I've been doing an anti-Amazon rant for so long, I'm afraid it's not very fiery these days, but the spectacle of the Krugthulhu attacking Amazon's latest nasty maneuvering inspires me to go on...
If you haven't been following the story, Amazon is in a fight with a large publisher, Hachette, trying to squeeze a better deal out of them by making it a little harder to buy their stuff via Amazon. Some years back, Amazon was in a similar fight with Macmillian, and got them to cave-in.
The fact that people are still surprised when Amazon does something sleazy is actually pretty amazing. And the fact that Amazon has defenders is astounding.
Here are some low-lights of the history of Amazon...
Amazon donated money to the Republican party, helping to support the rise of the Bush Junior regime. (The first place I heard of Amazon was a story front and center in the Wall Street Journal-- what kind of connections does that take?).
Amazon was the first company to aggressively use a software patent against it's competition, Barnes and Noble. Nearly every programmer is against software patents in principle (both the left-wing Richard Stallman and the right-wing John McCarthy spoke out against them-- not that this mattered to our lords and masters), and on top of that, nearly every programmer regards the particular patent they used as an obvious "fail" for the non-obviousness criterion.
If you talk to people who've worked for Amazon on the white-collar side, their business culture does not make it sound like the kind of place you'd like to stay for very long... it's always offended me that places like this can be successful in the US, where every free marketeer will tell you that market forces are supposed to constrain them to play nice to compete for employees.
And in recent years we suddenly started hearing about really bad working conditions in their warehouses... what a surprise that was, eh?
Krugman's column, Amazon’s Monopsony Is Not O.K., brings up some interesting evidence of a possible political bias in Amazon's recent moves:
Specifically, the penalty Amazon is imposing on Hachette books is bad in itself, but there’s also a curious selectivity in the way that penalty has been applied. Last month the Times’s Bits blog documented the case of two Hachette books receiving very different treatment. One is Daniel Schulman’s “Sons of Wichita,” a profile of the Koch brothers; the other is “The Way Forward,” by Paul Ryan, who was Mitt Romney’s running mate and is chairman of the House Budget Committee. Both are listed as eligible for Amazon Prime, and for Mr. Ryan’s book Amazon offers the usual free two-day delivery. What about “Sons of Wichita”? As of Sunday, it “usually ships in 2 to 3 weeks.” Uh-huh.
Krugman also remarks on a phenomena I've noticed lately: "Meanwhile, Amazon’s defenders often digress into paeans to online bookselling, which has indeed been a good thing for many Americans". By way of an example, Krugman links to a Joe Nocera article at the NYT (by the way, you do realize that the Times has policies against writers calling each other out by name, right? But Krugman did it by link, so that's okay. Heh).
Myself, lately I've been puzzling over a piece by Clay Shirky, who I'm am told is a very intelligent fellow. (It often seems to me that verbal facility can be an intellectual trap: someone who can write well can generate any amount plausible, reasonable sounding prose supporting any position. The professional propagandist does this on purpose, but the professional academic often seems to be deluding themselves by accident...)
Shirky repeatedly talks as though without Amazon, the book-reading public will be plunged back into the middle ages (no one else does online sales?). And he seems to feel that the opposition to Amazon is just a matter of snobbery (those big city intellectuals don't understand the plight of people living in podunkistan): but the central issue here is the fear of abuse of a single point of control-- and in the case of Amazon, it's an already substantiated fear.
At one point Shirky comments dismissively about someone who dared to question the sacred principle of supply-and-demand: "Set aside that fact that such a statement would contradict everything we know about the effect of price on human behavior ...". It seems to me that there's another thing that we all know about human behavior: monopolies abuse monopoly power. Centralized points of control become centralized points of failure.
Shirky also repeatedly sneers at big publishers as a "cartel" (it occurs to me that even a cartel might be preferable to an outright monopoly) with no interest in supporting small, independent works of which Amazon is supposedly the champion.
Strangely enough, V. Vale of RE/Search fame-- a man who knows something about independent bookselling-- violently disagrees with this line of thought. And I must say V. Vale's own anti-Amazon rant makes my efforts seem dull and weak:
Then, less than 20 years ago, a gigantic white Lovecraftian worm parasite calling itself “Amazon” climbed aboard something called the “Internet.” This parasite made nothing, created nothing, but conned every publisher in America to sell to Amazon on Amazon’s terms. Discounting, plus loss-leading “free shipping” systematically began killing bookstores, small book distributors, small publishers—as well as larger entities. Yes, in the past twenty years a large number of physical bookstores and publishers who print on paper, have perished.
Do you shop at Amazon? Well, you are destroying book publishing, culture itself, as well as countless other small enterprises. Every “merchant” who gets used by Amazon knows that the world was a better place before Amazon came along…
Krugman essentially suggests that we should be invoking the force of anti-trust law against Amazon (he mentions Standard Oil in passing). If you're not interested in waiting for hell to freeze over and Elizabeth Warren to be appointed the Czar of all Czars, I have an alternate suggestion: let us boycott Amazon.
What will we do for books? Myself, I use local independent bookstores when I can, and when I can't I often use Barnes and Nobles (bn.com). Whereas Amazon was in the Republican camp back when it really mattered, Barnes and Nobles has always been true blue, a contributor to the Democrats.
I like the idea of ordering directly from small publishers, but there's a regrettable trend in that world to use Amazon for "fulfillment", which strangely always seems to leave me unfulfilled.
Even just as a practical matter, bn.com let's me check a little box saying "just USPS for this address". Amazon likes to force you to use UPS, but if you don't live in Mayberry RFD and/or have your own shipping department to take deliveries, UPS is actually ridiculously inconvenient. If you miss a USPS delivery, you just go get it at the post office when you can. You too can join the communist anti-capitalist revolution: support your local post office.
By the way, I know I've been calling Amazon a "monopoly" throughout here, and I realize that technically they're more like a "monopsony"... but give 'em time. Krugman himself expresses skepticism that Amazon will conquer the entire universe of online retail, but why take that chance? Controlling around a third of online booksales is already bad enough.