More Amazon Stuff

An anonymous commenter said (here):

"How dos Amazon make it harder for small independent publishers to operate? Surely it is much harder for them to get their books into Waterstone's & WHSmiths? whereas they can deal direct with Amazon and sell their books to all customers worldwide. Why does nobody every compain when either Waterstone's & WHSmiths refuses to stock a book by a small publisher because they 'don't think it will sell'? Amazon sells everyone! You'd think small publishers and authors would be grateful for Amazon, but the way the trade media report this story almost gives the impression that being sold by Amazon is a RIGHT, a GIVEN. And you conveniently forget that Hachette (Headline in particular) were the first company to sell huge quantities of boosk through Supermarkets. Go into your local tesco and check if you want to. Helay Huctchison is a hypocrit!"

My reply:

"The problem is the terms. Amazon, and the supermarkets, demand extremely preferential terms - i.e. they won't stock books unless the publishers sell them at such a low price that it's hard to make any profit or pass anything on to authors.

This hits independents particularly hard, and my previous publisher - who were a small indie who have since ceased trading because they didn't make enough money - did not encourage people to buy their books from Amazon. They had their own online outlet, and it was better for them if people used it.

As for HL selling books to supermarkets... er, why is that a problem? I never said that supermarkets were inherently evil and that no publisher should use them as an outlet. Obviously if you're in the business of selling books, you want them to be distributed via all outlets possible. The problem is that supermarkets refuse to stock books unless they get them on ludicrously preferential terms. They also expect extra bungs for promotional offers, etc. They are also very picky about what they'll stock, but that's not a reason for publishers not to get their books in there if they can.

Small bookshops, on the other hand, can't demand similar terms cos they have no muscle. This often results in the same book costing twice as much, or more, in the small indie bookshop than it does on Amazon.

Illustration here."


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Amazon Update

Dandelion has suggested in my comments box that bloggers could stand together and campaign over the issue of Amazon's dodgy commercial tactics. Scroll to the bottom of this post for things you might be able to do. Meanwhile here's an update on the Amazon thing (full details here (http://tinyurl.com/4gocsg)).

Amazon have removed Pay Now and Pre-Order buttons from selected titles published by Hachette Livre, in an attempt to force the publisher to sell stock to Amazon at even lower rates than they already do. They've also removed HL stock from Recommended Reads lists and various other (obviously not as impartial as you might think) sections of the site.

Hachette Livre is a large umbrella organisation, which encompasses the following publishers:

Little, Brown Book Group (includes Abacus, Virago, Sphere, Piatkus, Orbit, Atom)
Orion Publishing Group (Orion, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Gollancz)
Headline Publishing Group
Hodder & Stoughton (includes Sceptre)
Hachette Children's Books (includes Franklin Watts, Orchard, Hodder, Wayland)
Hodder Education Group
John Murray
Octopus Publishing Group (includes Bounty, Cassel, Conran Octopus, Hamly, Gaia, Mitchell Beazley, Miller, Philips)
They also have subsidiaries in India, Aus, NZ...

This isn't the first time Amazon has used this tactic. Earlier this year Amazon.com removed Buy buttons from selected books of publishers who refused to switch their Print-on-demand publishing to Amazon's newly bought POD company (see Bookseller story here (http://tinyurl.com/3efuy5)). They really are bullies.

Amazon and the supermarkets have consistently been putting the squeeze on publishers in this way, making it harder and harder for independent publishers to operate, not to mention small bookshops (who don't have the same muscle and can't compete). The ultimate losers are the authors, who get a smaller and smaller slice of the pie. I got 70p per book with a cover price of £10.00. When books are sold at a discount, the author gets significantly less than that (percentages vary according to contract, but they're typically less than 10% of cover price).

Things you can do to help:

Contact Amazon (http://tinyurl.com/4skfzf)
Copy this post, or write your own, on your blog / website / via email
Boycott Amazon (alternative book sources: localbookshops.co.uk, abebooks.co.uk, bookdepository.co.uk, Waterstones.com, Play.com, actual physical bookshops, or where possible buy through authors' and publishers' own websites).
Write to newspapers
Contact the competition commission (email: info@cc.gsi.gov.uk)


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Amazon Outrage

Here is a slightly edited version (to protect the source) of some info about Amazon's latest dirty dealings. For info, Hachette Livre are a large publishing company who own, for instance, the Headline imprint.

