Just say no

Are you using Lightning Source to print your books? If so, Amazon would like to make you a pleasant little offer: switch to BookSurge (with a resulting decrease in quality and increase in costs) or Amazon will stop selling your books. Restaurant owners would find this sort of offer quite familiar.

We don’t print our books on demand, but this story feels like history repeating itself. After several years as a special order customer on an equal footing with any bookstore, Amazon stopped selling our books over 5 years ago when we wouldn’t agree to their demand for better terms and monthly fees. Now a new group of publishers is being squeezed by Amazon, and they’ll have to decide whether to pay up.

The common business logic for publishers has been to offer better terms to the biggest customers, whether that’s chain stores, distributors, or Amazon. As the chains prospered and the independent bookstores closed, publishers failed to see that their discriminatory pricing was inevitably leading to a consolidation in their customer base. Worse, they failed to see that consolidation in their customer base put them at far greater risk when their remaining large customers demanded steeper discounts, or went bankrupt, or decided to become the publishers’ supplier as well. The publishers helped create the current power relationship that now allows a bookseller to demand control over who publishers contract with to print their books. Insisting that small customers be treated on the same terms as large customers requires placing long-term interests over short-term fears, but it could prevent further confusion in the power relationship that should rightfully place publishers on top.