In a special report, WNYC’s On the Media recently took a look at the publishing industry and print books. It covers a lot of ground — including the subversive history of adult colouring books, Amazon’s bricks-and-mortar bookstore, and South Korea’s quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature — but the opening segment, ‘Why the Publishing Industry Isn’t in Peril‘, with LA Times books editor Carolyn Kellogg is an excellent overview of the current state of US publishing:
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Hamlet vs. Amazon Prime
Roz Chast for The New Yorker.
Comments closedAmazon: Pass This Letter To My Wife and Kids
I wasn’t going to mention that New York Times article about Amazon. We already know the company treats its workers poorly (there are almost too many articles to link to at this point),1 it’s just that some people rather admire this kind of ruthlessness (or simply don’t care if they’re getting a good deal). Nevertheless, I did quite like this cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez for The New Yorker on the subject:
Comments closedThe Shiny Surface of Jonathan Ive
My ‘longreads’ to-read list is as bad, if not worse, than the pile of books I have to read right now, so it’s taken me until today to get to that very, very long New Yorker profile of Jonathan Ive, the senior vice-president of design at Apple.
Unfortunately, the whole thing is a bit disappointing and, I thought, even a little sad. By the end, Ive remains an enigma. What lingers is his famous friends, love of bland luxury brands, and just how remarkably wealthy he is (writer Ian Parker reminds you several times that Ive owns a private jet).
It seems Ive is either depressingly shallow or, more likely, these superficial things are all that he is willing to reveal about himself, which is depressing too in its own way. Ive is, no doubt, just politely protecting his privacy, but he comes across as peevish and sadly unlikeable, which is a shame. Or maybe I’m just not interested enough in industrial design and luxury brands, or Apple if it comes to that.
The article does, however, give me an excuse to post this blistering 15 minute video of NYU Stern marketing professor Scott Galloway talking a mile-a-minute about Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google. I’m sure he’s wrong about a lot of things, but not only does he talk about Apple’s transition from tech company to luxury brand, he also offers some of the most cogent insights into the current problems facing Amazon I’ve heard in a while:
Interestingly, Ian Parker says in his New Yorker article that watch manufacturers are not worried about Apple stepping into the market. Galloway says they should be. I guess we’ll see who is right.
Comments closedBecause You Bought H is for Hawk
(H is for Hawk is actually on my reading list. And I would love a book about horology and depression to be honest)
Comments closedThe War of Words
Keith Gessen, writer and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men, has a long article in the December issue of Vanity Fair on the ongoing hostilities between Amazon and Hachette. Essentially it’s a timely primer on how the retailer’s relationship with publishers sank to its current low, but it is worth reading for literary agent Andrew Wylie’s thoughts on the matter alone:
The issues at the heart of the conflict are both margin and price, according to Wylie. Publishers have been slow to recognize the danger of percentage creep, he told me. “There was a European publisher in here recently who proudly sat on that sofa and said, ‘I’ve worked everything out with Amazon. I’ve given them 45 percent.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘But they wanted 50 percent.’ ” The European publisher thought he had won. Wylie stared incredulously at the memory of this encounter. “He’s a moron!”
Losing the fight over margins would be an immediate blow to the publishers’ profits, but losing control over pricing could be fatal. “If Amazon succeeds,” said Wylie, “they will lower the retail price—$9.99, $6.99, $3.99, $1.99. And instead of making $4 on your hardcover, you’ll be making 10 cents a copy on all editions. And, Keith, you will not be able to afford to write a book.… No one, unless they have inherited $50 million, will be able to afford to write a serious work of history, of poetry, of biography, a novel—anything. The stakes are Western culture.”
Western culture I could take or leave, but the part about me sent a chill down my spine. This is not what you want to hear from your literary agent. Surely we’ll think of something, I said to Wylie, if Amazon does win?
“You think?”
Wylie was not in the mood for a pep talk.
If you don’t have the strength to wade through the whole thing (and who can blame you?), Gessen discussed the piece with Leonard Lopate on WNYC today:
WNYC Leonard Lopate: Why the Amazon-Hachette Fight Matters and What it Means for Publishing mp3
But for more Wylisms, the man himself was in Toronto recently and Mike Doherty interviewed him for the National Post:
Wylie readily admits, in his Massachusetts drawl, that he was once a big supporter of [Amazon], going so far as to call up CEO and founder Jeff Bezos and offer to help him expand into Europe. He praised the idea that, unlike in a bookstore, backlist and literary titles could be on equal footing with bestsellers — the industry dependence on which he calls a “coked-up, crazy, wild weekend-in-Vegas approach to publishing.” Amazon’s dedication to the long tail, he thought, was key, but then with the introduction of the Kindle, he says, “the dark side of their intention began to be visible.”
Wylie was in town to deliver the keynote address at the International Festival of Authors.
Comments closedHave You Seen My Kindle?
Worse than Wal-Mart?
