By the time a federal judge ruled last week that Apple had illegally colluded with five of the so-called Big Six publishers to raise e-book prices, just about no one in the book business was surprised. All the publishers named in the lawsuit had already taken a long look at the uphill battle and the crippling legal bills and decided to settle. (Unlike Apple, book publishers have less cash than the United States Treasury.) The ruling seemed to be just the latest uplifting story for Amazon, whose dominance Apple and the publishers had been trying to curtail until the Department of Justice stepped in.
Links of the week July 29 2013 (31)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
29 July 2013
Through logistical excellence, e-reader innovation and pitiless business practices, Amazon has contributed to the demise of hundreds of independent booksellers and the entire Borders franchise, and it is now threatening to do the same to Barnes & Noble. Independents have seen a small resurgence in market share lately, but it is not anywhere near enough to counteract the loss of chain store locations. Industry analyst Mike Shatzkin calls the ongoing decline in retail shelf space "relentless." That all sounds good for Jeff Bezos, right? After all, Amazon is running out of competitors.
There's an old saw about journalism that the more you know about a subject, the less sense reporting about it makes. I had an odd, vertiginous sense of unreality reading Hothouse, by New York's Boris Kachka, about the publishing house where I've worked for the past quarter-century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. I loved reading the spiky, spicy evocation of the company's good old days. But the story of those years casts a shadow on the current life of the company, and I found myself wondering: Do the book-publishing cynics have it wrong, or do I?
Yes, the contemporary publishing environment is very different: disappearing bookstores, inimical trading "partners", and a still-consolidating industry (the new Penguin Random House is set to publish more than 15,000 books next year worldwide) in a "mature", i.e., declining, market. There are too many books and readers with too little time to read, and too much competition for anything with a chance of exciting their wavering interest. Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world. In Kachka's version, publishing today is all about "marketing chutzpah". Hasn't it always been?
In our look this week at literary agents in digital times, we opened Monday with New York agents Brian DeFiore and Scott Waxman, and with San Francisco's April Eberhardt. Today, we move the conversation to two much-watched programs in London, talking with agents Jonny Geller and Edina Imrik. And in our new Ether for Authors today, our discussion turns to whether the literary agenting profession can ever be demystified.
'The argument we make is that it's not for every author. But if they do want" to do this sort of work with the agency, "they must get a better deal than anywhere else, and they must have more control than they get anywhere else, and the rights that we need are very different from the rights that a studio might need.'