to shop there. They find browsing through physical books to be a meditative experience, and they enjoy some of the ancillary benefits of physicality (authors’ readings, unlimited magazine browsing, in-store coffee shops, the warm couches that you can curl into on a cold day). And that’s fine: In the same way that I sometimes wander into Whole Foods for the luxurious experience of buying fancy food, I don’t begrudge bookstore devotees spending extra to get an experience they fancy.

Cause yeah, the experience of visiting a store like Talking Leaves in Buffalo, NY or Square Books in Oxford, MS is pretty much the same luxurious experience you get in any of the 304 Whole Foods locations littered across our country. Exactly.

But this starts to get at Manjoo’s prejudices and where he’s really gone astray . . . More on that in a second, first, here’s one last damning quote about the (non-)value of bookstores:

Say you just care about books. Well, then it’s easy: The lower the price, the more books people will buy, and the more books people buy, the more they’ll read. This is the biggest flaw in Russo’s rant. He points to several allegedly important functions that local booksellers play in fostering “literary culture”—they serve as a “gathering place” for the community, they “optimistically set up . . . folding chairs” at readings, they happily guide people toward books they’ll love. I’m sure all of that is important, but it’s strange that a novelist omits the most critical aspect of a vibrant book-reading culture: getting people to buy a whole heckload of books.

What this all boils down to is Manjoo’s unabashed desire to operate like a rational consumer. If the goal of every entity—business, consumer, etc.—is to “maximize surplus value,” then you should try and wed yourself to the principles of neo-classical economics, in which the free market determines the price (there’s nothing preventing bookstores from discounting, and thus increasing demand), and it’s your job to only purchase things in which you get the biggest bang for your buck. It is absolutely 100% economically irrational to purchase a book you’re willing to pay $30 for for that $30 if there’s a $20 version available through means that don’t entail a lot of opportunity costs. This is the primary consumer advantage for online retailers. It’s just as easy (or even easier) to buy the Steve Jobs bio via an online retailer than it is to drive to a store and buy one, and that way you’ve accrued surplus value.

OK, fine. Tech people and stock brokers and MBAs and some Slate writers think like this and want to live like this. Two things: first off, people don’t behave rationally, especially when it comes to price, and secondly, there are hidden opportunity costs in this scenario that relate to community.

Manjoo, in a myopic fashion that is stunningly boneheaded, equates the “buy local” movement with bookstores supporting local authors. That is foolish and beside the point. One of the primary purposes of bookstores is building a literary community. Sure, you can point to readings (which, unless it’s Richard Russo are generally attended by 10 readers and a few homeless) as a physical representation of this, but it’s actually something much larger. A good independent bookstores is a place where you know you can interact with people who read as much as you do. It’s a safe haven for the literati in a world that’s increasingly rationalized and scary. It’s one of the few physical spaces where you can talk about literature and art after college.

This all sounds sort of dreamy and pollyannaish, but bear with me for a few sentences . . . In a way, a good bookstore is the equivalent of Cheers. Sure, I could buy a six-pack for less than half of what it would cost in the bar, but I wouldn’t get to chat with my favorite bartender, laugh with my friends, or check out the pretty people. OK, this is maybe as shitty an analogy as the Whole Foods one, but the “value” of a store like Schuler Books in Grand Rapids, MI, is the social experience AND the book selection. Manjoo’s focus on cushy chairs and shit belies the gross materialism that underlies his entire worldview. (Which helps when you talk about tech, I suppose. And explains some of that social awkwardness thing.)

The reason bookstore lovers advocate for bookstores rarely has to do with the actual books available. We all know that we can find anything we want in quicker, easier ways that cost less money. The reason people sign petitions to save St. Mark’s is because of the enjoyment you get of people watching there, or chatting with Margarita about crazy Russian writers and the East Village poets. Things are learned in bookstores and in interactions that are not able to be learned in online experiences. And for some people, that value exceeds the $10 that you could save buying Steve Jobs online. This isn’t true for all people, but it is for some. Like, as he admits, Farhad Manjoo’s wife.

Anyway, to parallel yesterday’s post, here are three ideas:

1) If you value this community experience and feel like online retailing (especially the big-A) will eradicate it like polio, you should try and find ways to help your local retailers and rail against the online stores. This is the route a lot of booksellers take, and it is an admirable one based on beliefs. I’m not sure how much of a difference this makes in the end, since technology is molding society and our values, but it’s an option.

2) You can give up. Buy books online and use that extra $10 to meet your bookish friends at a local pub. Invest in anti-depressants and Match.com subscriptions. Pray that you become part of the 1% even as you watch hyper-capitalist companies suck your surplus dry in ways so insidious that you think you’re actually signing up for them.

