From Knives to Nukes and Sausages

More on the Amazon and Macmillan dust-up. Go, Macmillan! And Scott Westerfeld had a fabulous analysis of the whole deal on his blog, as does Tobias “Tobe” Buckell (and I love reading how he thinks about this; I agree a hundred percent and think the same way, but I just don’t say it as well as he does).

But this bit in the NYT’s piece really stuck out and I haven’t seen anyone address this yet:

“Amazon may still hope to play one asset to its advantage. Loyal Kindle users routinely give low ratings to books they perceive as too costly, or whose digital editions are delayed past the publication of the hardcover edition. These consumers could ostensibly reject costlier e-books.”

I know that this happens, routinely, because I’ve seen it with my own beady little eyes on the Amazon site.  Happened to one of my favorite authors, John Sandford.   I went so far as to a) complain to Amazon about this and b) notify Sandford via his website.  I got a very nice reply back from Sandford’s webmaster (his son, I believe), who said they and their publisher have been trying to get Amazon to police its reviews for years around this very issue.  Amazon, it seems, refuses to do anything, period.

Now, to be fair to Amazon, it/they have pulled blatantly abusive reviews–at least, for one of my books.  But for them to ignore negative reviews on the basis of whether a book’s available on the Kindle or whether it looks GOOD on the Kindle . . . that’s absurd.  Worse, if all a consumer sees are the stars (or lack thereof), he/she might just pass that book on by without giving it a second glance.  Yet another reason to give Amazon a pass.

Amazon wants to play cop?  Wants to tell you what you can read?  Let it start by policing itself.

Things will not improve for you, the consumer, or us, the writers and publishers and artists and editors, unless we’re all ready to make some noise.  This is a little like that apocryphal story of Teddy Roosevelt reading Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: Teddy got so pissed, he started hand to hand combat with a sausage.

The reality was different–and just as instructive.  Roosevelt went through channels, was reassured by the Agriculture Department and then wrote a letter to Frank Doubleday, the head of Doubleday publishing, and told him how irresponsible the book was.  Doubleday responded that it had fact-checked everything–and then Roosevelt investigated on his own and found that Doubleday, and Sinclair, were right.

Now, no one is comparing Amazon to a sausage or the meat-packing industry per se.  But what Amazon is churning out–grinding up everything and calling it sausage and aiming to be the only purveyor of sausages around–is comparable.  It’s not good for you, period.