The Nation: The Trouble With Amazon

[marmar]

The Trouble With Amazon
Colin Robinson

July 14, 2010 |


Jeff Bezos loves numbers. In a speech in May to graduates at his alma mater, Princeton University, he recounted a childhood memory: when, driving with his grandmother, a heavy smoker, he calculated by how many years her addiction would reduce her life expectancy. Announcing the result from the back seat, he expected praise for his deft math. But his grandmother just burst into tears.

The Amazon founder's geeky obsession with numbers evidently formed early, and despite the glimmer of discomfort revealed by his Princeton anecdote, his fervently quantitative take on the world clearly still predominates. In a letter accompanying the 2009 Amazon annual report, for instance, he sets out a mind-boggling 452 goals for the company in the coming year. The word "revenue" is mentioned only eight times, yet revenue growth is central to the Amazon story. Expanding both internationally and across other products—nonbook sales represent 75 percent of total Amazon turnover—Amazon's global business has increased fifteenfold over the past decade, 28 percent last year alone. Sales in 2009 topped $24.5 billion. To put that in perspective, in 2008 total sales by all US bookstores were less than $17 billion. Amazon is today, by some margin, the largest bookseller in the world.

Of all the goals in the report, Bezos proudly points out, no fewer than 360 deal directly with customer needs. The customer has always been king in the Bezos ethos, and the formula for keeping the king happy is straightforward. "Amazon gives the customers what they want: low prices, vast selection and extreme convenience," he told a shareholders' meeting. On these terms, Amazon's success is stellar. It has more than 2 million titles on sale; bestselling books are routinely discounted by 50 percent or more; and it ranked first in BusinessWeek's "customer service champs" awards last year. But dig beneath the surface of the numbers and a more complex picture emerges, one suggesting that, stats notwithstanding, readers and writers may ultimately not be best served by Amazon's race to become the biggest, cheapest and most convenient bookseller around.

Amazon has not grown to where it is today by being touchy-feely. Sure, it adopted the informal trappings that characterized many of the new technology start-ups of the 1990s. But if Bezos's first desk at the company was an old door on trestles, the business conducted from behind it has been as ruthless as anything he encountered in his previous gig as a Wall Street broker. Soon after Amazon's launch in 1995, Bezos told his employees that he wanted a place that was both "intense and friendly" but that "if you ever had to give up 'friendly' in order to have 'intense,' we would do that." ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.thenation.com/article/37484/trouble-amazon

[frazzled]

1. I feel the problem

I happen to be a freelance copyeditor. As the bottom line for publishers continues to be slashed, so does the work available to me. When a project does come my way, the (already paltry) amount publishers are willing to pay has become more paltry. This not only results in a huge slash in work and income for me, but in an inferior product for the reader. As the article mentions at the end, publishers are working with fewer staff and cutting corners wherever they can to keep up with online retail prices. Copyeditors are one of the first to go. Even though I work for commercial publishers rarely, this has filtered down into the academic, nonprofit, and arts publishing world in which I mostly operate.

As a reader, I feel it too. I sometimes buy from Amazon, out of convenience —but only when I am trying to get a specific title within days that is not on the shelf in one of the independent bookstores I am fortunate to have where I live. But the act of going to a bricks-and-mortar bookstore where I can leaf through a book I may never have heard of is an invaluable pleasure. One that future generations may never know.

Time marches on ... but it does have consequences. Interesting authors will not get published, books will be thrown together and full of typos, writers will not be able to work for years on a book because there will be no chance to be compensated adequately in the end. I hope it figures itself out.

[DainBramaged]

2. So (and I am not trying to be snarky) you get paid for formatting, spellchecking and punctuation?

I don't understand in the age of computers why that is necessary.

[Better Today]

3. Neither do many folks, and that's why there (or is it their or they're) are

so many mistakes in so many posts, editorials, and more. Those programs in my opinion can only find the glaring mistakes, the subtle one's take a real human, at least for our English language. I've become quite dismayed at the number of errors in articles even from places like Reuters or Washington Post, where it's clear that only a program was used due to the type of mistakes.

Perhaps some languages are tightly enough presented to successfully use programs only, but not English.

[dixiegrrrrl]

4. I had read that copysetting and editing is outsorced to India now.

Which may explain why there so many published typos of words that sound almost correct.
Like using "reign" when "rein" is supposed to be used, I see that a lot.

[Liberal_in_LA]

6. wow. India does everything for us these days

[LostinVA]

7. Agreed -- there are so many printing typos now

It used to be a rare book where something popped out at you, but not now.

Even better: some X-ray raedings are now outsourced. For real. WTF.

[arikara]

5. Tell me about it

As long as a word is spelled correctly doesn't show up on the spell check even though its the wrong word. Just like the kids don't know how to do math anymore they also are not learning spelling or grammar either. We'll probably soon be shifting to texting phonetics and smiley faces for everything.

[nilram]

9. the subtle one's, yes

:evilgrin:

[Flying Dream Blues]

14. I know....gaaah! nt

[DainBramaged]

17. Jesus (and I mewna Jesus in the Biblical sense) I are sorrie I is ignrant

fuck this.

[Better Today]

18. I'm surprised you took the answer personally. I've re-read it and I don't find

anything but a straight forward answer. If you determine to take it personally there's nothing I can do about that, your problem, man.

[frazzled]

8. You've got to be kidding me

If you leave a piece of serious writing to a spellchecker and grammar checker, you'll get a piece of worthless gobbledygook. Spellchecker wouldn't even recognize half the words in some of the manuscripts I work on for academic or arts publishers.

