[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by G. M. Palmer

How are readers being screwed by Amazon?

There's a bit of circular logic to it.

People are naturally drawn to the place that sells a product for a cheaper price than another place. Amazon is typically the cheapest place to buy books (and many other things besides). As a result, independent presses and small businesses that actually require a profit margin on each individual item they sell -- as opposed to observing an overall profit on hundreds of thousands of items collectively -- don't get the business that they would in the absence of a corporate behemoth.

This assumes, of course, that people would always be willing to pay $20+ for a book. I don't think that's the case, personally. But the other alarming trend is that when all the smaller presses start to close down because they can't compete with a large scale entity like Amazon, then the only arbiters of literature become the entities that can mass produce and mass distribute.

But the real problem is that people, for the most part, aren't wealthy. They'll only spend twice as much as what they have to if they truly believe in the deeper value of their money and think about where it goes. For the most part, the immediacy and cheapness of going on to Amazon is more valuable than trying to keep a small scale publishing house afloat. There's a real disconnect between dollars and sense.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Originally Posted by G. M. Palmer

How are readers being screwed by Amazon?

The answer to that is "Do you still beat your wife?"

I suggest you look more closely at the meaning of "oligarchy" and review the acquisition patterns and corporate structure of the media industries (for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concent...edia_ownership and http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...All3Media.html) .

It is the same pattern as in the pharmaceutical industry
http://www.ehow.com/about_5558983_st...-industry.html

The steel industry, the oil industry, etcetera.

You might also find this of interest

PDF]



Media Ownership – Does It Matter?

According to William Melody, the greatest threat to freedom of expression in the United States or elsewhere is the possibility that private entrepreneurs will always tend to monopolise the marketplace of ideas in the name of economic efficiency and private profit (Melody 1978). As a result of economic conditions or circumstances, access to the marketplace of ideas is restricted to a privileged few.

Twenty-five years ago, when Melody made this statement, only 37 cities out of 1,519 in the United States had two or more daily newspapers. By 2000, the number had decreased and the one-newspaper town had become the national norm (Sterling 2000: xvi). In 1996, the number of the cities with two or more dailies
declined to 19 or 1.3% of all American cities (Compaine and Gomery 2000: 9).

Fewer owners have control over more newspapers and their circulation, and most of the media have been absorbed by large conglomerates, ‘families’ or chains.

In addition to ownership concentration of the mass media industry, content provision, packaging and distribution have also ‘become a standardised production and marketing process in which the messages communicated are constrained and directed in both quantity and quality to meet the economic imperatives of that process’ (Melody 1978: 219). What are the implications of this? The result is that what most people hear and see in the mass media is remarkably uniform in content and world-view (Neuman 1991: 130). Giddens goes even further when he calls for ‘the democratising of the democracy’. He criticises the untamed power of media owners:

The media have a double relation to democracy. (my boldfacing) On the one hand ...

the emergence of a global information society is a powerful democratising force. Yet, television, and the other media, tend to destroy the very public space of dialogue they open up, through relentless trivializing, and personalizing of political issues. Moreover, the growth of giant multinational media corporations means that unelected business tycoons can hold enormous power (Giddens 1999: np).

You might also wish to look more closely at Pierre Bourdieu http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu

[W.F. Lantry]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

You might also wish to look more closely at Pierre Bourdieu

Janice,

I've always been fond of Bourdieu. His argument that judgments of taste are acts of social positioning is something we see demonstrated all the time, both here and elsewhere. And I agree with him that sometimes those expressions constitute a form of symbolic violence. He's arguing against the "I am I, and you should believe as I do" argument, and he has my sympathies.

That said, he looks much different in the hexagon than he does here: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_... _symboliques . I'm afraid I'm missing the connection you wished to draw, and it makes me feel I'm not reading your words in good faith.

Back on the actual subject, I think you and I view web marketing differently. I'm a big believer in the long tail. It used to be that you'd go into a bookstore in Memphis or Minneapolis, and find the same few poetry books there. The big houses controlled the selection of authors, and the limited distribution chains made it easy for bookstores to just stock what was being offered. It was good for poets with connections to the big houses, but bad for everyone else.

Things are different now, small presses are blossoming all over, mainly because of the long tail. It's become economical to list thousands of titles, rather than just a few dozen. Do I miss bookstores? Of course. But I also remember a sincere young man, who had no money for books, who was limited to those very few things he could find in the local library. That young man today, armed with a cheap kindle, could get just about every classic book in the history of world literature for free, and books of contemporary poetry for not much more. There's something to be said for that, even if we wish a few of the details were treated differently.

So I think we're mostly in agreement. We both see small presses as a good thing. Some note the explosive growth of small presses over the last decade, others say they could grow even more if they were better treated. Who could argue with either point?

Best,

Bill

[Janice D. Soderling]

I don't wish to quarrel with you, Bill, or attempt to persuade you to my way of thinking. I have no objection to electronic distribution per se, nor do I object to electronic reading devices per se. My objection (which I don't seem to be able to make clear), is that it is detrimental to diversity of thought and to democracy if one powerful organization controls authors and content, publishing, and distribution channels to the exclusion of independent bookstores and a multiplicity of publishers.

That is why antitrust laws originally came to be.

When information can be so easily erased or manipulated, I trust those who control it no more than I trust the tabloids or Fox News.

I've finished with this debate now.

[Allen Tice]

Amazingly (or not!), I could have written Janice's last post word for word. Also large portions of her earlier posts on this thread. It may be that any differences we have had in the past were simply superficial misundertandings based on what I think are misleading (to me, at least) labels.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, Allen.

[Gail White]

Originally Posted by Janice D. Soderling

Others, formerly responsibility of government, now the province of business are: education, prisons, public transportation, affordable housing.

Yes indeed. We are going full circle back to the Victorian era, when the man who could get the most work out of the paupers for the least amount of food got the contract to run the workhouse.

[G. M. Palmer]

I think you're suggesting how Amazon could screw customers.

Not how they are screwing them. Being freed from travel in $4/gal gas land and having a vastly wider selection of goods appears to be the opposite of screwing.

Clearly the ability of Amazon to gather in so much power is concerning--but their goal is to make money on sales, not anything else--Bezos wants to be the point of sale for the world.

You don't get that by screwing your customer.

Perhaps you imagine a world in which Amazon gains a total domination of the market and then cuts us off Soviet-Bread-Line-Style.

Hardly. The very existence of the internet (as it stands) makes such behavior impossible due to the ease of creating competition.

[G. M. Palmer]

Just read this related article and thought I'd share.

Best,
Michael

[Quincy Lehr]

"Bloated infrastructure"? Didn't we have enough downsizing in the 1990s? Jesus Christ! Sure, one could, I suppose, run an even leaner ship than the already understaffed publishers do already, but really, it's no way to live, and the disappearance of such jobs has been a contributing factor to this city starting to suck. It's a Tea Bag argument, really.