Category Archives: Hachette

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Elites or freedom fighters: How the Amazon-Hachette battle took on the rhetoric of class warfare

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

One side defends the ideals that this nation was founded on: Independence and freedom from tyranny. The other side is made up of elites who keep the little people down and take the money that is rightfully theirs in an attempt to control the message and maintain the status quo.

I’m talking not about the Tea Party and big government, but the worlds of self-publishing and traditional publishing. Yet the rhetoric in both debates often sounds very much the same. In 2009, the Tea Party movement took shape in the United States. At just around the same time, ebooks began gaining in popularity, and as the digital publishing revolution took off, so did the once-stigmatized practice of self-publishing. Authors were suddenly able to get their ebooks to large audiences without going through traditional publishers. On January 20, 2010, Amazon (s amzn) began offering 70 percent royalties on self-published Kindle books (priced between $2.99…

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Amazon makes a direct offer to Hachette authors: Here’s the full letter

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

As the negotiations with Hachette drag on, Amazon says it is “thinking of proposing” a path that would alleviate pressure on Hachette authors.

David Naggar, VP of Kindle content and independent publishing, sent a letter to a few Hachette authors, literary agents and Authors Guild president Roxana Robinson over the weekend suggesting that “for as long as this dispute lasts, Hachette authors would get 100% of the sales price of every Hachette ebook we sell. Both Amazon and Hachette would forego all revenue and profit from the sale of every ebook until an agreement is reached.” The idea, seemingly, is that that loss of ebook revenue would “motivate both Hachette and Amazon to work faster to resolve the situation.”

Hachette would need to agree to the proposal, of course, and the letter made it clear that as of its writing Amazon hadn’t actually suggested the idea to Hachette yet: Rather…

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Ebook Pricing Court Battles

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The link below is to an article reporting on the latest legal battles concerning ebook pricing.

For more visit:
http://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/big-five-back-in-court-over-ebook-pricing

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Amazon exec on Hachette dispute: “It’s all about ebook pricing”

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

As Amazon(s AMZN) and Hachette’s contract dispute wears on, Amazon has had little to say publicly about it: The company released an unattributed statement on the Kindle forums at the end of May, but until now no executive from the company had commented. That changed Tuesday, when Russ Grandinetti, Amazon’s VP of Kindle content, gave a few quotes to the Wall Street Journal.

Amazon has been criticized for tactics like turning off pre-orders on upcoming Hachette titles. Grandinetti told the WSJ that Amazon is working “in the long-term interest of our customers.” He also seemingly confirmed reports that Amazon is demanding a larger commission on ebook sales, up from the 30 percent it currently receives: “This discussion is all about ebook pricing. The terms under which we trade will determine how good the prices are that we can offer consumers.” Grandinetti seems to be arguing that if Amazon…

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If you love books then you should be rooting for Amazon, not Hachette or the Big Five

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Mathew Ingram's avatarGigaom

As Amazon (s amzn) continues to tighten the screws on book publishers like Hachette — by making its books difficult to find, impossible to pre-order, and so on — the conventional wisdom seems to be that the company is an aggressive and possibly illegal monopoly aimed at killing publishers, and that its behavior is also bad for authors and probably consumers as well. The only problem with this view is that most of it, if not all of it, is completely wrong. What Amazon is doing is not only good for book-loving consumers but arguably good for authors as well — and even for some publishers (although not Hachette and its ilk).

Is Amazon a true monopoly? Not in any meaningful sense of the word — not any more than Walmart has a monopoly on sales of toothpaste. Yes, the electronic retailer has a large share of the ebook…

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DRM is unfortunate, but it’s not the problem in Hachette vs. Amazon

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

Let me start with the obligatory assurance that I’m no fan of DRM technologies. That’s why I use (illegal) tools to break it if I want to buy an ebook from another retailer and read it on my Kindle(s AMZN). Yet I disagree with author and BoingBoing co-editor Cory Doctorow’s argument that DRM plays a big role in the ongoing dispute between Amazon and book publisher Hachette.

In a column in the Guardian Friday, Doctorow wrote that “because Hachette has been such a staunch advocate of DRM,” it hasn’t been able to take advantage of “a whole range of tactics” that would be available to it if it dropped DRM:

“Amazon’s ebook major competitors – especially Apple and Google – have lots of market clout, and their customers are already carrying around ebook readers (tablets and phones). Hachette could easily play hardball with Amazon by taking out an ad campaign whose message…

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Guess what: Some people are on Amazon’s side in Amazon vs. Hachette

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

In Amazon and Hachette’s ongoing battle over a new contract, Amazon has received most of the blame — and that’s probably not surprising since it’s the party cutting off pre-orders, messing with search and shipping Hachette books with multiweek delays. Authors, in particular, have come out on Hachette’s side — John Green, J. K. Rowling, James Patterson and Malcolm Gladwell (who shall henceforth be known as Explaino the Clown). So nobody’s on Amazon’s side, right?

Stephen Colbert Amazon Hachette

Well, actually… To every backlash there is a counter-backlash, and in recent days some pro-Amazon sentiment has trickled out — or if it’s not fully pro-Amazon, exactly, it’s at least … conflicted. So who’s saying what? Here are the general themes:

Hachette is a big company, too

Amazon isn’t the monopoly we have to worry about, Hugh Howey, the author of the bestselling self-published Wool trilogy (which Simon &…

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As Amazon’s fight with book publisher Hachette continues, criticism from authors and others grows

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Laura Hazard Owen's avatarGigaom

It’s been a week since it became clear that Amazon(s AMZN) is delaying shipments of publisher Hachette’s print titles, likely due to a fight over terms. As Amazon continues to ship many Hachette print titles with delays of two weeks or more, the story is picking up momentum and more authors are criticizing the retailer’s actions.

In addition to the shipping delays, Amazon is using other tactics to pressure Hachette. For example, it’s offering shoppers lower discounts on Hachette titles and in some cases is suggesting “similar items at a lower price.”

The New York Times’ David Streitfeld suggested Friday that “Amazon wants to have it both ways, telling customers it has the book while discouraging them from buying it.” In other words, shoppers who Google Hachette titles likely see an Amazon product page as their first result, then click through and find they won’t get the book any…

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Digital now makes up 11.3% of Hachette’s revenues worldwide, and 20% of Random House’s

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Following pilot, Hachette will make all of its ebooks available to libraries nationwide

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