The Brooklyn Book Festival’s website debuts a new feature this year called OnePage. Every week from March through September, OnePage will post part of a previously unpublished work — chunks of correspondence, scenes from books in progress — by authors such as Darcey Steinke, Martha Southgate, Paula Fox and Stefan Merrill Block. There will also be mini-profiles of participating small presses, including indie mainstays McSweeney’s and Akashic.
That a Brooklyn book festival would promote small presses and their authors isn’t surprising. But the sponsor of OnePage has raised a few eyebrows. As the festival’s press release noted, “The project is made possible with a grant from Amazon.com.”
Yes, much of the literary world is in full-throated revolt against Amazon’s dominance — bookstores fear Amazon will push them out of business, authors worry about deep discounting, and the Department of Justice is considering the major publishers’ challenge over the price of e-books. But amid the public and private rancor, the massive e-retailer is very quietly trying to make friends in the book world. Its strategy is simple and employs a weapon Amazon has in overwhelming supply: Money.
The Brooklyn Book Festival is just one of many recent beneficiaries of Amazon’s largess. According to a list on Amazon’s site, prestigious groups such as the PEN American Center, journals like the Los Angeles Review of Books, One Story, Poets & Writers and Kenyon Review, mentorship programs such as 826 Seattle and Girls Write Now, and associations including the Lambda Literary Foundation, Voice of Witness and Words Without Borders have all received grants.
While the dollar figures are not always announced, according to interviews and press reports, many recipients said they have received between $20,000 and $25,000. With the more than 40 current grants listed on Amazon’s site, this suggests the company distributes approximately $1 million annually to small presses and other literary-minded nonprofits. (Publishing sources confirmed that number, but Amazon would not.)
At a time when independent publishing is struggling to survive, in part due to the influence of Amazon, recipients say that these grants offer crucial — if ironic — life support. Sometimes the grants pad out thin margins of survival, and make it possible for worthy programs to maintain their tiny staffs. And there’s no question the grants support legitimately important work: Literature in translation, international poetry, smart criticism, youth literacy efforts.
If few Amazon customers know anything about the company’s growing charity presence in the world of literary nonprofits, this is by design. Since launching its grant program in 2009, Amazon has kept its efforts low-key. Indeed, Salon’s repeated requests to discuss the grant program with Amazon — or to interview Jon Fine, Amazon’s director of author and publisher relations and the man who distributes the money — were all declined.
That silence cuts both ways. A gift from Amazon is considered the devil’s kiss in many corners of the publishing world, and many grantees are in no rush to blow a ram’s horn announcing their acceptance of money, either. (Many grant recipients interviewed for this story didn’t want to say anything negative or positive about Amazon, concerned either with offending Amazon on one hand, or betraying the anti-Amazon indie ethos on the other.)
Because both sides understand the delicate nature of the dance, the only stipulations attached to Amazon’s grants are a brief acknowledgment tucked away on a back page, and a short press release sent to supporters and members of the project. Those receiving these news releases generally consist of fellow authors, editors and members of America’s indie-publishing ecosystem. In other words, some of the only people left in the world who not only never learned to love Amazon, but actively hate its grinning yellow guts.
So what’s the point of contributions that get little publicity? Does Amazon genuinely want to be a white knight, unconcerned about the credit? Or do the grants represent a kind of blood money? Is the real goal of the grant program to keep friends close and enemies closer, by showering influential, articulate and potentially critical voices in the publishing community with sacks of no-strings cash?
“It’s the bully on the playground handing you a lollipop,” says Shirin Yim Bridges, publisher of Goosebottom Books in San Francisco, which has not received a grant from Amazon. “I mean, what do you do?”
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The pillars of Amazon hatred — recently recapped by the Authors Guild’s Scott Turow on Salon — are arranged like this. Critics allege that the Seattle-based company, led by Jeff Bezos, its ex-Wall Street CEO, engages in predatory pricing. They claim that Amazon bullies small publishers into signing price and promotional contracts that threaten their already slim margins, and doesn’t hesitate to unplug the “Buy” buttons of those who resist. While the company claims a foundational book-loving ethos, some suggest it wages total war against other institutions that sell books and embody book culture.
Amazon is picking up its literary largess during an especially charged season in the company’s relationships with the rest of the book world. For the first time, the “Big Six” publishers — HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan — have refused to sign Amazon’s latest annual contract. The main sticking point is exorbitant increases in “co-op promotional fees” for e-books that the publishers see as an illegal gouge by another name. One person familiar with the details of the proposed 2012 contracts that Amazon has submitted to major New York publishers described them as “stupifyingly draconian.” In some cases, he said, Amazon has raised promotional fees by 30 times their 2011 cost. In saying no, the big publishers are following in the footsteps of the Independent Publishing Group, a major indie distributor representing dozens of small presses that refused Amazon’s increases earlier this winter and soon saw the “Buy” buttons on more than 4,000 of their titles promptly delinked.
