As Publishing students and faculty, we know all too well that Amazon is everywhere and really, everything. It seems that there isn’t anything that the company hasn’t touched or will get a hold of and as a country that thrives on business, this has been and will continue to be a game changer. Most importantly to us in the publishing industry, Amazon’s book selling and manufacturing has decreased the value of books, forcing publishers and book sellers to compete at a level where they aren’t comfortable and where they’re taking a loss just to be on the same playing field. Still, Amazon thrives because they don’t just sell books, they sell the tablet that you can read the books on, the case for that tablet, the bookmark for that book, etc. Amazon not monopolizes business, and it’s hurting business.
To read more on Amazon, visit here for George Packer’s New Yorker article, “Cheap Words”.
I think that it is important for us to get a handle on what Amazon means to us as publishers. It doesn’t look like it is going away anytime soon, in fact it looks like it’s just getting bigger and stronger (unfortunately for us as a business, fortunately for us as consumers). How can we as a group reconcile this? I think that we have to get creative and stop playing victim to schemes such as Amazon’s. Perhaps to face them, publishers have to be a united front. I think that we need to start playing hardball rather than shrinking away when we think we may lose. Yes, publishing has taken a hit in recent years, but because it has been a time of great change. We will stabilize again once everyone becomes more acquainted with the new order of things.