Morning Coffee – 14 December 2020
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
- I am not the only one who thinks Bookshop.org is a false savior.
- It’s not just book publishing – the pandemic is also accelerating the death of print news media.
- Amazon may finally sell their ebooks to libraries.
- The bad sex in fiction award will not be given out this year. Apparently the judges decided that bad sex is better than no sex.
- Google Play Books turned ten last week.
P.S. Sorry for missing last week’s post. I was busy recovering from 3 days of no internet.
P.P.S. If you need a tech VA or help with your website, email me at [email protected]. Got a story that I should include in next week’s list? Shoot me an email.
Comments
Disgusting Dude December 14, 2020 um 6:26 am
Re: Bookshop.org – "If it looks too good to be true, it isn’t."
Or, as Daunt says, everybody (in publishing) loves a good anti-Amazon story.
Amazon succeeds by eliminating the middlemen, so how can *adding* yet another intermediary help anybody but the new intermediary?
Not publishers, getting less money.
Not bookstores, getting less money and losing account control.
Not writers, getting less money off the same number of readers.
And not consumers, getting a 7% discount instead of anywhere from 10% to 30% or even more on occasion.
As the old joke goes, "I’m losing my shirt on each sale, but I’m making it up in volume."
Which might work, except trade book selling is a *stagnant* business. The only way to get volume is to take it from somebody else and at 7% discount it ain’t coming from Amazon.
DaveMich December 14, 2020 um 2:38 pm
If we read the article closely, we see that it is just bookstore owners complaining that people are not coming in to their stores. They see bookshop.org as just another competitor for their customers. The money realized is 10% for unaffiliated sales, and 30% for affiliated sales. For an affiliated sale that is about 5% less than they would make for an in-store sale, and they complain about that even though the sale involves no labor or inventory costs *at all*, because sometimes those sales go to people who *might* have visited the physical store. These are owners who have rejected internet sales completely and vigorously. Let’s see how that works out for them.
It’s just a different world on the other side of the pond.
Disgusting Dude December 14, 2020 um 5:44 pm
Bookshop started on this side of the pond.
Same model, same math.
Same issues.
Same odds of taking sales from Amazon: zilch.
DaveMich December 14, 2020 um 6:43 pm
Same model, math, issues, odds.
But while there might be one or two complaining US booksellers, over there it seems like many more are up in arms over the idea that anyone would be doing anything else but visiting their stores.
Disgusting Dude December 15, 2020 um 2:45 pm
According to THE BOOKSELLER’s vehicle for Bookshop, the OP was just one person.
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/ba-and-bookshoporg-respond-bookseller-criticism-1228973
(Apparently they sell London Bridge over there, instead of the one in Brooklyn.)
Incident Report No. 100 – Unlawful Acts December 21, 2020 um 4:11 am
[…] Bookshop.org may be fighting Amazon but destroying small publishers at New Statesman, h/t The Digital Reader. […]