Why I'm ditching my Amazon account | Hacker News Reader

Why I'm ditching my Amazon account

blogs.reuters.com

14 pointssmacktoward41 comments

Ridiculous article that boils down to "I can't buy everything through Amazon and I believe that I'm entitled to an explanation of an inter-corporate dispute."

>I take it personally that the company doesn’t think it owes me even a half-baked explanation for why I can’t buy some books from it."

Corporations make decisions based almost entirely on monetary factors. The article's author is not a shareholder or Amazon employee and is not entitled to the minutes of meetings or corporate strategy documents. Some bars don't serve Guinness. If I want a Guinness and the bar doesn't serve it, I'll order something else or go to a different bar. The bartender doesn't owe me a handwritten rationalization as to why they're not in a relationship with a distributor.

edit: Unless Guinness paid me. Then I would complain and blog about it. Maybe Reuters works the same way.

Yup. Some airlines serve only Coke, and others server only Pepsi. The nerve!

Talk about ridiculous. Let me get this straight:

1. I want to buy all books on Amazon.

2. Amazon won't sell all books, therefore:

3. I won't buy any books on Amazon.

I've honestly never before read a serious article that (a) raised such a trivial, entitled complaint about a company, and (b) responded to the complain in such a self-destructive way.

this whole article comes across as whiny. It's not like amazon is abusing it's workers (a la wal mart) or buying our politicians to screw individuals (most other huge companies) or using slave labor (apple, gap, wal mart again) and the author probably shops at many of those places so whatever.

Amazon is a state-supported monopoly (through a strange tax regime for internet business) that is quickly driving brick-and-mortar stores out of business. The fact that it uses this position to pressure publishers is anything but trivial.

As a buyer all I care about is to find the product I want at the lowest possible price. I will let the publisher worry about how Amazon compete with them.

Depends on where you live. When I buy something from Amazon, I pay the same NY sales tax as in a brick and mortar store.

And a monopoly? There are many places where I can (and sometimes do) buy books other than Amazon.

"Amazon is a state-supported monopoly (through a strange tax regime for internet business)"

They're using the same tax regime that's been in effect since the heyday of Sears, Roebuck (and yes, retailers whined about it then, too -- it even went to the Supreme Court).

Amazon pays sales taxes in every state where it has a physical presence. Just like every other business.

Do you think Random Penguin, Hachette, etc. pay taxes in your state? Unless you live in New York, no, they do not.

"I take it personally that the company doesn’t think it owes me even a half-baked explanation for why I can’t buy some books from it. "

Uh - what? What if Amazon had never stocked books by Hachette in the first place, would he still have had a tantrum?

There are a lot of items I can't buy on Amazon. There are many more items that I choose not to buy from Amazon, in order to support other retailers.

But I don't take it personally and neither do they. They don't tell me why they don't stock certain items and I don't ask. It's business.

"You won’t hold it against me if I still stream free programs until my account comes up for renewal later this year and I bail, will you?"

Yes, yes I will. If you're going to trumpet your principles you'd better stick to them.

I'm curious whether the Department of Justice would get involved in something like this at some point? I am very unfamiliar with the legal world, but this seems borderline illegal for Amazon to do. Are they close enough to being a monopoly in the books world for this to be anti-competitive?

To me, anti-competitive means Amazon colluding with or sabotaging a "competitor" such as Barnes&Noble[1] or Apple iBooks[2].

The dispute between Amazon and Hatchette is a fight between a retailer and a supplier. Same as Costco/Walmart and a manufacturer, or a broadcast network NBC with NFL football, or TV series production and an actor's contract renewal. All negotiating parties use whatever market leverage they have to get the most favorable terms possible.

Hatchette can still sell via B&N, iBooks, ebay, open their own e-commerce site, etc. Amazon's hardball tactics are not barring any of those options for the book publisher.

