Too Many Books, Too Little Time

Are you one of those readers who posts terrible “reviews” of books on Amazon.com to protest a book price higher than the originally-promised $9.99? A month or so ago I posted a blog about those protests titled “Kindle Readers Skew Book Ratings,” suggesting that these protests were unfair to authors, who have no control over the price that Amazon charges. I reported that, as a result of a lawsuit, publishers have more leverage in setting the price for e-books, and that disgruntled e-book readers should protest to the publisher.

My bad.

The new Boston Review has published a detailed article by Onnesha Roychoudhuri explaining the chokehold that Amazon.com now has over the publishing industry. This article presents a clear and complete picture of how Amazon.com – as well as big-box booksellers – have impacted the publishing industry. While lengthy, the article is well worth the time to read it.

However, if you are short on time, here are the main points:

• With approximately 75% of all e-book purchases in the US made on Amazon.com, the online seller is in a unique position “to control the e-book market and thereby the future of the publishing industry.”
• Amazon.com uses a variety of strong-arm tactics against publishers that won’t play ball with its pricing demands, including (but not limited to): refusing to sell their books at a discount, turning off search options to publisher’s books, and removing “buy” buttons.
• The books that readers see as “Recommended for You” on Amazon.com are paid promotions, which inhibit the exposure that publishers – and authors – get for “small” books. Roychoudhuri explains that “this is frustrating for publishers who want their books to be sold on their merits.”
• Amazon.com set the original $9.99 rate without consulting publishers. Roychoudhuri explains the cost of publishing a new title:
• “The sale of a twenty-dollar hardcover nets a large publisher about ten dollars. Royalties run the publisher about three dollars, and the costs of printing, binding, and paper are a further two dollars (more for low-volume titles). Take $1.20 for distribution, two dollars for marketing, and that leaves a publisher with roughly $1.80 to cover rent, editing, and any other costs. A smaller publisher might keep closer to a dollar per book.”

The bottom line is that, unless publishers push back, eventually this is going to deeply impact who and what gets published and sold. I make no secret of the fact that I love my Kindle as ONE of my reading options, and I believe that price is an important consideration for all readers. More affordable books means more people can buy and read them. Nevertheless, the people involved in writing and publishing those books need to make a fair living. If no one but the huge publishers and most popular authors are able to compete, we will find our reading choices severely curtailed.

Do we really want a retailer such as Amazon.com to be making our literary decisions for us?

 This quiz has been making the rounds. If you’re not on Facebook, you may have fun completing it and sharing it on your blog. Also might remind you of some books you’d like to add to your TBR list!

Here are the instructions:

 Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.  

 I have read 60. Parts of 9 more. There are 4 I’ve never heard of.  Looks like I have some more reading to do!

  1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 

 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

 6 The Bible

 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 

 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 

 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott

 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy

 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 

 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger 

 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (at least twice)

 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

 34 Emma -Jane Austen

 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

 36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

 37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres

 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

 40 Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne

 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving

 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery

 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy

 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood

 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

 51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel

 52 Dune – Frank Herbert

 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens

 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov

 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt

 64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold

 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac

 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy

 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

 75 Ulysses – James Joyce

 76 The Inferno – Dante 

 77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

 78 Germinal – Emile Zola

 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

 80 Possession – AS Byatt

 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens

 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker

 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 

 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

 87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery

 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks

 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams

 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas

 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare

 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl   

 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo