Interesting analogies between the collapse of the comic book market and what could happen to books without bookstores

Apr 15 2012

Tim O'Reilly 1:59 PM - Public
Awesome analysis of the Amazon ebook strategy by Charlie Stross (@cstross). Anyone who wants to understand how Amazon is changing the game for publishers should read this post.

I agree with Charlie on every point. He is particularly compelling on the subject of how publishers played right into Amazon's hands by insisting on DRM, and how their only hope is to drop it ASAP. I've been saying this, to deaf ears in New York, for years. Publishers need to focus on interoperable ebook standards above all else. Good for them, good for readers, and good for the industry as a whole.

disintermediation

monopoly

monopsony

authors (or anyone?) can manually add back any data lost from their books in Goodreads

Posted by Joseph Esposito ⋅ Jan 10, 2012

September 20, 2011 6:35 AM

"I never felt like passing out in a warehouse and I never felt treated like a piece of crap in any other warehouse but this one," Goris said. "They can do that because there aren't any jobs in the area."

The Allentown newspaper The Morning Call investigates life inside of one of Amazon's newest warehouses.

As you probably know, reddit was down or degraded for the last 36 hours. Right now we are still a bit degraded, but we have enough servers to handle the weekend traffic (we think). We hope to be at full capacity by Monday.

We want to tell you why reddit was down.

In short, Amazon had a failure of their EBS system, which is a data storage product they offer, at around 1:15am PDT. This may sound familiar, because it was the same type of failure that took us down a month ago. This time however the failure was more widespread and affected a much larger portion of our servers (and not just ours, many other companies were affected as well). Namely, most of our database slaves were disabled from this outage. Even though we are spread across multiple availability zones (data centers), it did us no good in this case, since the outage was so widespread and hit multiple availability zones.

The Great SkyNet Day Amazon Downtime roundup - EC2 outages

Since fraud and publishing fall straight into our bailiwick, I’d been meaning to do a full-dress Post about this, and may yet do so. This, rather, will be a lick-and-a-promise review of the literature.

With the cost of self-publishing approaching zero thanks to e-publishing, and with content-farms being depreciated by Google, it seems that spammers have taken to e-publishing.

Amazon Cloud Drive is your hard drive in the cloud. Store your music, videos, photos, and documents on Amazon's secure servers. All you need is a web browser to upload, download, and access your files from any computer.

Sell your eBook for iPad, Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader.
Get distribution to the hottest eBook retailers in the world. Keep 100% of the royalties! Sign up now for only $149 $99.

KindleBoards is a website devoted to all things Kindle.

We’re the largest independent Kindle site on the web. The site includes a Kindle user forum, a Kindle blog, and few other goodies like our Top 10 page and our Link-Maker tool. Our forums have boards focused on Kindle books, accessories, reviews, user tips, and other Kindle-related topics. The site receives over 1.5 million pageviews per month, and currently has over 9,000 registered members.

Through our services, you can sell books, CDs, and DVDs for a fraction of the cost of traditional manufacturing, while maintaining more control over your materials. We make it simple to distribute your books, music, and video through Internet retail outlets, your own website, and other bookstores, retailers, libraries, and academic institutions.

With Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) you can self-publish your books on the Amazon Kindle Store. It's free, fast, and easy. Books self-published through KDP can participate in the 70% royalty program and are available for purchase on Kindle devices and Kindle apps for iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PC, Mac, Blackberry, and Android-based devices. With KDP, you can self-publish books in English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian and specify pricing in US Dollars and Pounds Sterling. You will also find useful information on our active community forum.

Amazon has given authors access to their Bookscan sales data, and wooo, Twitter is all lit up. MediaBistro on the subject, Off on a Tangent likewise.

Dennis Loy Johnson, head of Melville House Publishing, was one of the publishers approached by Amazon and encouraged to “sign on” to the new program. He refused and two weeks later received a visit from a cadre of Amazon employees at a book convention. “It was one team of guys one day and then another team of guys the next,” he recalled, when we spoke in May of 2009. “They kept saying, ‘Why aren’t you participating in the program?’ in this really heated, aggressive way. I told them we couldn’t afford it.” They countered that Johnson “couldn’t afford not to.”