This standoff comes as the Department of Justice considers the antitrust implications of the Big Six and Apple’s refusal to let Amazon set the price of Kindle titles at $9.99. Then there is Amazon’s bold, long-term gambit to take on publishing houses altogether with them with its in-house Amazon Publishing project.
That adds extra movement to the philanthropic knuckleball of the company’s recent patronage of small publishers. Is the program simply a calculated corporate response to past accusations of stinginess? Is it part of a long-term strategy to divide and conquer the last bastions of Amazon’s critics, while winning over some of the very people Amazon may find useful as it develops its print-on-demand and e-book business?
It depends whom you ask. Of more than a dozen grantees Salon interviewed, some completely disassociated Amazon’s charity from its business practices. Others were more conflicted, but saw nothing to gain by dwelling on the source of the funds or turning their cash-strapped offices into an Ethics 101 seminar. Others saw Amazon’s grant giving as something to be feared: An evolutionary skill developed by a natural and intelligent predator growing ever stronger off the blood of its prey.
“The grants are a blatant attempt to buy goodwill from an industry that they’ve ravaged,” said one veteran indie publisher who asked not to be identified because he’s involved in an Amazon-funded project. “They are a rapacious, horrible company from top to bottom. But they have all this excess capital, so $25,000 here and there is nothing to them. And it’s working. People say, ‘Oh, look, they’re funding a translation prize, what could be wrong with that?’ Yet everything about them is still evil.”
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But the devil’s checks never bounce. The above Amazon hater still took the money. The truth is, there probably aren’t any underfunded indie lit institutions that haven’t, or many that wouldn’t, given the chance. Nor are there many people willing to argue they shouldn’t.
“They’re funding excellent things focused on emerging writers that create new work,” says Jeffrey Lependorf, president of the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, an Amazon grantee. “Amazon operates a dangerously large part of the marketplace, and many of us are trepidatious about the power they wield. But they’re not pulling a fast one here. They’re a giant corporation doing what large corporations do, which is sponsorship [with the goal] of gaining the imprimatur of that to which the money is given.”
The tension is plain enough: The same people most familiar with and bitter about the bully’s methods are often the same people most in need of lollipops. Amazon’s grantees tend to be small and broke. They do not receive the kind of government support they would get in many European countries. A sponsored project can keep the lights on, put out the next title or series, and provide financial cushions to educated professionals who have mastered the art of flirting with, and occasionally bedding, the poverty line.
This is especially true of literary translators. Along with its own translated feature series, AmazonCrossing, the company funds several original translation projects, including the PEN Translation Fund and Open Letter’s Best New Translation Award, to the tune of $20,000 annually. The result has been some new friends for the Yellow Giant. “Translators love Amazon,” says Chad Post of Open Letter, an Amazon grantee and publisher of translated fiction at the University of Rochester. “They’re working for maybe $500 a book, books no one wants to touch. Then Amazon comes along and suddenly they’re benefiting from an industry that doesn’t help them, ever. Five thousand dollars is enormous to them. I can understand people are concerned with Amazon’s power in the marketplace, but I have a hard time chastising them when they directly benefit people who struggle their whole lives to do what they think is important.”
Many of Amazon’s grants have a broad trickle-down effect that puts hundreds of dollars in a lot of pockets. Amazon’s $25,000 grant to the Brooklyn Book Festival, for example, is spread out among numerous writers with small presses and associations, including Coffee House Press, Hanging Loose Press, Coach House Books, PM Press, McPherson and Co., Archipelago Books and Poets Wear Prada. Grants targeting writing programs reach the next generation of writers whom Amazon might one day sign up to Amazon Publishing. Recipients include the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, Girls Write Now, Asian American Writers Workshop, New York Writers Coalition and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Smart new journals have also received money, such as the recently launched Los Angeles Review of Books, an online book review site. As newspapers have cut back on books coverage, paid outlets for critics have dwindled over the last decade.
“We are thrilled with the grant from Amazon.com, which is going to allow us to pay more writers and editors,” says Los Angeles Review of Books editor Tom Lutz. “These days, if you find money for writers, you take it. It is a drop in the bucket, given all the out-of-work journalists and incredibly shrinking book advances, but it is real money. Yes, Amazon is a controversial company, but this is not a controversial program — no one, as far as I have heard, has said, ‘No, thank you.’”
Nor has anyone yet heard from a Big Six publisher eager to fund a translation award of their own.
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The man who controls Amazon’s purse strings, and is tasked with outreach to the literary community, is a 40-something lawyer named Jon Fine. Fine’s previous positions, listed in biographies and his LinkedIn page, show he’s comfortable with a range of people across the political spectrum, from liberal tastemakers to boardroom insiders. He was a media counsel for King World when they syndicated “Inside Edition” (coinciding with part of Bill O’Reilly’s tenure as anchor) and several reality shows. He moved to NBC as senior media counsel in November 1996, where he worked with late-night shows including “Saturday Night Live” and several news divisions. Before joining Amazon in 2006 as an associate general counsel for media and copyright issues, he spent five years as the vice president and associate general counsel for Random House, where he led the legal affairs division for Alfred A. Knopf and Random House of Canada.