In an excerpt from his new book, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans, Simon Head compares the labour practices of Amazon and Walmart:
Amazon equals Walmart in the use of monitoring technologies to track the minute-by-minute movements and performance of employees and in settings that go beyond the assembly line to include their movement between loading and unloading docks, between packing and unpacking stations, and to and from the miles of shelving at what Amazon calls its “fulfillment centers”—gigantic warehouses where goods ordered by Amazon’s online customers are sent by manufacturers and wholesalers, there to be shelved, packaged, and sent out again to the Amazon customer…
…With Walmart’s and Amazon’s business model, the workplace practices that raise employee productivity to very high levels also keep employees off balance and thus ill placed to secure wage increases that match their increased output. The “cult of the customer” preached by both corporations is a scented smoke screen thrown up to hide this fact. Apart from the model’s intensive use of IT, there is not much to distinguish its methods from those of the primitive American and European capitalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
UPDATE: George Packer, continuing his series about Amazon, touches upon a similar topic in a new post for The New Yorker:
Comments closed[T]hese companies are everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous in our lives but with no physical presence or human face. They are regarded by many users as public resources, not private corporations—there for us—and their own rhetoric furthers this misperception: Facebook’s quest for a “more open and connected world”; Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” and its stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”; Amazon’s ambition to become “Earth’s most customer-centric company.” Because these endeavors seem to involve no human beings, no workers, other than ourselves—the supposed recipients of all the benefits—it takes an effort to realize that the tech economy is man-made, and that, as with the economies that preceded it, human beings have the capacity to shape and reform it for the public good. It would be easier to remember this if every time you clicked “BUY,” searched for an article, or texted a friend your screen flashed the face of a worker who once held a job that made way for your seamless online experience.
Cheap Words: George Packer on Amazon
The book folks have surely seen this already, but at The New Yorker George Packer takes a long hard look at Amazon:
Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected. Two decades later, Amazon sells a bewildering array of products: lawnmowers, iPods, art work, toys, diapers, dildos, shoes, bike racks, gun safes, 3-D printers. Amazon’s code of corporate secrecy is extreme—it won’t confirm how many Seattle employees it has, or how many Kindle e-readers have been sold—so it’s impossible to know for sure, but, according to one publisher’s estimate, book sales in the U.S. now make up no more than seven per cent of the company’s roughly seventy-five billion dollars in annual revenue.
Origins, though, leave lasting marks, and Amazon remains intimately tangled up in books. Few notice if Amazon prices an electronics store out of business (except its staff); but, in the influential, self-conscious world of people who care about reading, Amazon’s unparalleled power generates endless discussion, along with paranoia, resentment, confusion, and yearning. For its part, Amazon continues to expend considerable effort both to dominate this small, fragile market and to win the hearts and minds of readers. To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world—and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales. But then it started asking a lot of personal questions, and it created dependency and harshly exploited its leverage; eventually, the book world realized that Amazon had its house keys and its bank-account number, and wondered if that had been the intention all along.
It’s very comprehensive piece and well worth taking the time to read all the way through. At the LA Times Jacket Copy blog, Carolyn Kellog spoke to Packer about how the article came about:
Packer… included a suggestion from super-agent Andrew Wylie that publishers stop selling their books to Amazon altogether. Does Packer think that’s viable? “It’s a pretty radical solution, if you think about what it would do to their sales” he said. “I don’t know enough to agree or disagree.”
But in terms of telling the story, it was helpful. “It seemed like a way to jolt the picture productively. When you’re been an industry for a long time, you can’t imagine things differently. Maybe publishers need to think disruptively and not be victims.”
UPDATE: Packer has posted a short, but interesting, follow-up essay, ‘Amazon and the Perils of Non-Disclosure, at The New Yorker:
To Amazon, any piece of information could give its competitors an advantage. But what if those competitors’ main advantage is the walled-off, impenetrable nature of the company? If Amazon were just selling clothes, this might not be a potentially fatal flaw. But, as I wrote, the company has become a book publisher and a production company, and its owner has bought a major newspaper. Amazon is up to its neck in the world of culture, where nothing good can be done without a little light and air. The fact that Bezos visited his newspaper last month with more stealth than George W. Bush flying into Baghdad—a visit that was so well hidden even from people at the famously wide-open Post that I managed to break the story in these pages—struck me as particularly bizarre. Why not just show up? Because secrecy is in Amazon’s marrow. I’m certain that, sooner or later, this is going to create problems for Bezos’s newspaper, and I’m fairly sure that one reason for the failure of Amazon’s trade-publishing arm has to do with its isolation from the larger publishing world. If editors can’t gossip, speak to reporters, and pick up intel, they’re less likely to spot new talent and incubate ideas. They’re also less likely to be trusted by writers. Book culture and non-disclosure agreements are inimical.
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Out of Print
Out of Print, a documentary by Vivienne Roumani about “the turbulent and exciting journey from the book through the digital revolution,” will première at the Tribeca Film Festival on April 25th:
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/54234607 w=480]The film features interviews with Scott Turow, Ray Bradbury, and Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos among others.
