NO AMAZON BUY-LINKS IN 2015.

   Well, this isn't an idea that came to me during the latest incidence of Amazon behaving like a fucktard. It is something I have been thinking about for a long time, since Amazon bought Goodreads. I was planning to write this post last year, with a call to remove all Amazon buy links in 2014. But for several reasons I was delayed, and I wanted to give people time to remove their links.
   This is an experiment, or a challenge if you will, to show that Amazon is dependent upon people linking directly to their buy-pages. I honestly think that the biggest convenience with shopping at Amazon is that you get a constant barrage of direct links to buy-pages. Consumers are fickle creatures, and I think that it will not take very long for them to get used to shopping elsewhere. And I have myself witnessed things online that make me think that quite a lot of people shop at Amazon out of laziness, and I think those people would be happy to shop anywhere as long as they get a direct link to a buy page.

   First, I'll tell you what I have observed. The events that made me think that the buy-links put out there by readers, reviewers, and others are what gives Amazon its convenience.* I said I started thinking about this when Amazon bought Goodreads. Actually that was just the catalyst for thoughts that started some time earlier.
   My first real experience with Amazon buy-buttons came in late 2010-early 2011. At that time quite a lot of people in the SFF blogosphere were removing their Amazon buy-links in favour of ones linking to The Book Depository. It seemed at the time to be a real popular movement, and it looked like it could make The Book Depository a real competitor to Amazon. That didn't happen of course, in July 2011 Amazon announced they were buying The Book Depository.**
   Let's skip forwards about two years, to late 2012-early 2013.*** Goodreads had some disagreement with Amazon. As far as I could tell at the time it was about Amazon wanting them to be the first link showing up on the books's pages. Goodreads disagreed, and Amazon forced Goodreads to remove all data sourced from them.****Goodreads went on without Amazon being the first linked store on a book's pages. And then in April 2013 Goodreads announced that Amazon had bought them.*****

   When it was announced that Goodreads had had a disagreement with Amazon, a lot of people on Goodreads where very happy they didn't back down when Amazon started making demands. There was however a quite vocal group that were pissed at Goodreads. This group were Amazon customers, mostly Kindle owners from what I saw.
   Incredibly, some of them were complaining that they had to scroll down to find the Amazon link. And that is when the thought that had been forming in the back of my mind since Amazon bought The Book Depository leaped out: People find it easy to shop at Amazon because they get direct links.
   Once I'd had that thought, I couldn't really help going to the next step: The loss of buy-links was part of Amazon's decision to buy both The Book Depository and Goodreads. I have absolutely no evidence for that though, and the only way to prove I am right is to remove all Amazon buy-links. Which is what I am suggesting.

   Yes, you got it right, I want there to be no direct links to buy pages on Amazon. I suggest it now so everyone has time to remove them before 1 January 2015. And if people start removing the links now, and talking about why, I think most readers will be used to it come the New Year.

   I am aware of how people think they are dependent on Amazon to sell books, but as said above, I think Amazon's convenience is its buy-links. I do not think the average reader who shops online will take long to adjust to links leading elsewhere. And as an extension of that, shopping for books elsewhere. There might be a small short-time loss, but I think it will be survivable for everyone. With the blow back Amazon's behavior is getting, it might even turn out that those who want to shop elsewhere if it is made easy by having links to other stores outnumber those that will only shop at Amazon. And let's face it, with tablets making dedicated e-readers more or less obsolete, few reader are really locked into Amazon's e-book format.

   I'll end with making this challenge to everyone in the SFF community. Do not link directly to Amazon buy-pages in 2015. Link to other stores, or if you are an author/publisher to where the book is available to buy on your own site.

   P.S You might notice that there are no buy-links at all on my blog. There is two reasons for that. The first is I want to be a neutral reporter, to have what is referred to as journalistic integrity. ****** Linking to a single store can be construed as "textual advertising" (, or whatever the English expression is), you are sending your readers to a market. At its most basic it is advertising.
   The second is that to have buy-links and be neutral, you'd have to link to all sellers. One minute of thinking gave me ten online shops in Norway. How many thousand there is around the world I don't know, but more than enough that it is very impractical to link to them all.

_____

* I will be focusing on books, since that is what I have been observing for the past six years online.

** I think that allowing that purchase to go through was a huge mistake by the regulatory authorities. Ideally they should make amends by forcing Amazon to sell it.

*** Sorry for not giving accurate dates on everything. I simply do not have the time to spend on as much research as I would like to do.

**** I am a Goodreads Librarian, and a call went out to manually add all the lost data. A lot of people put in a lot of work to do that. -Interestingly, most of my activity as a Goodreads Librarian was correcting erroneous information that people had gotten from Amazon...

***** Apparently the purchase of The Book Depository was announced on 4 July, while the Goodreads announcement cam 1 April. Not exactly dates you'd chose if you wanted attention to what you were saying.