"Hachette Livre UK & Amazon

Amazon has been removing the “buy button” from some of the Hachette Livre books and also removing some of their titles from promotional positions such as “Perfect Partner”, in order to apply pressure on them to give Amazon even better commercial terms than it presently receives.

Larger British book retailers already receive the most generous terms in the English-language world from publishers, including Hachette Livre. Of the “cake” represented by the recommended retail price of a general book, major retailers including Amazon already receive on average well over 50%. Despite these advantageous terms, Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at the publishers' expense. (You may have read in the press a few weeks ago of Amazon’s penalties against Bloomsbury and its authors). If this continued, it would not be long before Amazon got virtually all of the revenue that is presently shared between author, publisher, retailer, printer and other parties. (Again, you may have read that in the USA Amazon has been demanding that it should take over the printing, initially of print-on-demand titles, dictating its own royalty terms to publishers and authors). Hachette Livre are politely but firmly saying that these encroachments need to stop now. Declining all additional terms demands is the approach that HL take with all major retailers, and it is particularly important in relation to Amazon.

Amazon has grown very rapidly since it launched and it now makes some 16% of all book sales in Britain. The creativity, value and range offered and the standards of service that have made Amazon so successful, are respected. At its present rate of growth, which was 30% last year, Amazon would become the largest bookseller in Britain in about three years. The retail market for book is not increasing and therefore much of this growth would inevitably come at the expense of “bricks and mortar” booksellers. This is of course not a criticism of Amazon, and no publisher can or should tell the public where to shop. However, it is a concern that more and more traditional booksellers are having to close their doors, with skilled individual booksellers losing their jobs, and this is due in part to Amazon’s aggressively low pricing on prominent titles. Therefore, despite their limited role in respect of these changes in the retail landscape, Hachette Livre are determined not to provide Amazon with further ammunition with which it could damage booksellers who offer a personal service, browsing facilities and other valuable benefits to the reading public.

Amazon’s reputation to date has been built on range, service and honest recommendations to customers. Their current actions represent reduced range and service together with distorted recommendations – effectively creating a breach of trust between Amazon and its customers, particularly its “Prime” customers who have paid to have free delivery on a comprehensive range of books."

NB: I've written an update here, with more info about who Hachette Livre are, and some suggestions for things you can do to help.


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Fuckwits

"There is a growing sense of inequity" ... "politicians are becoming increasingly concerned about this issue"...

On Radio 4. Just now. Talking about immigration. So why are those in power getting upset about it? Because of this growing sense of inequity. Apparently people are getting more and more worried that immigrants are getting more than their fair share, at the expense of "us" and our public services. And immigration is a big issue because it feeds into so many other issues - jobs, crime, the NHS, public services in general.

And why are all these issues on the agenda? Is it actually true? Do immigrants get more than their fair share? No they bloody don't. They contribute more in taxes than they take in benefits, and many groups are not even eligible for benefits, and even when they are they get pitiful help. I'll never forget the family of asylum seekers in front of me at the Asda checkout, who couldn't leave until I gave them an extra 10p because their food stamps (they only get stamps, they're not trusted with money) weren't enough to cover the pathetic collection of Value brandless products on the conveyor belt in front of them.

Figures are endlessly quoted of how many people are coming into this country, but nobody mentions the hundreds of thousands of Brits who leave each year. And why do they leave? Because they don't like the weather, or they've heard that in Australia, Canada, the US, other parts of Europe, the Far East they can get better-paid jobs or better benefits or a higher quality of life. We all know people who have done this. Do we condemn them, for taking other people's jobs, for using up the resources of other people's countries, for moving around the world in search of a better life? Do many people leave this country because they have been raped or beaten or tortured or have lost their home and their whole neighbourhoood in a flood or an earthquake? Would anyone blame them if they did?

So why are politicians concerned, if it's not even a fucking issue? Because the media, and those same fucking politicians, allow these lies to be propogated - and don't put anyone right. Because the fucking so-called neutral media continue to report the "issue of immigration" as if it really was an issue, and not just a convenient way of offloading concern on all those statedly-connected issues of crime, jobs, public services. Because rather than say "Actually, this is bollocks. We shouldn't be blaming these people for things that are not their fault," it's easier to say "Ooh yes, immigration, what a problem it is, let's make it even fucking harder for any poor bastard to move to our supposedly-wonderful country, and then demonise them even more in the process."

