

Hachette Puts out Response to Amazon Statement - IBM
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2014/hachette-puts-out-response-to-amazon-statement-rejects-author-pool-before-agreement-is-reached/

======
panarky
It was pure evil genius for Amazon to offer a pool of funds to compensate
authors, split 50-50 with Hachette.

    
    
      We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be
      allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute
      on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%.
    

Hachette's response isn't nearly so clever.

    
    
      Once we have reached such an agreement, we will be happy to
      discuss with Amazon its ideas about compensating authors for
      the damage its demand for improved terms may have done them,
      and to pass along any payments it considers appropriate.

~~~
danudey
It really feels like Amazon is the bad guy in this situation though. They've
demanded terms from Hachette, then lashed out by slowing, then ceasing
entirely, sales of Hachette's books. That doesn't seem like a mature way of
dealing with things (at least, not without a little more communication rather
than just cutting them off unannounced).

Hachette's response makes sense. 'We didn't agree to the terms you tried to
dictate to us, and now you're saying it's half our fault that these authors
lost revenues as a result of your retaliation?'

~~~
mullingitover
> It really feels like Amazon is the bad guy in this situation though. They've
> demanded terms from Hachette, then lashed out by slowing, then ceasing
> entirely, sales of Hachette's books

Aren't they doing a standard renegotiation of their contract? If they don't
have a contract, Amazon is under no obligation to sell Hachette's products at
all. Meanwhile, I wasn't in the room for their contract negotiation, but who's
to say that Hachette isn't the one making unreasonable demands?

------
eck
It is kind of amusing how similar this is to the network neutrality debate --
i.e. comcast's dispute with netflix affecting comcast/netflix customer content
delivery -- yet with decidedly old-fashioned media.

~~~
valas
Except that there are a lot of alternatives to Amazon with low switching cost
to consumers.

~~~
jtbigwoo
Unless you own a Kindle Paperwhite.

~~~
joshstrange
How do you figure that? Yes you might not have an ebook store built into your
device but you are not locked into ONLY obtaining your ebooks from Amazon.

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youngtaff
This is a good read on the whole situation -
[http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-
hache...](http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2014/05/26/amazon-v-hachette-
dont-believe-the-spin/)

Suggests Hachette may not be as innocent as they would have us believe

------
moron4hire
>>> "Amazon indicates that it considers books to be like any other consumer
good. They are not."

Unfortunately, from everything I've seen of people's book buying habits,
especially online, books _are_ consumer goods.

~~~
jacobolus
The point is, you can’t really substitute one book for a similar one in quite
the same way you can substitute for a roll of toilet paper or a dinner plate
or an umbrella or whatever.

~~~
cwyers
I mean, they're not quite commodities. But there's no shortage of close
substitutes for most books. Books are subject to competition from other books,
which causes price pressures, just like most goods.

~~~
protomyth
"But there's no shortage of close substitutes for most books"

When the next book in a series arrives, there is no substitute. I would love
to have seen someone trying to tell a Harry Potter reader that this other book
is a substitute.

~~~
cwyers
So, lemme ask you a question. When you see a statement that something is true
MOST of the time, what exactly possesses you to think that citing ONE EXAMPLE
is a rebuttal?

And again, books are absolutely not commodities. Nobody is saying there's no
difference between the preference for Harry Potter versus Percy Jackson or
what have you. But Percy Jackson is certainly a close substitute for Harry
Potter, so if the price difference between them is great enough, some readers
will choose to read Percy Jackson instead of Harry Potter, and the number of
readers for which this is true grows as the price difference does. This is
also true if the supply of Harry Potter books is restricted. (This is the
principle that makes small airport bookstores work, incidentally -- given the
constrained supply of books available for purchase, airport book stores stock
the most popular titles they can and figure that people will substitute their
most preferred book that's available for the book they would purchase if the
store carried a larger selection. And often enough, they do.)

And this is true for most goods. Android phones and iPhones are close
substitutes for each other -- if you want one, that's the one you want, but if
the price difference gets high enough, you'll go to the close substitute, and
people vary in their level of price sensitivity. If the price of corn
tortillas gets high enough, you'll start eating flour tortillas. And so on and
so forth. This is pretty basic economics here.

~~~
protomyth
> So, lemme ask you a question. When you see a statement that something is
> true MOST of the time, what exactly possesses you to think that citing ONE
> EXAMPLE is a rebuttal?

I don't believe it is true much of the time. Maybe for technical books, but
even then it is not because authors matter.

Picking between authors you like or have heard good things about is one thing,
but they are not interchangeable. If I am waiting for the next in a series and
I go to Amazon and they pull this crap then I will have to go elsewhere. The
book is more important that a seller. If I want a certain painters art on my
wall, I buy that print, not a "well Amazon didn't have that so I'll get a
Fred".

~~~
cwyers
Well, look, from Hachette's own statement:

"It is good to see Amazon acknowledge that its business decisions
significantly affect authors’ lives."

Because when people aren't finding these books available through Amazon, or
are finding them at a higher markup than other books, some of them aren't
going to Barnes and Noble or Books-A-Million or to Actual Physical Bookstore
to get them. Now, some of these missed purchase opportunities may simply be
books that aren't sold at all, but some of them are going to be consumers
buying other books. Because books are close substitutes for other books.

~~~
protomyth
You read quite a lot into that sentence. Many of those people bought nothing
because Amazon doesn't have what they wanted.

------
notlisted
I found the discussion, cited by the Amazon response, pretty insightful (and
it shows some shades of grey - no not 50! - with regards to the issue at hand)

[http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-
af...](http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-
amazoncom.html)

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jeffcox
Enough people are getting upset about this that I expect both sides to make
apologetic noises and shuffle towards a resolution at an increased pace. As
far as finding out what really went down, or what the resolution ends up being
I am doubtful at best.

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jpiasetz
Reuters published this recently
[http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/28/hachette-
amazoncom...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/28/hachette-amazoncom-
idUSL1N0OE1GZ20140528)

------
bsimpson
Blogspam with no link to the original.

Also, that was a lot of words with basically no content:

"We publish books. We think books are special. We have not yet reached an
agreement with Amazon to keep selling books to them, but we will eventually.

Also, we think this is all Amazon's fault and we're not going to consider
their proposal to pay our authors in the meantime until after we resolve the
contract dispute."

~~~
lnanek2
The French do indeed write like that. You get used to it.

~~~
gaius
See also Piketty. 1000 pages to say "les Anglo-Saxons, bof!"

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dang
It seems there's no original online source? At least the current url includes
the actual statement. We changed it from
[http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2014/05/hachette-
answ...](http://lunch.publishersmarketplace.com/2014/05/hachette-answers-will-
discuss-compensating-damage-amazons-demand-dispute-settled/), which weirdly
inlines bits of it.

~~~
smoyer
There actually seem to be quite a few "news outlets" that received a press
release from Hachette, and yet their own press release page is horribly old:
[http://www.hachette.com/en/press/press-
releases](http://www.hachette.com/en/press/press-releases)