Comments closedSomething for the Weekend
Snowstorm…something, something… Snowstorm… Hmm, what? Oh right. Here we go…
Pick Up a Pearson — A profile of book designer David Pearson in the New York Times:
The chillingly eloquent jacket of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the work of the British graphic designer David Pearson He is responsible for the design of four more books that have been reissued by Penguin in the Great Orwell series of paperbacks. From the horror movie typography on “Animal Farm” to the Vorticist-inspired illustration that Mr. Pearson commissioned from Paul Catherall for “Down and Out in Paris and London,” each of the covers exhibits the wit, thoughtfulness and ingenuity that have come to distinguish his work.
“David manages to combine respect for tradition with playfulness and a light touch,” said the graphic design historian Emily King. “He also has a brilliant understanding of the book as a physical object.”
Kvelling — Gerald Howard on the 50th anniversary of the New York Review of Books, at Salon:
Last week, my colleague at Doubleday came by my office with an austere-looking 11-by-15-inch broadsheet. Good God! It was a facsimile edition of the first issue of the New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963. The advertising director and I sat there kvelling over this wondrously manifested printed object from another universe, with its Murderers Row of reviewers weighing in on many books that all these years later still matter, its old-school book ads with their quaint frontal appeals to the reader’s higher cultural aspirations…
The Literaries — A great essay Eddie Campbell about comics criticism at The Comics Journal:
Moving sideways at this point takes me to another recurring argument that falls within the jurisdiction of the present rant. I refer to the incessant debate over who authored Marvel Comics, was it Stan Lee or was it Jack Kirby?… The literaries are inclined to debate whether the furnishing of a plot is enough of a claim to authorship, or whether the real writer in this case was the artist. Once the argument gets started it can go in any direction, and is just as likely to deny that a plot was ever given in the first place, because it is obligatory that everybody who wasn’t there have an opinion and take sides. None of that has ever mattered, as far as I’m concerned, though I acknowledge that the ownership of successful movie franchises could make a difference to this party or that. But the movies do not interest me and I do not care. None of them have ever captured the thing that made Marvel comics exciting to me in 1965 when I discovered them for myself.
And finally…
Amazon Unpacked — A long, must-read piece at the FT on Amazon’s warehouse in the former mining -town of Rugeley, Staffordshire:
As online shopping explodes in Britain, helping to push traditional retailers such as HMV out of business, more and more jobs are moving from high-street shops into warehouses like this one. Under pressure from politicians and the public over its tax arrangements, Amazon has tried to stress how many jobs it is creating across the country at a time of economic malaise. The undisputed behemoth of the online retail world has invested more than £1bn in its UK operations and announced last year that it would open another three warehouses over the next two years and create 2,000 more permanent jobs. Amazon even had a quote from David Cameron, the prime minister, in its September press release. “This is great news, not only for those individuals who will find work, but for the UK economy,” he said.
People in Rugeley, Staffordshire, felt exactly the same way in the summer of 2011 when they heard Amazon was going to occupy the empty blue warehouse on the site of the old coal mine. It seemed like this was the town’s chance to reinvent itself after decades of economic decline. But as they have had a taste of its “jobs of the future”, their excitement has died down…
You can probably guess where it goes from there (but you should still read it)…
Comments closedSomething for the Weekend
Sturm und Drang — Author Nick Harkaway (Angelmaker and the forthcoming The Blind Giant: Being Human in a Digital World) on Amazon and the publishing industry for The Guardian:
The most thunderous argument in Amazon’s favour is that the market has spoken, and demands cheaper product. This one I find utterly bizarre. We know very well, in this post-crash age, that the market can be an idiot. The market wanted easy credit extended to all, low taxes and plenty of public spending. The end result was a financial catastrophe that has just plunged us into a double-dip recession and shows no sign of being played out. Sometimes, things cost more than we want. That is a truth we were encouraged to forget in the 90s, but it’s one we’re going to have to remember.
See also: Jason Epstein in the NYRB and Dennis Johnson’s on-going commentary on the Department of Justice’s legal shenanigans at MobyLives (archive).
Literature Needs More Than E-books — James Bridle for Wired Magazine:
What we are coming to realise is that no one thing can pick up where the book left off; instead it is everything, all of our networks, our services, our devices, the internet plus everything else, which will carry literature forward. Literature is unique among art forms in that it is enacted entirely in the minds of author and reader; a psychic dance. Literature is everything, and thus everything must be employed in its support. And publishers, so long accustomed to doing a couple of things well, are adrift in a world that needs them to do everything — or GTFO.
And finally…
No Sympathy for the Creative Class — A fascinating piece by Scott Timberg for Salon:
Creative types, we suspect, are supposed to struggle. Artists themselves often romanticize their fraught early years: Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” and the various versions of the busker’s tale “Once” show how powerful this can be. But these stories often stop before the reality that follows artistic inspiration begins: Smith was ultimately able to commit her life to music because of a network of clubs, music labels and publishers. And however romantic life on the edge seems when viewed from a distance, “Once’s” Guy can’t keep busking forever.
Yes, the Internet makes it possible to connect artists directly to fans and patrons. There are stories of fans funding the next album by a favorite musician — but those musicians, as well, acquired that audience in part through the now-melted creative-class infrastructure that boosted Smith.
(And on that cheery note, have a good weekend).
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