A Black Friday Blog: take that, Amazon!

Posted by Suzy Vitello Soulé on November 26th, 2010 at 05:04 AM | | Tweet

E-book, schmee-book, I sometimes want to say [stomping my foot emphatically].  I love my artifacts.  My shelves of bindings and pages and fonts.  The texture, the smell, the way some books yellow with age and others don’t.  But, alas, just like my befuddled grandmother in front of her very first microwave oven, I will have to adapt.  Learn to love.  Embrace, even.

As a writer, the whole thing scares the living crap out of me. An entire industry scrambling to figure out how authors, agents, publishers, booksellers and readers will all develop a new model that’s smart and fair and good.  As an artist, I worry that the big boys hold all the cards.  The behemoths: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft—if they dictate the medium and the price.  What then?  That’s why I was absolutely gleeful upon reading, in this recent Standford Magazine article, that Macmillan bigwig John Sargent took Amazon to task for its $9.99 predatory e-book price, and its no-holes-barred underselling of conventional books as a way of ensuring continued stellar sales of Kindle.

Quoting the article, Macmillan postulates a different pricing model—one that reflected a belief that, “the first release of an e-book is worth more and people will pay more for it.” Macmillan further ventured that Amazon was an agent for its titles and the publisher had the right to withhold the release of e-book editions unless Amazon agreed to sell them at a price the publisher deemed fair. Under this plan, the e-book price of a new release generally would start at about $15—with the expectation that the price would fall to about $10 as demand waned.

So what did Amazon do?  They froze the shopping cart on all Macmillan titles.  Bummer for Macmillan, right?  Well, in a move I applaud as ballsy and astute, Macmillan took out a full-page ad in the New York Times announcing one of its newly released prestigious titles, The Checklist Manifesto by surgeon Atul Gawande, with a caveat: “Available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.”  That ad, along with hundreds of complaints from angry would-be buyers, caused Amazon to quickly reinstate the Macmillan “buy” button.

If I ever run across that Sargent guy, I’m so buying him a beer.  And probably, some time in 2011, I’ll also be buying a Kindle. 

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