RicDay on Publishing

This falls into the category of "something I might write a lot more about." For now, I will be brief. Amazon may be more of a threat than a benefit to books.

We have seen over the past couple of decades a great deal of concentration in the retail trade. The ecosystem of mom-and-pop retail stores gave way to impersonal malls "anchored" by large chain stores, then "big box" retail warehouses like Wal-Mart set up shop and beat up on the malls.

The same has happened to book stores. Small, independent booksellers underwent a near-extinction event with the advent of Barnes & Noble in America, Chapters-Indigo in Canada, and Waterstones in the U.K., to name just three.

The growth of market-dominating chain stores has not, I think, been especially good for book publishing. Books are increasingly merchanised like laundry powder: discounted heavily and pushed hard. Computer "models" measure how fast each title "turns" on the shelf and those titles which fail the test are quickly returned for credit and dropped from the "buy" list.

In this light, Amazon seems appealing. It "stocks" everything on its virtual shelves, theoretically for ever.

My problem with Amazon is its naked ambition to dominate, utterly if possible, the book retail business. It will go to extreme lengths to obtain its goal, including discounting to cost and below if that will drive others out of the market.

I do not have a solution to the Amazon problem. I do think that publishers need to be worried. To much concentration is not healthy.