In November 2008, Fine became Amazon’s first director of author and publisher relations and was put in charge of a “community fund” worth, by many estimates, $1 million annually. He has since become a fixture at book fairs and publishing events around the country, where he leads seminars, joins panels and generally hams it up with friends in the business, often seeking tips on grant candidates. (Again, Fine did not return multiple written and phone requests for an interview.)
Most everyone agrees that Fine is a laid-back, likable fellow, especially by Fortune 500 standards. Although he doesn’t pretend to be anything but a company man, he cuts checks with just enough sly and endearing self-awareness. “My job is to make an 800-pound gorilla seem like only a 200-pound gorilla,” he’s known to say. Combined with his background in publishing, the result is an effective go-between for repping Amazon to indie artists, publishers and writing program directors. “He’s a book lover and genuinely cares about books,” says the CLMP’s Lependorf. “Fine has a great eye for great indie causes that don’t get funded otherwise.”
Fine may be a book lover, but he still works for a CEO who famously said, “I get grumpy when I’m forced to read a physical book.” And he himself is no stranger to what some call Amazon’s darker side. Among his specialties is antitrust law, and he is said to remain part of the company’s notoriously demanding legal brain trust. “Jon Fine embodies the two faces of Amazon,” says one of his grantees who asked not to be identified. “I like him a lot and think his heart is in the right place, but he comes from the legal side.”
Even while working a room in indie-press savior mode, Fine can bare his fangs. Dennis Johnson of Melville House Books, who has become something of a legend as a fearless and relentless on-record Amazon critic, remembers Fine approaching him at the 2011 Associated Writing Programs conference. In fall 2010, Johnson had withdrawn Melville House from the Open Letter Translation Award, rather than be associated with an Amazon-funded project. “The first morning of the conference, everybody kept telling me that some guy from Amazon was looking for me,” says Johnson. “Eventually, Jon Fine walks up to me and says, ‘I just wanted to thank you for giving us a world of publicity.’ In other words, ‘We won.’” Johnson says the company has also sent reps to intimidate him into accepting contracts. “These young guys in suits come up and stick their fingers in my chest with a message that amounts to ‘Get with the program or [perish].’ This is the class of Amazon,” he says.
After Johnson pulled Melville House from the Open Letter award, he heard from translators and small publishers around the country. Some were livid. How could he deprive his translators of an all-too-rare chance to make some coin? Others expressed a whispered respect, but said they were in no position to follow suit. As if in confession, some admitted to have recently taken money from Amazon. “One of the reasons they’re finding people so eager to accept their money is they have created a desolate landscape where that money is more necessary than it used to be,” says Johnson. “People are more willing to co-opt their ethics as a result. Not everyone is proud of it. I think a lot of the giving is not known for that reason.”
Johnson’s long crusade against Amazon has for the most part been a lonely one. “I admire Dennis’ rebel spirit,” said one small publisher who declined to go on the record. “It’s very brave. You can’t really speak out publicly against them. They’ll hear. It’s amazing. You say something in a short blog interview, and they know.”
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The fact overshadowing every Amazon debate is the company’s position as the world’s largest seller of books. It is so large that those now teamed up against Amazon in the fight over agency pricing — the right for publishers to set their own prices — is a new alliance of former enemies. In 1994, an association of independent bookstores sued the major publishing companies for discount rates they said favored the chains. The publishers in turn saw chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble as the enemy for putting a squeeze on their margins. “Discussion of terms goes back before Amazon,” says Jim Milliot, a longtime observer of the industry at Publishers Weekly. “What makes this [standoff] with Amazon stark is that they take the ‘Buy’ buttons off the website. To a lot of people, that seems unfair, and it catches a lot of attention. At least the chains always sold the books.”
Publishers large and small are on the same side as Barnes & Noble and Apple in challenging Amazon’s attempt to gain a death grip on the exploding e-book market. Amazon’s success, say its critics, will lower price expectations for physical books to the point where they become untenable for the Big Six’s business model.
The current standoff between the Big Six and Amazon is a game of chicken that will end in some sort of compromise. Amazon is the biggest customer for publishers, and it is entirely possible that Amazon will succeed in making them increasingly irrelevant with Amazon Publishing — signing authors and distributing their books directly to Amazon’s massive customer base. The company has already proven with Kindle singles and other digital exclusives that they can profit by creating content and selling it directly to readers on an Amazon-created device — and without any of the legacy infrastructure costs hobbling big publishers and bookstores.