3) Maybe there’s an evolution that could take place. The U.S. Government and other municipalities should make it easier for bookstores to become nonprofits or get grants or find ways to support their base costs. Maybe bookstores and libraries or museums or cafes or bars or other community spaces could join forces in creating spaces for post-grad thinkers to share ideas and passions and books and whatever. The idea of a bookstore a la 1990 starting up in any mid-sized town and surviving is difficult to imagine, but there are always places like Writers & Books and whatnot that can combine bookselling with writing with the love of books with the idea of desiring social interaction.

Oh, and as a friend (who is also writing about Manjoo’s “boneheaded” article) pointed out just now, this article reeks of link bait. Manjoo could be gaming us all, hoping we get pissed so that the read rate on his articles spikes leading to more money for him to spend on $.99 books at Amazon, thus maximizing value.

First off, for anyone not familiar with this recent Amazon vs. Indie Bookstore kerfuffle, here’s a quick synopsis: Ģ����ý a week ago, Amazon posted explaining that on December 10th, if you use their Price Check App in a physical store, and then buy the product via Amazon.com, you’d get $5 off. Sort of.

To keep this as logical and accurate as possible, here’s the “fine print”:

Use the Price Check App with the location services enabled on your mobile device. See below for information on enabling your mobile device’s location services.

While you are out shopping, you may optionally provide the Price Check App the in-store advertised price of a qualifying product in the eligible product categories (Electronics, Toys, Sports, Music, and DVDs).

Place a qualifying product (shipped and sold by Amazon.com) into the shopping cart within the Price Check App.

Within twenty-four (24) hours of placing a qualifying product in your Price Check App shopping cart, complete your purchase from any Amazon channel (Price Check App, Amazon website, or other Amazon apps). If you do not make your purchase within this time period, the discount will expire.

Your discount of 5% off Amazon’s Price (up to a maximum of $5.00*), will be automatically applied at checkout within the Price Check App.

Naturally, indie bookstores (and Dennis Loy Johnson and many others) got PISSED about how this behavior (using customers to spy on competitors) was evil and would destroy all independent bookstores everywhere, and maybe cause Melancholia to crash into Earth. (Or something like that.)

What was pointed out in the comments section at MobyLives, and is absolutely evident in the instructions above is that books were not included in this program. Sure, some bookstores sell DVDs and Music, so they’re not completely unaffected by this program, but indie bookstores selling DVDs and CDs are making bigger mistakes and should be worrying about things other than Amazon.

Not that this “books aren’t included” argument had any impact whatsoever. Some of my favorite bookstores in the world took this Amazon program and used it as a marketing tool to reinforce local loyalties. Third Place had a special offer all day on the 10th, Diesel started an “Occupy Amazon” Facebook page and movement, and the ABA CEO Oren Teicher posted an open letter to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos that opens “We’re not shocked, just disappointed,” then builds off the sales tax controversy into an attack on the price check program.

Personally, I think the ABA should keep these two issues separate and deal with them on their own terms, but whatever. The point is, most indie stores seemed to follow a similar logic: Amazon may not be targeting bookstores with this particular offer, but they will in the future, and they’ve done enough damage that we need to react now. I worked in indie stores, I get this.

Yet, for some reason, this program didn’t bug me that much. I guess because a) I knew books weren’t included and that’s all I ever buy, aside from wine and b) I fucking hate Target/Best Buy/WalMart/Sam’s Club/Toys R Us and all the other crappy big box stores that sell Electronics, DVDs, Music, and Toys and make Henrietta, NY (and a billion other cities) a veritable wasteland of disgusting warehouse-style buildings and parking lots. To me, there’s little more depressing than driving down one of these streets in Anytown, USA passing by Applebee’s, Chili’s, Best Buy, a vacant Circuit City building, WalMart, and a nondescript sadness-inducing shopping mall. So, had I been motivated to leave behind the couch and my books to save 15% or $15 (whichever is less), to screw Target for its general state of sucking, I would’ve driven over to Sorrowville and scanned some toys that I would then buy from Amazon. Fuck em.

The thing is, shopping in all of these above named locations is an absolutely awful experience. And to pretend that even 25% of America is all quaint locally owned shops where customers get to know the owners and everyone smiles and bakes cookies for each other is foolish. Maybe in NYC and San Francisco and Seattle (ironically) and Chicago and large cities, this is the case. But where I live (where most people live), you can frequent the handful of decent locally owned restaurants and bars in town, but if you need to buy your daughter Mousetrap, you have to go into the bowels of hell. Or order it online. That is the truth.

I love shopping in indie bookstores. Whenever I visit a city, I check in at as many of them as I can. And buy books every single time. I have a problem. (I literally gave away 13 boxes of books when I last moved. And still have 10 in storage to go along with my 4 bookshelves at home, the 2 at work, and the growing stack of books next to my bed. DISEASED.) And I sincerely desire a situation in which indie stores populate the U.S. and most people have an actual choice between ordering books online (which you pretty much have to do if you live in Rochester) or buying from Bookstore X just down the road. I think that should be the goal of anyone advocating for buying local, or restricting Amazon’s influence, or whatever. What we want in the end is a healthy book culture in whatever form that takes.

