Why the Waterstones/Amazon Deal is “Like Vichy France”
From Publishing Perspectives:
Last month, Waterstones’ MD James Daunt shocked the world by penning a deal with Amazon to partner with them to supply e-books to the booksellers customers. But he has not done the surprise Kindle deal through gritted teeth, as some have suggested – he’s done it “through having all his teeth taken out.” That’s the view of one senior British publisher.
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The publisher, inevitably speaking off the record as is the norm when it comes to Amazon, continued: “James must be talking to a slightly different bit of Amazon than the one I normally talk to. He knows that the Amazon strategy is an end game for everyone. They are the Death Star, as we know. But James knows that too. This isn’t your Soviet Pact of 1939 [the non-aggression agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union that ended when Germany invaded Russia]; he’s not prepared to go to war with them, but he can use them as long as he can. This deal is one of the most practical I’ve come across.”
The chain announced last month that it would sell Kindles from the autumn and allow customers to download Kindle titles within its stores, taking a cut on each sale made.
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Many publishers believe customers will simply gravitate to Amazon when they leave the shop, but Daunt points out that since almost everyone already knows about Amazon anyway, “for those who want to use a Kindle, there is now the option to do so through Waterstones.”
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Commenting on the deal, another senior publisher said: “If I were Waterstones, I’d rather tie up with a ruthless devil than an also-ran,” a reference to the abortive deal with Nook. “This is definitely not a solution for Waterstones, but it buys him a little time and, I suppose, also a potential rescuer of the chain should Mamut [Alexander Mamut, the billionaire Russian oligarch who bought the company for £53m last year] get bored with losing money.”
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UK independents feel it will make life more difficult for them, and that it accentuates the need for them to have a credible digital offer. “I think it’s quite a short term move on Waterstones part, and they’ll lose customers to Amazon in the end,” said Sheila o’Reilly at Dulwich Books in south London.
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Like many indies, Davies suffers the frequent indignity of customers using her shop as a free showroom for Amazon. But it went one stage further in her store recently. “A lady came in who said she’d been given a Kindle for Christmas but wasn’t quite sure how to use it. I said to her, ‘Well,Eleanor Davies the first thing you do is put it in a bucket of water…’”
Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives
One of the frequent memes among both bookstores and publishers is that they’ll “lose customers” if they cooperate with Amazon.
This is a remarkably obtuse view of the world, as if customers were something to be possessed and controlled and somehow lacked independent lives with computers, mass media and new media. Perhaps if a bookstore’s customers were illiterate fools, this might be true, but those wouldn’t be very prolific readers.
One of the key indicators of dysfunctional organizations is the refusal to acknowledge/discuss the biggest problems they face. Don’t booksellers understand they just look stupid to customers if they act like Amazon doesn’t exist? Barnes & Noble is not a perfect organization, but when they introduced the Nook, they featured it front and center in their stores, impossible to miss when you walked in the door.
A saying that grew out of established tech businesses facing disruptive challenges from low-cost competitors was that if you didn’t cannibalize your own business, someone else would to it for you.
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“the first thing you do is put it in a bucket of water…”
P.G.
LOL, that is the best laugh of the day…wonderful:)
brendan
Why Jeff Bezos is like Lord Voldemort and why James Daunt is like Cornelius Fudge. Discuss.
*ponder* This works better if you take my spouse’s Most Paranoid Speculation that Amazon wants to eliminate paper books entirely (as they are a low-profit, high-volume item that is a pain in the neck to stock) — that assumption would drive a very good Voldemort comparison. (Or possibly an Amon one. #legendofkorra)
Otherwise, I think a Bezos/Gates comparison is more likely to fly. *bland expression with halo*
PG really needs more emoticons in here.
Hmm, I’d say Daunt is more like Pius Thicknesse, who gets brainwashed by Voldemort–Fudge just wanted to pretend Voldemort didn’t exist.
If Amazon is going to cannibalize a part of your business anyway, you might as well get paid something for the “provilege”.