In the future, publishers large and small may be forced to live in an Amazon world in which the company produces most books and sets whatever prices it wants. Everyone else, meanwhile, will fight for crumbs from one of Amazon’s $25,000 grants. These grants may continue to buy bits of gratitude and goodwill expressed in tight smiles, but it is unlikely to result in genuine affection for its corporate soul.
“The grants give Amazon something to point to, but people don’t see Amazon’s business practices any differently,” says Chad Post. “It’s the same as with any corporation. Money is money. I take money from Citibank, and I fucking hate Citibank.”
Late last week, the Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation’s largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.
The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.
Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, “grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,” and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more.
What are some of the Guild’s problems with Amazon?
First of all, so that I don’t get dismissed as an ingrate, I should say that Amazon has been a boon for bestselling authors. Authors get paid on the basis of the cover price for a hardcover book. By discounting, which is something that chain stores started and Amazon continued, they have lowered the barriers to book buying in ways that have been personally extremely beneficial to me.
Because you get paid the same amount regardless of how much the retailer charges for the book, and the discounting encourages more people to buy the book?
Exactly. These are not personal complaints. There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They’re innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I’m not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven’t been, so far, good to their customers.
So what’s the problem?
The concern is that they are getting so large and they compete so ruthlessly that there’s a lot of fear for what the world with Amazon in charge is going to look like.
The Guild’s beefs with Amazon became pronounced over the issue of the resale of new titles some years ago. This was something that Amazon pioneered. They would sell you a [just-released] book on Day One, buy it back from you on Day Two, and then resell it to another customer on Day Three. This was legal, but certainly not what anybody ever intended.
Traditionally, in hardcover, that’s been basically a split of the proceeds between the author and publisher. (An aside: That’s something we’re fighting with publishers about in the digital world.) So Amazon decides to go into competition with the publishers by reselling the book they just bought. The publisher gets paid nothing, and neither does the author. It’s a pure profit for Amazon.
Now, the reason you don’t see used bookstores within new bookstores is that the used books compete with the new books and the publishers supplying the new books would object. Either you’re doing business with me or you’re competing with me. I’m not going to sell you books so you can take some percentage of sales.
The problem of course was the Amazon had gotten so big that publishers were afraid to resist that. It’s not the mere fact that they’re competing [with their own suppliers]. I can certainly understand that it’s good for consumers to be able to buy a book two days later at a lower price. It’s the fact that the publishers were afraid to dismiss Amazon.
Which is what they would do with a regular retailer who was doing the same thing but had viable competitors?
Right, and of course, Amazon was undercutting authors in the process. We tried to persuade them to just window this [delay making used copies of brand-new books available for a period of time, the way the release of the DVD of a movie is delayed until after it has played in theaters]. That didn’t work. It was a muscle-flexing exhibition by Amazon, saying, “We’ve got so much market power, you guys can’t do what you’ve traditionally done and take your goods elsewhere. We represent at least 30 percent of the book market.”
I don’t like losing sales, but the real problem is at the margins. Midlist authors have been struggling to survive for decades now. If you start eating into the publishers’ returns, then at the bottom of the food chain, those books are just not going to get published. We have seen that happen.
Are there other examples of Amazon using its predominance?
They now control the print-on-demand market. That’s when you buy a book and only then does a service print a copy — literally on demand. [This is a method used by academic and small presses, as well as by authors with otherwise out-of-print books.] Amazon bought a POD service called BookSurge. Then they informed their customers — university presses and some other publishers who the Guild had organized to do POD for Authors Guild members — that they would not list their books on Amazon’s site unless they paid BookSurge more for their services.
I don’t know how they defend themselves on this one. That’s another very ominous sign to the book industry and authors.
What about their history with e-books?
They deserve a lot of credit for the Kindle, for yoking e-ink with this nationwide wireless network. It’s a great innovation. And they said to the publishers, “It’s really important to us in introducing this platform that e-books appear at the same time as the hardcover edition.” Publishers said, “Oh, we’ve seen your tricks before, Amazon! Why would we ever do that?”
So Amazon says, “We’ll pay you the same amount we pay you on a hardcover.” So publishers think that sounds fine, how can they complain about that? They agree and are then stunned when Amazon announces that they’re going to sell every e-book at a loss, for $9.99. That’s an average loss of $4 to $5 a book.
Why would Amazon do that?
I suppose they could argue they were doing it to sell devices and that may well have been one of their intentions. It had the additional benefit of making it much harder for any of their competitors to enter the market.
For example: A lot of people have the habit of going into a physical store, looking at books and then turning around and buying the e-book wirelessly from Amazon. Had it not been the case that you had to sell an e-book at a $5 loss, bookstores would have been able to say, “Sure, bring your device with you and we’ll sell you the e-book right here.”
Bookstores are pretty hard-pressed by book discounting as it is, and the idea of selling ebooks at a loss made it impossible for them to enter the marketplace in competition with Amazon.
What about the proprietary format of Kindle? Didn’t that also make it hard for competing e-readers to enter the market?