[1]http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/j-k-rowling?store=allproduct... [2]http://www.apple.com/ibooks/

> Same as Costco/Walmart and a manufacturer

Walmart, of course, being notorious for using its huge market position to force costs onto suppliers. That's part of how it gets the low prices: because if you sell at retail, and you don't agree your product should costs what Walmart thinks it should cost, you find yourself locked out of a giant part of the economy.

Walmart and Amazon sell products at the lowest price possible.

That's what they do. If you aren't willing to sell at the lowest price possible, you need to be in a different market.

Neither they nor their customers owe you a certain profit margin.

From September 2013, Amazon has 29% of consumer book spending while Barnes & Noble has 21%. Walmart also has a sizable share. We tend to fixate on online, but a lot of people still buy books in stores, and Amazon has 0% of that market.

Source: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailin...

> From September 2013, Amazon has 29% of consumer book spending while Barnes & Noble has 21%. Walmart also has a sizable share. We tend to fixate on online, but a lot of people still buy books in stores, and Amazon has 0% of that market.

Sure, but monopoly is by market, and if online vs. physical retail of books really is a distinct market (as, incidentally, you present it here) by the test applied in antitrust analysis (which I suspect it may well be), then the fact that there is also a physical book retail market that Amazon has none of would not be relevant, and combining the two markets to get a overall book spending market share would not be meaningful.

I've never bought a book online from Amazon, interestingly enough. I HAVE bought books online from indigo.ca (more often than not I just go into the local store if it's a more popular book, as it is almost certainly in stock).

Certainly there are other online book vendors around? Maybe I'm living in another world ...

You should always search for the best deal for your money. For e.g. I prefer to buy books from Amazon, but I always check Abebooks where sometime you find the international edition of the same book at 20% the price from Amazon (this doesn't really work for literature, but for Math or Programming books you have a good chance to find a better deal).

As a side note, you should probably check Amazon.ca where you have free shipment for Canada for order over $25.

Actually, AbeBooks has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008, so you're still buying from Amazon:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/CompanyInformation/?cm_sp=Ftr-...

As long as the price is better it is not really important to me if I buy from an independent Abebooks or from an Amazon subsidiary.

That could be a lot of research. Given the nature of the books I tend to buy (usually no single item over $15-20, but in bulk orders up to $400 sometimes), I have little incentive to spend much time researching for "good deals" across multiple sites, possibly making multiple orders instead of a single order.

I'm sure if I spent an hour or two finding the lowest price on 20-30 items I could save a bit of money on the order(s), but I don't think it's really worth my time for my default use case.

Now, if I were looking at items like text books or reference books, I would likely do the research. Such materials are often sold at huge variation in price across retailers ...

If you tend to buy books in the $15-20 range doesn't make much sense to do an extensive search using a lot of sellers, but you can give Amazon.ca a try. I've found that it is cheaper to buy from Amazon than directly from a Canadian online seller and the effort is minimal.

For reference books you should definitely check alternative sellers, I've seen programming books priced at $120 in Canadian bookstore at $20 (or less for the international edition).

I'm not a lawyer and I've disagreed with some antitrust efforts in the past, but I don't think Amazon is even close to what could reasonably be considered monopolistic in the book industry. Amazon is huge, but it has many competitors of varying sizes on and offline.

The DOJ went after Apple over ebooks, but the reasoning for that was sort of the opposite of this situation. Apple was colluding with publishers to keep prices high, thus (arguably) exerting excessive market influence through their combined weight. This is a dispute between Amazon and a publisher, which is (somewhat arguably) exactly what should happen in the marketplace. When the supply chain colludes, their power increases. When they contend, their individual powers are kept in check.

> The DOJ went after Apple over ebooks, but the reasoning for that was sort of the opposite of this situation.

Both collusion between players in a market (the publishers in the Apple case, Apple's role was as a deliberate collaborator in that illegal collusion) and unilateral action by one player with market power are prohibited by antitrust rules.

So, yes, while they are in a sense "opposite", both collusion of the Apple/Publishers sort and unilateral action by a dominant player (as in, e.g., the big Microsoft antitrust case, and arguable Amazon in this case) can violate antitrust law.

