But the biggest reason is that one simply cannot argue with any credibility that Amazon has control over the market for buzz. My book buying habits may not be representative of the public at large, but while I almost always buy my books through Amazon I cannot remember the last time I discovered one there.
Yeah, appeal to the sample size of 1, great argument...
I do use Amazon for discovering new books, now he has a sample size of 2 and Amazon controls a massive 50% of the world's "buzz". That changed fast didn't it.
I'm sure there are good responses to Krugman out there, but this isn't one.
"In a system without the publisher operating as middleman, where the author takes his life’s work and just posts it to Amazon, each book becomes a lonely outpost in the stiff winds of the marketplace, a tiny business that must sell or die....
"But I’m not sure that even Yglesias would want to live in the world he’s envisioning. Mark Krotov, an editor at Melville House, points out on Twitter that in posts like these two, Yglesias has often recommended 'good, unusual books' such as Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey and Daniel Dennett’s Consciousness Explained. 'I’m confident that none of these books, as different and diverse as they are, could ever have found their audience without a publisher,' Krotov writes."
I'm rather suspecting that Evan Hughes could stand to be less ignorant of the industry he's discussing.
For one thing, Tripmaster Monkey is at least the fifth book that Kingston has written (I can't find a complete bibliography.) and Dennett's Content and Consciousness was published in 1969, 22 years before Consciousness Explained. Both of them had already "found their audiences" before those books were written, much less published.
Further, Dennett has published many of his books with academic presses, where advances are rare. (Anyone know if MIT Press pays them?)
The new republic piece is interesting, but misses a large segment of the book industry: academic material. My father published a few non fiction books on an academic press, after years of work, they paid him less than $2000. Hardly worth the time, and due to the nature of how they published it, the price was far too high to gain much traction sales wise.
Regarding the New Republic piece, I'm not sure I think his insurance analogy fits.
With insurance (Particularly now, in the US), everyone can pay in and get it. With publishing, only a super select few ever get in, and those that do will get dropped if they get 'sick' and stay 'sick', regardless of whether or not they were 'healthy' when they got in.
In terms of books I wonder if the average shopper on amazon is really thinking about books enough (compared to all the other products) for buzz to be generated. On my front page I have chilli sauce, bike spares, bluetooth headsets and automtive tools.
I have found lots of books on Audible based entirely on popularity, and I am sure Kindle is the same. IMHO subscription services have far more power to push a particular title than a normal shop as you are a captive audience. You are much more likely to go for the serendipity of a popular title that may not appeal to you normally as you are not spending a cash amount. And with Audible there is no risk as you can return titles you don't like.
Even when you know what you want, Amazon will make it difficult or impossible to figure out what you need. My wife enjoys a few popular fiction offers who publish different series of books. Amazon has no obvious way to search for a book in a series. Even used book thrift shops figure that out!
Then you have the issue of third party listings cluttering up search results. If you want to buy a Mac Mini, you'd better be familiar with the Apple model numbers, because you may have a 3 year old model land at the top of the stack.
"Amazon has no obvious way to search for a book in a series."
With all due respect maybe this is TMI but I've been listening to an audiobook-ish lecture series about fantasy literature and we've come to the lecture about Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series so I visit Amazon this morning, search for Earthsea in the kindle store, I get six results presented In Series Order and for each book right underneath the star ratings for each individual book it lists "Book 1 of 6 in the Earthsea Series" So I'm a pretty happy little customer.
For fun I just tried the same search technique for Harry Potter and got the same result. The search results had the books In Series Order with "Book 1 of 7 in the Harry Potter Series" written under the star ratings. Cool.
Amazon is, however, not consistent. I went more obscure and tried "Classics of Buddhism and Zen Thomas Cleary" and got the predictable first 5 results (awesome, because its a five volume translation series) but in book order 1, 4, 2, 3, 5 rather than sequential. Too lazy to research but I'm guessing something related to edition / reprint date.
I did more research and found an even more epic failure, searching for "feynman lectures on physics" in books results in just a tepid random pile of tangentially related books.
I searched for Steven Brust in the Kindle Store and didn't get a very good list, although it mentioned the "Vlad Taltos" series, so I searched for that.
I'm currently seeing Book of Dragon as the second entry (which is a collection of part of the series), an unrelated Brust book, and something by Michael McClung.
Click "Recommended for you". Their "search for something specific" interface may have problems, but their "suggest me something new, I don't really know what" interface is top-notch.
Their recommendation engine is good, but only for individual products. It also gets screwed up if you buy something in a profitable niche outside of your typical profile -- I bought a book once about a gay latino's life for a class and received lgbt and latino recommendations for years that were not very relevant to me.
A pretty basic use case for people who read serial novels (ie. millions of people) is the ability to recommend a series or books within a series. People can down-vote me because Amazon is a cool company, but it's a use case that they just don't fulfill.
"recommendations for years that were not very relevant to me."
You can go into recommendations and there's a drop down where you can tag why a recommendation is inappropriate, tell amazon it was a gift and the whole topic will magically, nearly instantly, disappear.
I had the same issue with Thomas the Tank Engine and I'm not sure which of us had it worse.
Its a UI failure in the checkout process, just because I don't want amazon to wrap my gifts for me doesn't mean that I'm buying something thats not a gift at checkout time.
Its also a backend failure, come on Amazon lets think this one thru a bit, looking at the rest of my ordering history do you Really think I'm a big Thomas fan? Really? I mean he's cool, sure, but...
>> Amazon has no obvious way to search for a book in a series.
Try typing something like "Jack Reacher series" into the search box and look at the search suggestions as you are typing. Amazon's actually pretty good at helping you find this sort of thing - which makes sense, given the likely propensity of consumers to purchase all the items in a series if they're available and Amazon's financial incentive to help the consumer do so.
Third-party listings, on the other hand, are more of a challenge. Limiting your search to Prime-eligible items often helps quite a bit.
Yeah, appeal to the sample size of 1, great argument...
I do use Amazon for discovering new books, now he has a sample size of 2 and Amazon controls a massive 50% of the world's "buzz". That changed fast didn't it.
I'm sure there are good responses to Krugman out there, but this isn't one.