You couldn’t read all those books you bought from Amazon on a competitor’s device — you can now, if you have an iPad, but you couldn’t then.
The nook is widely regarded as the better e-reader device, but if you’ve accumulated a library of Kindle titles, you can’t take them with you if you decide to switch. [Technically, you can, but most users would find this quite challenging.]
Barnes and Noble developed the nook because they really had no choice but to compete with Amazon. They were struggling at that point, and I personally don’t think they’d have been able to survive while losing $5 on every book. There simply were not a lot of people jumping into that market to compete, not with the prospect of losing $5 on every book sale. From the outside, it looks like the pricing was not just a loss leader on the devices, but a way to discourage competition.
How did Amazon’s e-book pricing affect authors?
One way that 25 percent of net became the standard royalty for e-books was because publishers said, “We all know they can’t go on selling e-books at a loss forever and sooner or later this pricing structure has got to change.” They told authors they couldn’t agree to a different royalty because everyone knew that Amazon wouldn’t be paying them $14 to $15 per title indefinitely.
You’re implying that Amazon planned eventually to use the consumer’s habituation to $9.99 books to force publishers to charge Amazon lower wholesale prices for books. They’ve tried to do that recently with some small presses, removing their titles from Amazon unless the presses agree to sell their books at rock-bottom wholesale prices. And publishers would have no choice but to agree because every other competitor would also have been driven out of the market by Amazon’s predatory pricing?
Certainly, that’s what publishers assumed.
The other thing Amazon could have done once they had the market to themselves — and this is virtually inevitable — is that they would have raised prices to consumers.
That’s part of the less-known history behind anti-trust laws. Once a large company has spent its capital to fund predatory pricing and drive its competitors out of business, there’s no reason to keep selling for cheap. The low prices don’t last.
Right. Look, if what they’re into is maximizing profits, then if they were to have a monopoly there’d be no rationale not to use the monopoly power to increase prices to consumers. Now, if I were on the other side, working for Amazon, I’d say “Show me where I’ve done that.”
Presumably, they haven’t done it yet because they haven’t achieved the monopoly yet. Historically, that’s what monopolies always do.
Correct. That is historically what monopolies do. There is plenty of precedent for that. It’s only rational to fear what they’re going to do with this accumulation of power.
Again, the concern from the author’s perspective is that e-books are putting a tremendous downward pressure on the price of books in general. That’s putting tremendous pressure on publishers to survive. And I think a world in which online book selling is driving bookstores out of existence is a pity.
How did Amazon respond to the entrance of Apple and the agency pricing system?
Apple offered to sell books on the iPad using the agency model — which is what they use for iTunes — and the publishers one by one agreed to that. Then they told Amazon they were going to follow this new model, and that they were going to produce the e-books themselves rather than Amazon doing so.
When the first publisher, John Sargent [of Macmillan], told them that, Amazon responded by removing the buy buttons not just from all of Macmillan Publishing’s e-books — about which you can say, yeah, there’s a legitimate dispute — but from their print books, too. Paper, physical books! It was another demonstration of their ability to abuse their market power.
They used their market power over an item where pricing was not in dispute to punish a publisher for taking what Amazon regards as an unfavorable position in a different market.
Why should where their books are bought make a difference to authors?
New authors traditionally are nurtured by bookstore personnel, especially in independent bookstores. These people literally hand sell books to their customers, by saying, “I’ve read this. I think you’re going to love it.” Not to mention the fact that a bookstore is a small cultural center in a community. That’s definitely a loss.
Again, my concern is for the sake of literary diversity. If the rewards to authors go down, simple economics says there will be fewer authors. It’s not that people won’t burn with the passion to write. The number of people wanting to be novelists is probably not going to decline — but certainly the number of people who are going to be able to make a living as authors is going to dramatically decrease.
When that decreases, the diversity of the literary culture decreases. The store of new ideas and the richness of the discussion all decreases.
Further reading
Scott Turow’s letter to the Authors Guild membership
The Wall Street Journal on the Justice Department’s threat to sue Apple and five book publishers for price fixing
I suspect I’m not the only person starting 2012 with a resolution to buy fewer books from Amazon. Resistance to the e-commerce giant and its crypto-monopolistic ways crystallized just before Christmas, when it offered customers a 5 percent credit to use its price-checking app in brick-and-mortar stores, thereby undercutting local businesses.
Booksellers have been complaining about “showrooming” — the practice of using a bookstore to browse and learn about new titles while buying the actual books online — for a while now. Amazon’s holiday-season gambit, and a New York Times op-ed denouncing it written by novelist Richard Russo, alerted readers who value their local bookstores to the possibility that those stores will vanish if we don’t make a point of patronizing them.
