WORDS AND PICTURES

Amazon is all about customer service. Its mission is plainly stated in its corporate documents: “We seek to be Earth’s most customer-centric company.1

Yet in 2014, customers looking for books from a certain publisher on its Web site might not have found or purchased them so easily. For some books, Amazon’s usual “one-click” buy buttons were missing or the period for shipping mysteriously expanded from just one to two days to one to four weeks. Prices also increased, while some book listings were missing entirely. Even blockbuster author J. K. Rowling’s latest book (The Silkworm, written under her pseudonym, Robert Galbraith) wasn’t immune from the problem. Amazon had removed the pre-order button from its listing for the book, which was expected to be a best-seller.2

The problem wasn’t a few suddenly malfunctioning pages but Amazon’s disagreement with Hachette, one of the world’s largest publishers. In all, Hachette reported, “Amazon has limited its customers’ ability to buy more than 5,000 Hachette titles.”3

Amazon, which controls more than 40 percent of U.S. book sales, offered terms for new e-book contracts that were apparently unreasonable for Hachette. According to the Atlantic, Amazon wants control of e-book prices (rather than having the publishers set prices) and wants higher payments (often called co-op payments) from the publishers for the promotion of books on the Amazon Web site. Because Amazon now sells more e-books and printed books than any other entity, it has growing leverage to make these requests.4

The dispute took on David-versus-Goliath elements, with Amazon (annual revenues of $74.4 billion) taking on Hachette (annual revenues of $2.8 billion). Stephen Colbert, whose books are published by Hachette, said “this means war” and flipped off Amazon on his show. But award-winning author Sherman Alexie (whose books are also published by Hachette) argued to Colbert that it was “two giants fighting each other,” and that people should “root for the authors,” who were the real underdogs in the battle.5

Other retailers, including Walmart, Barnes & Noble, Powell’s, and independent booksellers, took advantage of Amazon’s snub to get a bigger piece of Hachette sales. Colbert even plugged one of the affected books, California—the first novel of Edan Lepucki—on his show to prove that he could “sell more books than Amazon.”6 The unexpected boost helped the novel make the New York Times best-seller fiction list.

For its defense, Amazon released a statement saying, “When we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers.”7 But Amazon’s success in controlling prices, on behalf of its customers, would both enrich Amazon and change the entire nature of the publishing industry, the Atlantic argued: “More liberal discounting practices will give Amazon the power to continue to gain market share and it’s easy to imagine a scenario where it controls three-quarters of all book sales in the U.S. At the same time, higher co-op payments would make book publishers less profitable and less likely to invest in riskier book projects.”8 Of course, many writers speak in favor of Amazon and its industry-changing store and Kindle readers.9 Amazon offers independent authors a chance to sidestep publishing houses and earn a 70 percent royalty rate for books published with Amazon.

The dispute ended in November 2014, with Hachette retaining the power to set its own pricing on e-books. But Amazon continued other plans to remake the book industry with its new Netflix-style pricing scheme. Called Kindle Unlimited, Amazon’s new service offers more than 600,000 book titles and audio books for reading and listening. Noticeably missing in the plan were the books of the five biggest trade book publishers: Penguin Random House, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette. Advances in technology, distribution, and commerce continue—along with the battle over the future of the book industry.

IN THE 1950s AND 1960s, cultural forecasters thought that the popularity of television might spell the demise of a healthy book industry, just as they thought television would replace the movie, sound recording, radio, newspaper, and magazine industries. Obviously, this did not happen. In 1950, more than 11,000 new book titles were introduced, and by 2011, publishers were producing over fifteen times that number—more than 177,000 titles per year (see Table 10.1). Despite the absorption of small publishing houses by big media corporations, thousands of different publishers—mostly small independents—issue at least one title a year in the United States alone.

Our oldest mass medium is also still our most influential and diverse one. The portability and compactness of books make them the preferred medium in many situations (e.g., relaxing at the beach, resting in bed, traveling on buses or commuter trains), and books are still the main repository of history and everyday experience, passing along stories, knowledge, and wisdom from generation to generation.

In this chapter, we consider the long and significant relationship between books and culture. We will:

As you read through this chapter, think about the pivotal role books have played in your own life. What are your earliest recollections of reading? Is there a specific book that considerably influenced the way you think? How do you discover new books? Do you envision yourself reading more books on a phone or tablet in the future? Or do you prefer holding a paper copy and leafing through the pages? For more questions to help you understand the role of books in our lives, see “Questioning the Media” in the Chapter Review.