Which brings me to opinion piece from today in which he goes after Amazon in praise of indie stores:

I first heard of Amazon’s new “promotion” from my bookseller daughter, Emily, in an e-mail with the subject line “Can You Hear Me Screaming in Brooklyn?” According to a link Emily supplied, Amazon was encouraging customers to go into brick-and-mortar bookstores on Saturday, and use its price-check app (which allows shoppers in physical stores to see, by scanning a bar code, if they can get a better price online) to earn a 5 percent credit on Amazon purchases (up to $5 per item, and up to three items).

Books, interestingly enough, were excluded, but you could use your Amazon credit online to buy other things that bookstores sell these days, like music and DVDs. And, if you were scanning, say, the new Steve Jobs biography, you’d no doubt be informed that you were about to pay way too much. I wondered what my writer friends made of all this, so I dashed off an e-mail to Scott Turow, the president of the Authors Guild, and cc’ed Stephen King, Dennis Lehane, Andre Dubus III, Anita Shreve, Tom Perrotta and Ann Patchett.

I’m not entirely clear that the first sentence of that second paragraph makes sense, but let’s let that go for a minute. Here’s my problem: Richard Russo and everyone he mentions in here are corporate authors. They are published by the largest media conglomerates in the world, who have used their power and money and influence to shape the book retail world to their advantage.

Who was the target of the last Robinson-Patman anti-trust ruling? Penguin and the other members of the Big Six. They were giving unfair discounts to B&N and Borders at the expense of indie bookstores? Why? Because they could make more money by aligning themselves with the big box stores. (Death to Big Box Stores!)

The reason I bring this up is because it’s worth wondering if the Big Six are in this publishing game for the benefit of book culture as a whole, or to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. The correct answer is the latter, and that’s reflected in nearly every decision they make. As a result, people like Richard Russo and Stephen King publish their books with Random House and Simon & Schuster so that they can reap the benefits of these corporate practices. Namely, Russo and King get way more cash and reach way more readers by being part of this system. They’re also not motivated by “doing the right thing for book culture” but by trying to maximize their impact, relevance, and earnings.

And that’s totally well within their rights. And by “their,” I mean Russo & Co., the Big Six, and Amazon. If one of these parties does something illegal, that’s a different matter, but as I well know, arguing against any of these entities from a moral “you shouldn’t maximize profits by being evil” perspective rings totally hollow in today’s business climate. Banks run rampant, oil companies are less than trustworthy, GE and all fellow corporations game the system to avoid paying any income tax whatsoever to the U.S. government. All in the name of capitalism and the free market, something that we’ve all unwittingly signed on to, and are still coming to fully understand the long-term impact of.

So it seems to me like there are three major ways to approach Amazon and this situation:

1) Acknowledge that what they’re doing is what every corporation would do if in their position (Amazon is not a bookstore, Amazon is more a tech company meets retailer), and that if you don’t like it, you should do everything in your power to benefit those outside of the corporate system and try and take down capitalism as a whole. Publish with nonprofits. Buy all books from local stores. Donate heavily to worthy literary organizations like PEN and Words Without Borders and Open Letter and the Center for the Art of Translation. Help foster and maintain a book culture that’s based in something other than price and hype.

2) Agree that capitalism rules the day, and go make your money in whatever way necessary. Amazon probably sells more Russo books than all the indie stores combined. (Maybe. I could be wrong, but if not now, then soon.) Random House’s colophon and publicity office gets Russo & Co. on the front of the NY Times Book Reivew. Use every advantage the current corporate and social structures give you to make as much money as you can, and if some presses and stores don’t make it, don’t worry—that’s capitalist Darwinism. The weak fail because they aren’t savvy enough. (I cringe writing that whole paragraph. Sorry.)

3) Figure out a valid third perspective or way of accomplishing what you really want. To say Amazon is a completely bad thing is to ignore the fact that someone living in a remote part of the country may not have access to books and other goods through their local stores. Or they have to deal with the obnoxious lighting of Target anytime they want to buy a TV or a copy of Twilight. That sucks. But it’s also true that book culture has been altered by the existence of Amazon. In some ways that are good (more people buying books), in some ways that are not-so-good (fewer communal places for book people to hang). Advocate for a fixed book price law. Work on finding ways to benefit local readers while acknowledging that a lot of people (especially in this economy) are very price sensitive. Find partnerships that benefit the culture as a whole.