Short term? If you don’t survive then you don’t get a seat at the long term table. The longer you last the better your chances of finding a way out. Who knows, maybe Amazon won’t turn out to be the biggest threat. And if it’s not, get ready for the blindside because it’s coming.
This article skirts perilously close to invoking Godwin’s Law.
Yes.
Cornelius Fudge is to Chamberlain as Voldemort is to…uh nothing’s coming to me.
Yes, my first thought was “Vichy? Really?”
But of course, it makes sense. Godwin’s Law always crops up during a last dying gasp of a hissy-fit flamewar. I can’t think of a better way to describe how some folks have been reacting to the changes in publishing.
Bookstores trying to pretend Amazon doesn’t exist is like a convenience store pretending you can’t buy a soda from a supermarket.
Clumsy point, but still the nature of the market.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people in this industry are more or less admitting that they are ripping off their customers. If customers “gravitate” towards Amazon, that means that those customers get greater utility from Amazon. So these publishers believe that the path to success is via their customers getting less utility. Oh, that’s right, these guys think we are functionally idiots who must be protected from our desires for greater selection and lower prices.
It’s all about whether I can get the book now. That one factor often decides whether AM or the bookstore gets my money. That’s the one area that bookstores could lead in, but they would need POD to make it worth it and that’s too complicated when you look at the details.
More seriously, though, I go to local bookstores for [new] Hardcovers (~$25), used bookstores for [old] Paperbacks (~$5), and Amazon for [convenient] eBooks (~$10). I figure I spend about the same chunk of total dollars at each (1/3, 1/3, 1/3).
They can co-exist!
That is to say, Amazon threatens Barnes & Noble (et al), not Ma & Pa Bookery.
I’m probably similar to David, but that still represents a change from a couple of years ago (before I got my first e-reader), when my spend was probably 90% in the bookstore and 10% at the book exchange and none online.
The thing that bothers me the most about all of this complaining that people do about Amazon is that not once have I seen someone propose a solution. Much like politics, they just engage in smear campaigns rather than innovate to create a solution to their (perceived) problem.
There are a lot of e-ink devices out there without sufficient platforms. Someone should create another e-book store with great features that has a flexible delivery API that can be adapted to these devices and new devices from other makers. These other e-book readers have little to no market share specifically because they operate only from places like Diesel and Smashwords, neither of which have the ease of use that make the Kindle so popular.
Rather than device makers and competitors complaining that Amazon is evil, they should try competing once in a while. There’s a reason Amazon has the greater market share. They make everything (too) easy.
I applaud James Daunt for his making this deal with Amazon. “Download a book from Amazon in our store and we get a piece of the action.” I suggested that to my favorite independent bookstore not so long ago.
I am happy to go in and patronize a local bookstore, but if you ain’t got what I want, I’m goin’ to Amazon. You want a piece of that action? Strike a deal with Amazon to get a piece of my download.
Kudos to James Daunt.
antares: “I applaud James Daunt … ‘Download a book from Amazon in our store and we get a piece of the action.’” Isn’t it amazing that indie bookstores fail to study their “enemy”? I assume they carry Sun Tzu on their shelves. Military metaphors aside, booksellers fear a future that doesn’t resemble the past. Their ostrich posture won’t make the future go away.
This passage stood out for me: “Getting personality into the Amazon site is impossible because their algorithms don’t allow for it – only bookshops can do that. When Waterstones Online launched in 1996, it used the catchphrase ‘Booksellers make the best search engines’ which I thought was brilliant. The aspiration now is to harness the hardware, which Amazon will bring, with the personality of Waterstones”
As an American, I’m not familiar with Waterstones’ personality, but I can say I don’t feel the need for a bookstore’s personality getting between me and the books I want to read. It’s one thing I really like about Amazon–I don’t have someone looking down his snooty nose at me when I bring one of “those” books up to the counter. I’ve had that experience at Barnes & Noble and I didn’t like it. I’m never impressed when a bookseller wants to tell me what I ought to like.
Tori