Meanwhile people go through hell in order to get to this country and leave their homes, only to find themselves vilified, attacked, even murdered when they get here. And all over the world and history, most ethnic and civil conflicts have their roots in fuckwit politicians pitting populations against one another to distract them from the real problems. And people die.

Fucking bastards.


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Commenter of the Year?

Ooh! My other 'alf, AllyF, has been shortlisted for Commenter of the Year over on Comment is Free!

But there are four lefties and only one right-winger in the running, so the leftie vote is getting split and the right-winger is winning. Yuk.

Everybody vote for Ally! Quick!


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Intrusive Advertising by Haloscan?

I hate unwanted advertising. I hate it when advertisers hijack other people's content in order to push their messages. I hate the fact that the job of an advertiser is to make people want, and spend money on, things they never even thought they wanted until some advertiser pushed themselves into their heads. I hate the fact that we all waste so much money on things we never use and which fuck up the planet in the process.

I hate the fact that Haloscan stick adverts in my comments boxes when I didn't ask them to. I accept that by opting for the free Haloscan service I have little control over what it looks like. I know that if I paid them ten dollars (or something like) they would take the adverts away, but I don't like the bribery which says I have to pay somebody to remove adverts from my site. But it's not the end of the world. I can, and do, put up with it.

But fucking hell, this really takes the biscuit. I just posted a comment on my own site, and happened to use the word "hosting". I was actually talking about the Olympics at the time, but anyway. After I'd pressed Submit, I noticed the word hosting had been underlined, and lo and behold it had become a hyperlink. To a company advertising internet hosting services. WHAT THE FUCK?! To put adverts at the bottom of the comments box is one thing, but to embed them in someone's words, so that it looks as though they placed it there themselves? Talk about outrageous! I feel violated.

Update: The link has now disappeared. Which has me wondering whether it's not Haloscan at all, but some kind of weird phishing virus on my PC.

I'll be contacting Haloscan to enquire about this. If there's any suggestion that I pay them for the privilege of not having my and others' comments violated in this way, I... well. I might jump up and down a little. You may as well sell a free blogging service which automatically embeds racist graffiti into people's posts unless they pay for the privilege of having them removed.

Still, jury's out until I find out what's going on.


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Grrr

Spit-Lit is one of the few literary festivals I've been invited to speak at, and I'm therefore rather fond of it. It was set up to celebrate women's writing and happens at Spitalfields (which is, um, somewhere in London) every spring.

But this morning I received a letter. Here are some extracts:

"Before we had even applied to the Arts Council for our annual grant to produce Spit-Lit we were informed that they would be unable to maintain our existing level of funding because of the DCMS cuts from Lottery funding being redirected to meet the growing Olympics bill.

...

The arts and culture sector lost £152 million this year through Lottery funding going to the Olympics. The Government have just announced that Arts Council England funding will now receive an extra £50m, but not until 2010-11."

The festival has been cancelled indefinitely as a result.

Bastards.

And while I'm on my high horse, I'd like to mention Karen Reissmann. She's an old friend of mine, but also a very capable psychiatric nurse with decades of experience and an admirably active and effective campaigning trade unionist. Working as she does for a Primary Care Trust (Manchester) and being at the sharp end of all the worst effects of PFIs and all the other nonsense this government has inflicted on our health service, she has a lot to campaign against. And she's been sacked. For pointing out how rubbish the PCT are and therefore "bringing them into disrepute," which apparently counts as gross misconduct.

So, carrying out her duties as a trade unionist, protecting her members and alerting the public to the worst incompetencies of the local health service is a sackable offence.

I could go on, but that other 'alf of mine explains the whole thing so much more eloquently, over on Comment is Free (where he's becoming a bit of a regular, and I'm that proud).

New Feminists

Very funny piece here ripping the piss out of Observer Woman's attempt to "do" feminism...


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More "Politics" Stuff

There's more! The posts on this page aren't the only "Politics" posts.

For all posts labelled "Politics" and posted before September 2007, please go here.


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