Archives of Amazon
Book News Roundup: Write your way to a free Seattle apartment
An anonymous Seattle apartment building owner is running an essay contest. The winner gets to live rent-free in a "clean, comfortable place" in Queen Anne or Ballard for a year. The essays are supposed to respond to the question "How would a free apartment for one year help you reach your goals in 10 years?" in 350 words or less. You can't solve gentrification with a writing contest, but at least the odds are better than Powerball.
Cascadia College in Bothell is hosting a six-week course called "Innovative Cascadian Poetry." The course "delves into the geography and poetry of the Cascadia bioregion, exploring the area’s physical landscape, its cultural roots, and the innovative poetry produced there." It begins on January 25th.
Jeff VanderMeer's new short story is titled "Jeb Bush Is Sinking," it's published at Electric Literature, and it's fantastic, especially if you're the sort of person who has really enjoyed watching Jeb Bush squirm over the last few months.
Amazon is merging its original book social media site Shelfari with its other book social media site GoodReads, and at least one Shelfari user is very upset about it.
The January issue of The White Review — featuring works in translation — is available online. If you're looking for somwehwere to start, I very much enjoyed this weird and wonderful short story titled "Dimples."
Shelf Awareness, which broke the news about Amazon Books, continues to raise questions about the brick-and-mortar outpost of Amazon.com:
Is Amazon Books getting its stock from Amazon.com, which gets extra terms unavailable to most bricks-and-mortar retailers? Are books being bought non-returnable by Amazon.com but being returned by Amazon Books to Amazon.com? How, if at all, is a distinction made between the two businesses--and how will that be handled at meetings in which the bookstore buyers participate?
This is an important distinction to make: publishers sell books to physical retailers under very different terms — discounts, returnability, etc. — than they do with online booksellers. Publishers would likely be very upset if they learned that Amazon Books is selling books that were sold to Amazon.com.
"Amazon pulls Nazi symbols from New York subway ad campaign." (Here's context for those who weren't on the internet yesterday.)
Uh.
Seats on 42nd Street subway Shuttle cars are wrapped with symbols from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, intended to carry commuters into the alternate history of the Amazon TV series, The Man in the High Castle, in which the Axis Powers were victorious.
“Half the seats in my car had Nazi insignias inside an American flag, while the other half had the Japanese flag in a style like the World War II design,” said straphanger Ann Toback. “So I had a choice, and I chose to sit on the Nazi insignia because I really didn’t want to stare at it.”
In an America where Donald Trump leads the Republican presidential contest by running on a platform of bigotry, fear, and xenophobia, this particular image hits a little bit too close to home.
Looks like Amazon gave the Seattle Times the exclusive. Jay Greene reports:
At 9:30 Tuesday morning, the online retail giant will open will open [sic] its first-ever brick-and-mortar retail store in its 20-year life in University Village.
The store, called Amazon Books, looks a lot like bookstores that populate malls across the country. Its wood shelves are stocked with 5,000 to 6,000 titles, best-sellers as well as Amazon.com customer favorites.
We will of course go and investigate Amazon Books and report back soon. But in terms of quick takes: that's not a lot of titles for a bookstore to carry. Elliott Bay Book Company, for example, has 150,000 titles.
Since Shelf Awareness published the rumors that Amazon is preparing to open a bookstore in University Village, Geekwire has done a little digging into Seattle public records and uncovered blue prints for a space that "will combine elements of an Apple store and a Barnes & Noble, with areas for browsing books and checking out and buying new devices." It's a huge space.
Amazon to open bookstore in University Village?
For as long as I’ve been covering Amazon’s growth, rumors have circulated about the online retailer opening a brick-and-mortar store that serves as a kind of showroom. But I’ve never seen a report as well-researched and as compelling as this Shelf Awareness story suggesting that Amazon is in the process of opening a bookstore in University Village, where Blue C Sushi used to be. And this rumor suggests that it’s specifically a bookstore, and not just a place to buy Amazon’s tablets and hardware, as all the previous rumors have indicated. In fact, Shelf Awareness reports that Amazon has approached area booksellers with offers of starting pay that no local independent bookstore could likely match. You really should go read the whole report; it’s a terrific scoop, and well-reported.
If the report is true, this is a smart spot for Amazon to open a bookstore: University Village has been without a bookseller since Barnes & Noble closed in 2011. That Barnes & Noble reportedly closed over an argument relating to rent; rumor has it the store was very profitable.
There’s plenty of time to chew over this news and the story could change a million different ways before the store actually opens — if, indeed, it actually does open. But on its face, I have to say that Amazon getting into brick-and-mortar bookselling would be a fundamental shift for the online retailer.
The fact is that Seattle loves its bookstores. Most independent bookstores in Seattle have seen increased sales over the last five years. Third Place Books is opening a new branch in Seward Park early next year. This news could be an admission that e-books can only go so far. It could be a unique destination showroom for Amazon, a branding ploy to give the company a warm and approachable human face. (One can imagine the store’s booksellers becoming celebrities on Amazon’s online bookstore.) Or it could be something else entirely. We'll undoubtedly be hearing more about this story soon.
UPDATE 11:24 AM: GeekWire investigated the building site and they said there are already employees stocking books on shelves in the space. Looks like the truth will out sooner than later.
In letters to the Justice Department, authors and booksellers allege that "Amazon has used its dominance in ways that we believe harm the interests of America’s readers, impoverish the book industry as a whole, damage the careers of (and generate fear among) many authors, and impede the free flow of ideas in our society.”
This headline from Consumerist says it all: "Amazon Will Reportedly Pay Self-Published E-Book Authors $.006 Per Page Read."
According to the Guardian, that means the payments received by authors could be as little as $0.006 per page read, estimating that if an author publishes a 220-page book each page would have to be read by every person who downloads the book in order for the writer to make the $1.30 they get under the previous pay-per-download payment system.
Some authors have already left the program, "citing an estimated 60% to 80% reduction in royalties." The per-page payment system is classic Amazon-style shrewdness, in that it makes perfect sense and it's difficult to argue in terms of fairness. But even advocates for the plan have to admit that it's a hard-assed maneuver.
Think about it: when you go to a bookstore, how often do you buy books with the intent to read them right away? At least for me, the books that I buy wind up in a pile on my nightstand until the perfect moment for that particular book arrives. That moment might arrive two days after buying the book, or two years after buying the book. Maybe that day never comes.
When Amazon sells a self-published book to a customer, Amazon instantly makes money from that transaction. If the buyer never gets around to reading the e-book, the author will never make any money from that transaction. So Amazon is profiting from the author's hard work — plainly, the book wouldn't exist without the author, so Amazon would have nothing to sell — and paying nothing in return for that sale until the reader starts turning pages, a moment that is not guaranteed to ever arrive.
In this age of hyper-analytics, Amazon's new royalty policy is technically appropriate. But it's morally wrong.