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Amazon: TGF FTW!

04/02/10

First blood: Apple…

I know that not everyone who reads this blog will know what happened a few days ago between Amazon and Macmillan, so I’ll just recap quickly. The rest of you can keep trying to work out what TGF stands for (hint: it’s not one of these).

Basically, the conversation went a bit like this:

Macmillan: Whoa! Dude! This new Apple thing is totally awesome! Hey, Amazon, we want to sell our books on their pricing model!

Amazon: [sulking] You can’t.

Mac: Well, uh, we want to.

Amazon: Not talking about it. Fingers in ears. Lalalala.

Mac: We really want to. Uh, dude? That’s how we’re doing it from now on, if you don’t mind. Because, you know, it preserves our business model and stuff?

Amazon: Fine. Be that way, you insensitive jerks.

And then Amazon did something which in retrospect was utterly insane. It must have looked like corporate hardball when they did it, and a month ago it would have been fine. They’ve had this kind of fight before occasionally, and it was fine. But things have changed.

Amazon pulled Macmillan’s books from sale. Not just digital ones; paper ones as well.

This time, it didn’t work out so well.

John Scalzi and Charlie Stross have written angrily and gorgeously about it – as Scalzi points out, the danger with pissing off a bunch of writers is that they will write about you, and they know how to make that hurt – and several sites have removed Amazon links from their pages. Overall, the whole thing has not been a publicity success for Amazon.

Now, I’ve always tried to preserve a balance, in linking to people’s books, between honouring the majors – Amazon, Waterstones, B&N and so on – and linking to small bookshops. There’s no getting around the fact that the big stores are useful and shift a lot of books, and they’re very welcome. That said, a good indie bookshop is a jewel. In the US, you can go to the Indiebound site and find one near you. Here in the UK, that hasn’t happened yet – although it’s coming – so I’ll continue to pimp small stores like Primrose Hill Books (who can order things so fast it’s actually very like dealing with Amazon, only you talk to a real human being and they’re nice to you) and Goldsboro Books, whose book club is one of the really awesome things which can happen to a writer. I will also mention Lutyens & Rubinstein, although their website has not reached the giddying heights to which it no doubt aspires…

About those acronyms; FTW is an internetz thing – it means ‘for the win’, or in more analogue language ‘is an excellent tool or strategy for achieving positive outcomes’. TGF is a little more earthy. One might even say it was obscene. Still no idea?

Well, coming back to my main point to finish, Amazon appear to have handed Macmillan – and Apple, of all things – a huge advertising and PR coup. Ouch. Not the only game in town any more.

TGF, man.

7 Comments to “Amazon: TGF FTW!”

  • uberVU - social comments said on February 4th, 2010:

    Social comments and analytics for this post…

    This post was mentioned on Twitter by Harkaway: Amazon, Macmillan, Apple: TGF FTW! http://bit.ly/cmEMXO...

  • indigotea said on February 4th, 2010:

    I don’t think there’s any clear winners in this particular battle, and I think there will be many more casualties as the book publishing/book selling world tries to learn how to make money in a digital-plus-paper universe.

    I just hope it doesn’t turn into a total farce like it did for so long in the music industry.

  • Nick Harkaway said on February 4th, 2010:

    Indigo –

    I’d have to disagree and say that Apple have clearly won this round without ever being in the ring. To provoke this fight – which it seems to me they unquestionably did – and then watch Amazon take a walloping… must be very satisfying. Between the publishing industry as a whole and Amazon on the issue of control of pricing, again, this round goes to the publishers (after a long period during which they lost most of ‘em, owing to Amazon’s extraordinary reach and confidence). The overall situation, of course, remains undecided. It does look to me, though, as if Amazon’s de facto deathgrip on the ebook trade has come to an end, and that the Apple model – and Google Editions, when that comes along – will take the edge of threats like this from the world’s best-known online retailer.

    I’m also intrigued by the possible knock-on of this in terms of reading habits over the next decade. To be truthful, one rarely reads a book for more than an hour or so at a stretch, so the iPad’s rather short battery life (by comparison with the Kindle, though not, of course, with a laptop) isn’t so much of an issue. If the screen is less than perfect for reading that may push people toward buying both digital and paper copies of favoured books (I have said before, and will shortly be saying rather more loudly, that we need a way to have a deal on that, so that you can buy the electronic copy and then get the paper one for a sharp discount, and/or vice versa.) Although, that said, I understand that colour screens capable of moving image display and low-glare reading are not far off.

    It’s all change, folks. It’s going to be exciting! And that’s the key: don’t be scared. We have to grab this and make it amazing, because if we dillydally it’ll roll over us as it did the music industry and make things difficult.

  • Maine Character said on February 5th, 2010:

    This story came up on half a dozen blogs I check, and my eyes glazed over each time. I couldn’t get through the numbers. But your post here finally parted the clouds and I’ve already looked up Indiebound.

    (Still don’t get TGF, though.)

    Word verification: were hawk – Beware the werehawk, Amazon, for the moon be full.

  • indigotea said on February 5th, 2010:

    Well, I sincerely hope Apple doesn’t become the de facto leader of digital book sales. Apple is too bent on locking you in to whatever path they declare the fittest. Once you commit to an Apple product, you’re stuck with the higher prices and distribution methods for a long time unless you’re write off your investment.

    I’m not sure I agree with you about people not reading books for more than an hour at a time. Maybe that’s true on average, but it’s not so extraordinary that one hour would be insufficient. I’d hate to be on a long flight and know that my digital book can only give me an hour’s worth of reading. In fact, it would be a deal breaker for me, because that’s the situation in which a digital book would be most convenient. I can’t realistically lug six or seven books on a plane, but there’s no extra space needed with an e-reader. So if my first book turned out to be a dud, I’m not stuck with reading a crappy book on a long trip, I just switch to a new story.

    It’s similar to talk time on a phone. Hardly anyone has two-hour-long phone conversations on a day-to-day basis, but you always want the option available should you need it.

  • rowan said on February 8th, 2010:

    Gosh and Golly, I do enjoy your writing Nick especially the dialogue (&stuff) …translating the internecine struggles of the big guns into digestible negates, I mean nuggets. Hurrah for Nick.

  • Google Buzz: Not fit for purpose said on February 11th, 2010:

    [...] Again, would it be so hard to hold off automatically publishing stuff to people’s Buzz streams and make them go through a configuration process before they start publishing anything? Of course, that wouldn’t suit Google, who want as many people to be using Buzz as soon as possible. They don’t have a new tool here, they are just integrating Jaiku, whom they bought in Oct 2007, into Gmail. (Wait! What? It took them over two years to think of this?) So they don’t have a really compelling reason for people to change from Twitter or Facebook or FriendFeed. Buzz is not a killer app, it’s a mess. A TGF. [...]

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