But what if you prefer e-books? Because of my job, I rarely buy print books. (I get too many sent to me as it is.) Yet, for various reasons, I’ve found myself purchasing a surprising number of e-books to read on my iPad. At first, I automatically opted for Kindle books; the Kindle app for the iPad works great, and if I decide to switch to reading on my iPhone, it will automatically keep my place. Above all, Amazon has the richest and deepest online books database, where I can instantly find out whether a title is available in e-book (or audiobook) format, scan reader reviews and follow reader-generated tags to find similar titles.
Many people assume that if you want e-books, you’ve got to buy them from Amazon or another online retailer. They’re wrong about that. You most certainly can purchase e-books from your local independent bookstore. I’ve done it myself several times since I made my resolution to avoid buying them from Amazon if at all possible. Two of my favorite New York booksellers — Greenlight Books in Brooklyn and McNally Jackson in Manhattan — participate in the Google e-books program. You can visit their websites, find the book you want and purchase it through Google, which gives the bookstore a cut. The prices are comparable and the Google Books app works as well as the Kindle one.
That doesn’t mean that I don’t still use Amazon to find out about e-books. From browsing in the Kindle store, I learned that Cornelia Read’s “Field of Darkness” — a 2006 mystery recommended by one of my favorite authors, Tana French — is now available as a Kindle e-book for a mere $1.99. So I popped over to McNally Jackson’s website, searched on that title and found that the Google e-book could be had for the same low price, whereupon I bought it there. (Admittedly, McNally Jackson’s cut on a $2 book can’t be much, but I’ve bought full-price e-books from them as well. This is just the most recent one I learned about first from Amazon.)
I call this practice “reverse showrooming,” and recommend it to e-book aficionados who want to break their Amazon habit. Unfortunately, not all indie booksellers participate in the Google e-books program, and those who do aren’t always adept at highlighting the option. The small publisher Melville House Press is trying to boost the program among booksellers by distributing free, customized “shelf talkers” for the MHP titles carried by individual bookstores. (Shelf talkers are those paper notices attached to book displays recommending particular title, usually as a staff pick.)
Melville House’s shelf talkers include a QR code — one of those enigmatic squares of black and white dots — that, when scanned by a shopper’s smartphone, will take her immediately to the bookseller’s website and an order page for the book. Instead of seeing the book in the store and having to look it up on Amazon in order to buy the e-book, the code makes it even easier to buy the e-book directly from the bookstore itself.
Dennis Johnson, Melville House’s founder, says that so far only a few forward-thinking booksellers have taken the press up on its offer. Times are tough for brick and mortar stores and he says many of them view e-book sales as “not their core business.” Google’s eBookstore got off to a slow start after launching a year ago and there have been bottlenecks when it comes to adding new books to the system, especially for smaller publishers like Melville House. Yet booksellers and publishers have nothing to lose by making this un-Amazon, pro-indie option more visible.
Not surprisingly, you can’t read Google e-books on your Kindle (except for the KindleFire), which is one reason why the most popular e-reader on the market isn’t necessarily the best. You can read Google e-books on smartphones, tablets like the iPad, the Nook, the Sony Reader and a variety of lesser-known e-readers, some with e-ink, others backlit. There are also rumors of a forthcoming Google e-reader and — after a recent survey showed that consumers are interested in an indie-branded e-reader — the head of the American Booksellers’ Association said they are “aggressively in the process of trying to develop a device that our members can sell as well.”
But if you’re one of the millions of Americans who owns an iPad or its Android equivalent, there’s no need to wait. You can make the switch from Amazon to indie e-books right now, and do your part in the coming year to keep your town or city a more bookish place.
Further reading
Why it’s more important than you may realize to support your local independent bookstore
The site of the Google eBookstore can tell you how to read Google ebooks on your device
A video demonstrating Melville House Press’ Digital Direct Shelftalkers
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Congrats! You’re the best. For now. That’s the essence of an email I got back in June, when my novel “The Adults” was listed as an Amazon Best Book of 2011 … So Far. You haven’t heard of this list? Two weeks ago, I would have directed you to my Amazon page, where you’d see the gold badge on my book. It was inscribed Best Book of 2011, and then in small print, “So Far.”
It was enough of an honor for me. The shiny addition to my Web page would boost sales, regardless of what was written inside it. A gold badge plastered to a rock would help it sell, even if what was written on the badge was, “This Rock Sucks.” It draws attention to the rock, makes you at least consider its worth.
As a debut novelist, that is all I had hoped for. So I properly celebrated, meaning, I posted the news on Facebook, drank some champagne with friends, who were very enthusiastic, shouting, “That’s the coolest thing ever” and “Wow, I shop on Amazon!”
Then I called my parents. Talking to parents is always easier when drinking champagne, and drinking champagne is more fun when it’s because of your achievement. Even if that achievement is offered with a possible expiration date — December, the month that the final best books lists start to emerge. As the phone rang, I tried to savor the honor, ignored its ephemeral nature, and Harold Camping’s prediction that the world would end on Oct. 21, before the year-end lists. That didn’t seem like the worst thing in the world.