I have no answers here. But I don’t think you’re going to get a capitalist company to stop acting in as capitalist fashion as possible, so rather than try and guilt them into “better” behavior, especially since MBAs around the world would likely applaud Amazon’s tactics, or say that they’re not going far enough, since the only goal there is in business is to make as much money as possible at the expense of your competitors.

Well, apparently they’ve split the difference, and according to for the next year, the rent will be “only” $17,500/month and Cooper Union will forgive $7,000 of debt owed them.

The school will also provide student help with revising the store’s business plan. [. . .]

In the past year, the bookstore’s owners have reduced their staff through layoffs and have cut their own salaries in half, but it was not enough to offset losses from the poor economy and the rise in sales of electronic books. Mr. Contant said August was the store’s worst month in memory.

But since then, as the store owners went public with their losses, the neighborhood rallied in response. A group called the Cooper Square Committee started a petition to save the store, attracting 40,000 signatures. Business picked up by about 25 percent in September and October, Mr. McCoy said, leading him and Mr. Contant to believe they could continue with a smaller reduction in rent.

The owners have no plans to rehire staff. The store’s finances remain fragile, especially as the current sales levels recede, Mr. Contant said.

The struggling St. Mark’s Bookshop was dealt more bad news Tuesday when its owners were told they will not receive a rent reduction.

Owners Bob Contant and Terry McCoy found out their bid for a $5,000 rent cut was nixed by landlord Cooper Union in a meeting with T.C. Westcott, a vice president for finance and administration at the arts and engineering school.

“They don’t feel they can do anything in terms of the rent,” McCoy said. “She started out by telling us that Cooper is really losing a lot of money.”

This is pretty unfortunately, especially given that more than 40,000 people signed an online petition in support of St. Mark’s rent reduction request. There are a few bright spots in this piece though:

[Westcott] did offer Contant and McCoy a deal: They can defer a month’s rent and pay it back over time. [. . .]

McCoy said the outcome of Tuesday’s meeting, while disappointing, is not devastating because the community has rallied around the bookstore in recent weeks.

“People have gone out of their way to patronize the store,” McCoy said. “It’s helped us enormously.”

This has always been a huge issue—especially in Manhattan—and has helped shutter the doors of many an awesome bookstore. (Lenox Hill, Coliseum, Books & Co., list goes on.) I’ve been reading a lot about the history of independent bookselling (I’m teaching the very informative and interesting in my “Intro to Literary Publishing” class this fall), and as a result could go on and on about this and related issues . . . But I’ll put that off for a rainy (or slighly less busy) day.

Anyway, here’s part of Halford’s explanation for why indie bookstores are important to keep around:

I was explaining all this over e-mail to a colleague, who replied, “I know bookstores are supposed to be good things, but we don’t have video stores anymore, and maybe we need to get used to the new order instead of lamenting the old.” This is what I’d say to his point: it totally sucks that there are no more video stores. I spent long nights hanging out at Kim’s in college, deliberating for hours over which random German film from the nineteen-seventies to take home with me. I actually watched stuff like that all the way through then, maybe since I’d spent so much time and energy looking for it. I even miss Blockbuster: when I was a kid, the Friday-night trip to the video store to pick out a movie was the most exciting event of the week. How I watch a video now is: I browse on Netflix for a while, start watching something, get about five minutes in, wonder if I’ve made the right decision, and start the process over. It’s ridiculous, and yet I can’t…stop…clicking…

My point is that I wish we had been able to save the video store. I know the young citizens of the new order don’t miss it, but kids don’t miss anything: they’re kids. And since we haven’t entirely killed the bookstore yet, I would like us not to. Going into bookstores to browse, to attend readings, to interact with the staff, to see the selection they’ve curated—all these things excite me and entice me to read. If my book-buying experience becomes simply me sitting alone on the couch click, click, clicking, I don’t know what I’ll become (I’ll probably forget I’m looking for books and jump over to Netflix).

Still, my colleague has a point: chaos and destruction are a part of life, and their consequences, impossible to foretell, are not always negative.

Yeah, and on the flip-side, economic, capitalist progress is a part of life, and the consequences of that haven’t always been positive.

Putting aside the occasional frustrations indie bookstores present to me as a publisher of “difficult” books (based on 13 years of working at or with indie stores, I’ve come to believe that 98% of America consists of locations where readers “don’t buy your sort of books”), I’ve come to believe that good bookstores are one of the best things on the planet. It’s been a while since I lived in a town with a solid indie store, and man, do I miss it. Letting my book nerd flag fly here, but there’s something life-affirming about visiting a good bookstore and interacting with other people who really love books and talking about books. There aren’t a lot of places for that sort of interaction in our society (especially not in Rochester, NY—sorry), and it is a great counterweight to the pressure of working hard (and constantly) to make just enough money to be able to make it to the end . . .

So, yeah. Indie bookstores are rad. And I too hope St. Mark’s survives.