Nothing on a computer is able to edit for style, redundancy, complex usage, employment of foreign language or specialized terminology, or thousands of other "niceties" the editor must grapple with to make a piece of writing publishable. (That is why there is a 950-page Chicago Manual of Style that covers 18 chapters full of material a manuscript editor needs to know--and this only scratches the surface.) It certainly can't fact check (a big part of an editor's work). It can't query an author on an unsupported statement or on alternative positions that have been put forth in the field. It can't ask an author to expand her discussion of a particular item. It can't format or check footnotes or put a bibliography in order. It can't conform to a particular publishing house's style sheet. It can't recognize overlaps between discussions by different authors in the same anthology. It can't do ten thousand things that have to be done by the human brain.

Do they really teach you to depend on a computer for these things in school?

[DainBramaged]

10. No I wasn't kidding, which was why I asked for an explanation

sorry I bruised your ego, I won't bother next time.


PS

I got my degree in 1976 before calculators were being used in schools. You really think most of us understand your precious job?

[a la izquierda]

13. Spellcheck is not a substitute for good editing...

my students can NOT write or spell, yet they think simply running the paper through the "spellcheck" on the computer will solve all their problems.
Wrong.

[nadinbrzezinski]

15. Here is an exercise for you

write a letter, preferably a long letter. Insert in that letter correctly spelled misspellings, see how many are caught by your spelling and grammar program. That will give you a view into why copy editors are needed. Suffice it to say... the leading edge of that problem is here. And the results, I might add, are not pretty.

[Fumesucker]

12. What about those of us who aren't fortunate enough to have bookstores close to us?

I live in the quasi rural deep South, if you can't get it at Walmart, you basically can't get it locally.

Ever peruse the book section at Walmart? If you're looking for the "Left Behind" series or something similar you might be in luck, otherwise forget it.

[RainDog]

19. the anti-trust suit this article talks about was against Wal-Mart

and the big box bookstores.

The Independent Booksellers sued and won b/c Wal-Mart demanded special treatment - better discounts that they didn't want anyone else to get. Now, Amazon offers books for sale that are only available to independents at the same price Amazon charges customers.

However, the guy who started the Eric Carle Children's Bookstore wrote about this whole situation and one thing that has happened b/c of these demands for discounts by Amazon, etc. is that the price of every book has increased to make up for some of the discounts, as well as the "wallpapering" of stores that Borders and Barnes and Nobles do - they order huge amounts of books, knowing they're not going to sell most of them, b/c they can return them to the publisher - who then sells them to places like Half to recoup some of the loss - but who also raise the price of books to account for the waste accrued by the box stores' cookie cutter buying - and their attempts to drive independent booksellers out of business by offering discounts that smaller places cannot match b/c they don't have the budgets to tie up so much of their money for months in massive amounts of one title.

This strategy has also hurt small presses - the big stores don't bother to stock titles under x number in a print run -so publishers and writers who want to do something that's not going to be the next Twilight struggle to find their audiences because independents have to both compete with the box stores and have money to stock small print runs and small presses.

It's like the loss of bio-diversity when Monsanto gets to decide what crops are planted.

[nadinbrzezinski]

16. I understand the problem

And it will only get worst.

And there is no way my computer can detect all my perfectly well spelled misspellings... and lord knows I edit to at least ten drafts...

Writing is a lost art, copy editing is down right forgotten.

[iris27]

20. I'm in college bookstore retail, so this puzzles me. Publisher prices have

ballooned at more than twice the rate of inflation over the last several years (which of course we take the crap for, being on the final end of the sale). I guess perhaps they're losing sales hand-over-fist to the resale market, so they have to keep raising prices and cutting costs, further driving the vicious circle? Though I have to say, it doesn't help their cause when they sell to Amazon at huge volume discounts they won't give to college stores...of *course* Amazon is going to turn around and sell those copies for less than any other retailer had to pay to get them.

Interesting that they're cutting back on copyeditors, but ADDING to their sales rep staff...

[RainDog]

21. I mentioned this issue upthread

the reason the publisher prices have gone up is because of places like Amazon, Borders and Barnes and Nobles. They return so many books to publishers, after demanding these deep discounts. So the price of ALL books has gone up to try to compensate a little for this attempt on the part of these corporate entities to drive small businesses out of biz.

What Amazon is doing is illegal. I hope the Independent Bookseller's Association brings another class action suit - this time against Amazon for these practices. They won the first time.

You might be interested in reading Rebel Bookseller, from Andrew Laties. He talks about this history of illegal practices.

Another reason to hate Wal-Mart, too.

[Touchdown]

11. Unfortunately I had to quit shopping with them.

They don't allow their "Kings" to choose their preferred shippers. It's done by some computer program instead. Amazon either doesn't know or doesn't care that customers in condos are inconvinienced to the max when ever something arrives by UPS, the POS "free market alternative" that AFAIC should burn to the fucking ground, so that's not part of this "Customer is King" creed.

Post Office, Fed Ex, doesn't matter. Both are fine and I've had no problem with getting things delivered from either, or pocking them up. UPS? Every FUCKING TIME it's "we have to try and deliver 3 times before your allowed to come to our dist center out in the desert boondocks and pick it up, so you can come back on the 4th day for your overnight package!" How dare I have a job and not be home when they're trying to deliver my CDs? I guess some computer with an arbitrary decision process is more important than the "Kings". :eyes:

So I'm shopping for my movies at good ole brick and mortar stores now!