“So far?” my mother said through the phone. “What do they mean, so far?”
Yes, I explained. Amazon likes “The Adults,” but can’t commit to declaring it the best, because the year is not yet over, and surely something much better will come out, especially closer to the holidays when the big names are published.
“That’s kind of stupid,” my mother said.
My mother didn’t think it made sense to honor something and hedge your bets at the same time. And the more she pointed out the absurdity of the “So Far” on the bottom of the badge, the more it became the smudge on my contact. I put my finger over the two words, imagined what it’d look like if it were gone by December. My mother was right. A gold badge is not quite a gold badge if it’s halfhearted. Even if it’s shiny-looking, the doubt is there — especially when it’s written right within its border.
“It’s still an honor,” I said. “Just to be noticed.”
“You don’t have to be diplomatic. Not with me, sweetheart,” my mother said.
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Months passed. The world, for better or worse, did not end. December arrived. The best books lists came out, and I did not make Amazon’s final cut. My halfhearted gold badge was removed from my page. My friends came over again, and this time we drank Jameson.
“Imagine,” a friend said, “a teacher giving you a gold star on your elementary school essay. Congrats! You’re the best! And then you look closer, and you see ‘So Far’ inscribed in the middle of it. So mean.”
Another friend said, “At the very least, you are still kind of Buzz Aldrin.”
“At least you were invited to the party,” another offered. “I didn’t get sort of celebrated for anything this year.”
That was how I felt; at least I was invited to the party. That was how I always felt, in high school, if an invitation found its way to my locker. Me? Out of all these hundreds of people in our school? You want me to come and stand by your bag of potato chips and Twizzlers and tell stories about my slightly feral cat?
I always arrived too early to those parties, which might explain why I am always late now. When you are the first to show up, you stand around with the other early birds. Usually the only thing I had in common with the early birds is that we were early, and we are desperately waiting for everyone else to show up.
In the meantime, I started talking to a boy from my math class. He liked my earrings. I said, “Thanks.” We had math together. We started making fun of our math teacher. Turned out we had more in common. We both disliked our math teacher and agreed that her skirt made her look like a Fisher Price toy. Soon, we were laughing. I liked him. Who would have thought, this early into a party, already finding an interesting conversation? But he was still looking over his shoulder, waiting for the others, and so was I, even though I was pretty sure were both enjoying the conversation. Because all around us people were arriving and new conversations were forming. The room was loud with new laughter. Better laughter. Louder and fresher laughter. It had to be, because isn’t that the point of a civilization, that we advance with time, and the party gets better as the night goes on?
The cool kids were not even here yet; they showed up the latest, of course. I looked at my watch. Turned out, I wasn’t wearing a watch. But I could feel time passing, the room changing as it filled, and I suddenly wanted to go back to the time when I arrived, when it was just me and the nice boy from my math class, enjoying our small but surprising conversation. Looking over his shoulder was tiring, but I couldn’t help myself. I needed to see who was coming through the door, and figure out how they might change everything. I prayed the cool kids would get lost, that the world would end. No more cool kids, no more better books, no more lists.
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And the cool kids came, except this time in the form of Russell Banks, Haruki Murakami, Jeffrey Eugenides and others who made Amazon’s recently released Best Books of 2011 list. This would be upsetting, except who is outraged when outdone by these three giants of fiction? Who gets upset when they are cut alongside Teju Cole’s “Open City” or Arthur Phillips’ “The Tragedy of Arthur”? It was an honor to be noticed. I was grateful for those months on Amazon with a gold badge, the sales it garnered. Just like I was grateful for those minutes with the boy from my math class who surprised me with his humor, even if he did walk away shortly after to go talk to the girl with the loud laugh from my bio class.
I wouldn’t want their job anyway. It’s impossible for me to declare that something is absolutely the best, confidently, and with no conditions attached. I’m the most indecisive person I know. Well, probably. Diners terrify me with their book-length menus, married couples impress me with their lifelong contracts. I envy the people who, when online banking, chose the security questions: Who is your favorite painter? What is your favorite book? What is your favorite color? To think that this is even possible, one part of the rainbow being better than another? That someone logs onto their checking account in one year, two years, three years, and still confidently answers: Oh, Pollock. Because I can’t even make a list for various blogs that ask me to select the top 10 books of 2011. I can’t even choose one book when asked about this year’s best, and I don’t think I want to. I don’t want to pretend blue is so obviously the best anymore. My only honest response is to say, “The one I’m reading.” So far.
WASHINGTON, DC– Paul Misener, the vice president for global public policy at Amazon.com, appeared before members of Congress Wednesday to urge it to pass a proposed bill that would require online retailers — including Amazon itself — to collect state sales tax on the goods they sell through their websites.
“Congress should help address the states’ budget shortfalls without spending federal funds, by authorizing the states to require collection of the billions of revenue dollars already owed,” Misener said.
Currently, through a loophole created in 1992, online retailers that do not have physical stores in a state do not have to collect sales tax on the goods that they sell there. This sales tax loophole creates a loss of approximately $23 billion in uncollected state sales taxes every year. During tight budgetary years, state governments are now hungry to collect that money.
Whether Republican or Democratic, state governments have started duking it out with corporations such as Amazon, arguing that having a distribution warehouse in a state counts as having a “brick and mortar” presence there, thus requiring the company to pay sales tax. Recent congressional legislation, introduced by Reps. Steve Womack and Jackie Speier, known as the Marketplace Equality Act in the House, would allow states to opt into collecting sales tax from online retailers without the struggle. (A corresponding Senate bill has been introduced by Dick Durbin, Lamar Alexander and Mike Enzi.
Similar federal-level bills have been introduced in the past, but the new legislation is more flexible for states. The measure has garnered support from both Democrats and Republicans in a Congress that is usually bitterly divided on taxation issues. And Amazon, which was previously the ringleader among online retailers who uniformly opposed the previous bills, has unexpectedly decided to switch sides. Amazon now supports the federal intervention it once opposed.
The reason for Amazon’s change of heart: the company knows it is fighting a losing battle. “They reached a point where they were fighting so many states — I think they realized that it was in their best interest to finally support a national solution rather than deal with 45 states coming at them from all different directions,” said Jason Brewer, a vice president at the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a group that represents Amazon’s rivals among the big box retailers such as Best Buy and Home Depot.
To Amazon’s chagrin, Texas, New York, Illinois, Tennessee, California and other states have already passed legislation requiring online retailers to pay sales tax. These struggles have not been easy. Often it was Paul Misener himself trying to protect Amazon’s favorite loophole. When Tennessee lawmakers tried to force Amazon.com to collect sales tax, Misener threatened to punish the state by closing its warehouses, costing Tennessee jobs. He eventually brokered an agreement where Tennessee would delay action until 2012 in exchange for Amazon opening two new warehouses that would create 1,200 full-time and 2,000 seasonal jobs.
In California, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a deal to make the company pay sales tax, Amazon threatened a ballot referendum and gathered over $5 million for signature-gathering to back it up — despite the fact that the R&D lab that created the Amazon Kindle is located in Cupertino, California. Amazon eventually conceded, and agreed to abandon the ballot initiative–in exchange for a delay in the state implementing the new law.
Patrick Byrne, chairman and CEO of Overstock.com, sparred with Misener at the hearing. “Our tax accountants have never let me try something that aggressive,” he said of Amazon’s previous insistence on not paying taxes on goods, even in states where the company has physical offices and warehouses.
Amazon and other online retailers have had good reason to try to keep the loophole open in the past. The loophole gives them an advantage over their competitors, such as WalMart and Best Buy, that have physical stores in addition to online ones. They have must pay state sales taxes on all goods, even those purchased online.
WalMart, Best Buy, Home Depot and others have clearly felt the sting of Amazon’s success and have fought back in recent years. They established the Alliance for Main Street Fairness to work “to close the anti-small business sales tax loophole,” that is, the online sales tax exemption. Through this organization, WalMart and others take advantage of a momentary alliance between giant corporations and mom-and-pop stores. As the saying goes, the enemy’s enemy is your friend — and right now everyone’s enemy is Amazon.
Amazon seems to have recognized that its attempts to bully states are no longer working. Now the company is adapting its position fast. Amazon is good at adapting. Started as an online bookseller, Amazon has grown with the Internet, now selling everything from lawnmowers to wedding rings. When book sales plummeted, Amazon produced the Kindle, a low-price tablet where buyers can purchase digital books from Amazon with a single click. As the online marketplace grew massive, Amazon created its successful Prime service, which gives customers free shipping, for an annual $79 fee. Amazon actually loses $11 per customer annually on Prime, but it creates valuable consumer loyalty in the process.
Amazon displayed similar craftiness in front of Congress yesterday. Rather than continuing to fight a losing battle over sales tax in the states, Amazon flipped its position, and now the company will avoid fighting state-by-state battles that it would have lost eventually.
And in defeat, Amazon is already looking for ways to win. In early November, the company announced that it will roll out a new service early next year that will collect sales tax on behalf of its Amazon Marketplace vendors, the hundreds of thousands of businesses that sell their goods through Amazon.com. Amazon plans on collecting a 2.9 percent surcharge for acting as the sales tax calculator and collector, a fee that will presumably either get passed on to the vendor or the consumer.Rather than being hit by new sales tax regulations, the company is now using the regulations to profit.
Amazon remains a bully, and a very agile one at that.
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Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com (Credit: Reuters/Kim White) 
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos holds up the new Kindle Fire at a news conference during the launch of Amazon's new tablets in New York, September 28, 2011. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton (UNITED STATES - Tags: BUSINESS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY)(Credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton) 