> If Amazon prevails in this clash, will it put me and my material needs last whenever a supplier resists its will?

Let's try reframing that statement:

If Hatchette prevails in this clash, will it put me and my material needs last whenever Amazon resists a publisher's demands?

You have to get a kick out of internet comments. Despite the fact that Amazon was founded in 1994 and did not go live until 1995. One of the comments confesses that "I’ve been an Amazon power shopper since around ’92 or ’93..."

Here is the Amazon discussion from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7789753

Playing devils advocate here -

Okay I understand abuse of position AGENCY MODEL!!!

Remember when Steve Jobs got with the big 5 publishers? We got the, "They wanted $15+ for an ebook" price fixing job!!! I am sorry that the fight for price is still on BUT the HIGH cost of ebooks is a problem and don't even start to think about the high price of text books and text ebooks!

The issue with cost is big for customers. If the price is decided solely by publishers readers lose.

> position AGENCY MODEL

Google gives ten hits for "position agency model." Since you understand the concept so well can you explain it to me?

I think you parsed that wrong. I don't think it was "(abuse of) (position agency model)" but "(abuse of position) (agency model)". The lack of punctuation isn't helpful, and the exact argument being made is unclear, though.

That makes more sense, thank you.

OR that AGENCY MODEL was in all caps???? abuse of position is also a term.

abuse of position with their agency model. <--- That better?

The use of all caps and seven exclamation marks in six sentences was a little bewildering for me.

ebooks don't have a high cost, and their current prices aren't a problem, except maybe for publishers, editors, and authors. The cost of a book isn't even remotely based on the cost of paper. Books don't cost very much to print. They cost a lot to produce. Just because you know that bits are free to copy, doesn't mean the book was free to produce.

When an ebook is priced higher than a physical book then the ebook has a high cost. Maybe the high cost is justified because people are willing to pay for the convenience. But I'm not, I'll purchase whichever is cheaper, or not purchase at all.

i'm not sure publishers are ever pricing ebooks higher than the physical books, and certainly not often. I'd like to see that if they are. Yes you can buy used for almost nothing, but that's not really a fair comparison. It's already been sold once and is in used condition.

Amazon is a retailer that has used the fact that it doesn't have to pay taxes, and was first, to dominate the book distribution business, driving brick-and-mortar business to close all over the country. To dismiss the fact that it is openly abusing that position to pressure major publishers to conform to its business needs as trivial is, at the least, short-sighted.

I don't think the tax angle is very relevant on the book side. It's more that Amazon took advantage of the high margins in the book selling business to offer 30-50% discounts. The market was ripe for disruption.

Sorry, that's not true, unless you're talking about behemoths like Barnes & Noble and Borders. Indy bookstores have been on the rise for several years now, after decades of decline.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2014/05/27/membership-ri...

It is widely believed that Amazon's curb-stomping of Borders and B&N is what's opened up the opportunity for the indies to come back. Yes, they compete with Amazon, but not nearly as head-to-head as they were competing with Borders and B&N.

"To dismiss the fact that it is openly abusing that position to pressure major publishers to conform to its business needs"

How are they "abusing" the publisher and why should we care if they are? Publishers have been abusing authors for a couple of centuries now, so they get little sympathy from me. They're not quite as scummy as record companies and movie studios, but just barely.

Edit for typo: "studies" -> "studios".

It's difficult for me to empathize with publishers in the same way that the author has done. Wasn't this entire situation created by book publisher's love for walled gardens and DRM?

Concentrated power seems to me to be the logical result of that kind of strategy.

Yeah, in retrospect, the publishers would have been much better controlling the DRM themselves.

That is exactly what created the situation.

They could start up their own stores right now (and even get their stuff delivered to Kindles) if they abandoned their child-like faith in DRM.

Baen has been delivering straight to Kindle for years now. Of course, Baen has never been clueless enough to use DRM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com