Good old Amazon, fighting for our rights. Yeah.

This has been reported on extensively and derisively before so I don’t know why it’s taken this long to land in my inbox. But this morning I got a rallying call kind of email from Amazon, urging me to stand with their noble men and women as they fight the good fight against the wilful stupidity of publishers.

You can tell I’m on Amazon’s side. Clearly. Actually, before this email, I wasn’t exactly ambivalent but I was willing to see that there were points on both sides. Amazon wants cheaper ebooks, publishers want to survive. That doesn’t sound like my seeing both sides but I’m am truly finding it hard now because this email so annoyed me.

It’s a long email. It opens:

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

An Important Kindle Request – email from Amazon (9 August 2014)

Tasteful use of the Second World War there. The dispute and versions of this email have been reported on and analysed and had the sales figure maths in them ripped apart. And now 900 authors you’ve heard of have objected.

I’d like to add just one thing. Amazon states that ebooks should be cheaper because:

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 and should be less expensive.

I obviously tremendously appreciate that ink is worth more than my time and work actually writing the bloody thing. But that’s not it. This is: do you know that when you buy a Kindle ebook, Amazon charges the publisher for the cost of delivering it to you?

Whatever you’re thinking now, it begins with the words “Hang on…” and the thought that we download Kindle books off of the internet. There is no delivery cost.

There was. Back in the olden days, like five or six years ago, it could cost some money to deliver your book. Follow. You’re on a beach, you’ve got your Kindle device, you fancy a book, you buy it – all over what’s really a cellular mobile connection. You’re not paying for that but it costs money to run so Amazon would charge the publishers. It was and is called Whispernet, which I do think is a lovely name, and the bigger the book, the more publishers were charged.

I would like Amazon to be more upfront about its charges. Most everybody complains that Apple takes a lot with its 30% cut but it is 30% and you now know everything. With Amazon it’s this percent or it’s that, it’s this charge or it’s that. My counting-on-fingers calculation makes the two come out about even but it’s a choice of being annoyed how much Apple charges or aggrieved how sneakily Amazon does.

Nonetheless, this is today and this is not five or six years ago. If most Kindle downloads aren’t done over free wifi then at least most of them could be. There is at least far less call for a Whispernet surcharge, if there is a call for it at all.

But you don’t see any mention of that obsolete publishing expense in Amazon’s email the way you do warehousing.

I think this is a case of a company addressing an email to one audience while intending it to be read by a completely different one. I’m so aggravated by it that I find it hard to imagine any author agreeing with the way it’s written even if they, somehow, agree with Amazon’s logic. But unfortunately I can very easily imagine it convincing readers who have no need to know or interest in knowing what all this means.

I’m enraged at Amazon’s chutzpah but I think the email is clever. That just pisses me off even more. Enough so that I’m torn over whether to post the whole text or not. I obviously should for completeness yet I don’t want to encourage them and, actually, I don’t want to read it again.

But if you’ve read this far, I can’t leave you hanging or ask you go off doing Google searches. So here’s the complete text, stripped only of my email details at the top.

From: Amazon.com
An Important Kindle Request
9 August 2014 05:44

Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion.

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. 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 and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. 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. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read). A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures. And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com

Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com

Please consider including these points:

– We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
– Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
– Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
– Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

Thanks for your support.

The Amazon Books Team

P.S. You can also find this letter at www.readersunited.com

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