Today's user interfaces are limited: they only support tasks when we know how to write matching algorithms or interface designs. Microsoft Word is good at laying out your document, but poor at understanding writing and suggesting edits to it. But, it is now feasible to embed on-demand human computation within interactive systems. Crowd workers on services like Amazon Mechanical Turk will do tasks for very small amounts of money. Soylent is a word processor with a crowd inside: an add-in to Microsoft Word that uses crowd contributions to perform interactive document shortening, proofreading, and human-language macros. Underlying Soylent is a new programming design pattern called Find-Fix-Verify that splits tasks into a series of generation and review stages to control costs and increase quality.

ANNALS OF COMMUNICATIONS
PUBLISH OR PERISH
Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business?
by Ken Auletta
APRIL 26, 2010

"So my question is this: How long is Amazon going to dick around publishers before customers start to think of their inventory as unreliable?"

"I am ashamed to admit that until last night I'd not touched App Engine much, but having spent some hours with it now, I was blown away. Everything I labored hard to set up myself under Rails: memcache, message queues, email service, was already there, along with XMPP and user services to boot. And the simplicity of deployment had a lot to be said for it.

Amazon cannot afford to lose this war. Not so much because of the potential revenue impact this year, but because as digital books become more popular they will become a bigger part of Amazon’s business than of Apple’s. What we are seeing is a fight over who, if anyone, will get to be the iTunes of eBooks. Amazon holds that position today, but book publishers saw how iTunes emasculated the music industry and don’t want to repeat that experience. Perhaps nobody understands that better than Steve Jobs, which is why he is now playing a different game.

Who Moved My Buy Button? is a project of the Authors Guild.

Our goal is to allow authors to become immediately aware of when their buy buttons are removed. Publishers are often too fearful of antagonizing Amazon to say anything publicly about such incidents. Authors needn't have that fear (we can keep your identity anonymous), however, and publicity is probably our best collective defense.

So please keep track of a few of your books. Sound the alarm if you find Amazon's removed your buy buttons (but make sure your book isn't just out of stock: review Buy-Buttonology: A Field Guide to Amazon's Book Pages). We'll do our part -- we'll monitor thousands of titles from many publishers.

discusses the real work flow and costs of publishing paper books vs ebooks

author Felicity Shoulders

The Amazon Kindle team says:

Just remember: there’s one thing that authors can and should do in circumstances like this (and, um, always). That thing is: link to lots of different bookstores. If your book is unavailable at Amazon, you can get it at Barnes and Noble or Borders or Powell’s or the Tattered Cover or any of a number of other bookstores.

Tobias Buckell reprint at SFWA.org

more of a consumer side argument, which seems very incomplete at the least. The "Perceived High Prices" argument is very compelling, but it misses the point.

RT @jessicafreely: Now I'm reading Toby Buckell's #Amazonfail post: ...

Editors' note: This message ran as a paid advertisement in a special Saturday edition of Publishers Lunch

To: All Macmillan authors/illustrators and the literary agent community
From: John Sargent

RT @RichRennicks: Charlie Stross does a great job explaining AMZN vs Macmillan smackdown #amazonfail

Jackson Pierce - Amazon FAIL. Again. Quick video of the whole mess. #amazonfail

Jim Henley. Economics of ebook publishing

Jim Henley. Reasonable points about Amazon vs Macmillan

Charles Stross "Amazon.com can kiss my ass."

John Scalzi: A Quick Note On eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx - #amazonfail

NY Times: Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement - #amazonfail

Keep track of gift ideas, holidays, past gift purchases, birthdays and more with your Gift Organizer.

stories about the beginning of Amazon

This firefox extension(browser plugin) provides an user friendly interface for Amazon's S3 (Simple Storage Service) . Its interface is very much similar to the FTP interface that lists local folders in the left panel and S3 buckets/files/folders in the ri

Wishlist Buddy helps you save money on the things you have in your Amazon Wishlist. You can set target prices for items, and when any of those items falls beneath that price, Wishlist Buddy emails you to let you know!

Steve Yegge's internal Amazon blog, 2004-2005