****** My father just retired after being a journalist in Norway since before I was born. So I know how a journalist is supposed to behave. Granted, less and less journalists behave that way these days, but that's no excuse not to keep to those ideals.

AMAZON'S HIDDEN EXTRA CHARGES: DOES AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS GET A CUT?

INTRODUCTION

  On January 28th this year I got a newsletter e-mail from HarperCollins Book Blast, informing me that a free Septimus Heap book was available, in formats including Kindle.

   I'm not a huge fan of e-books, but this is a book I've seen in Norwegian translation in the bookstores here. So I wanted to take a look. I downloaded Kindle for PC, and clicked on the e-mail link. What happened next surprised me:

   Amazon.com wanted to charge me $2 for the book whose buy page listed the book's title as "Septimus Heap, book one: Magyk Free With Bonus Material".

   This got me curious, so I started to investigate.

AMAZON.COM'S HIDDEN INTERNATIONAL CHARGES

   After encountering what I related above, I started checking out Amazon.com. (NOTE: In Norway you get directed to Amazon.com for Kindle purchases.) It turns out that Amazon charges an extra $2 for many of its Kindle books, but not all. However searching for Kindle books, with lowest price first, shows up no books under $2. But I have found other books as low as $0.99, this could be a glitch based on other findings I have made.

   When I first looked at this on January 28th, most books on Amazon's official list changed price. This has been rectified, and they now show up with a $2 higher price. A reason I stated above that the books who doesn't get the $2 price raise could be a glitch. 

   I asked a US blogger I know to check the price of A Game of Thrones on the Kindle some hours ago, the answer was $5.00. Here's the image I got on my buy page here in Norway:

   And it even says that it "includes free international delivery". (Amazon Whispernet looks to be another name for the internet as far as looking at Amazon tells me.) 

    I tried to get an answer to this on Amazon's forums. I could find no answer to it from anyone officially affiliated with Amazon. Several international Kindle users reported price hikes in the $0.99-$3.20 range, even on free Kindle books. And the same users had bought the Kindle with free delivery stated. Someone even on the day before their forum post.

    American forum users blamed this on European governments. Answering this, several posts from Europeans stated that VAT was a percentage, not a flat fee, and that however many percent of 0 = 0. (Some of the posts pointing out it could not be VAT were flagged as "Does not add to the discussion"...)

    I checked Norwegian VAT laws. They were a bit difficult to sort through as I don't speak legalese, but there is no VAT for imports under 200 NOK (Norwegian Kroner) to Norway. (At 06.10 February 8, this is $34.65.)

    And I would think that Amazon would tell me if I was paying any charges they have no control over.

PRICING EXAMPLES

    I wanted some concrete examples from today, so I found a user list on Amazon that had different prices than the buy page. Prices on the list have been updated, I assume automatically, since it was written. Many books are priced above the "Free to $2.99" the list is said to cover. However, as opposed to the above example with A Game of Thrones, this list has not been updated with the automatic $2 hidden charge.

    I asked author John Locke, on twitter, if I could use his books as a pricing example. He said yes, and here is what the list above shows:

 

    This is what the buy page shows:

 

    This is the $2 hidden price raise for buying in Norway I have been talking about.

 

DOES AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS GET A CUT?

    So to the question in this blog post's headline: Does authors and publishers get a cut?

    This to me is the interesting question. Where do the extra $2 go? It doesn't actually matter to me personally. I'm only going to download free e-books to my Kindle for PC. But since there is absolutely no mention of it on Amazon, that I managed to find, I started to wonder. I could have asked John Locke, but I wanted to write this blog post based on what an average customer could be expected to find out.

    It is very interesting if Amazon alone pockets the extra $2. For John Locke it means that international Kindle sales, of at least some of his books, should have given him three times as much money.

    For a publisher we could potentially be talking huge sums if they are not aware of this. And if they are not, Amazon could be in some trouble.

    There is of course a chance that both authors and publishers are aware of this, and get their cut of the extra money. Something I don't have a big issue with. But it means that free books for Kindle is not something an international customer can see as an argument for buying the Kindle. (NOTE: Gutenberg.org does have Kindle editions of their free books. But most of these are out of copyright books.) 

    It seems at best very immoral to me that international customers have to pay an extra charge that is, judging from Amazon's own forums, not defined. And not in any way made public knowledge.

    I would love for authors and publishers to comment on whether they were aware of the hidden $2 charge. And also to give their reactions to it. 

    I would of course also welcome comments from international Kindle customers about their experience with this, and what they think of it. And I would like to hear from American, and other Kindle customers with regional Amazon shops too.

NOTE: I have other examples. But felt it was enough with those I have used. 

SUNDAY RANT: AMAZON PROPAGANDA AND BAD JOURNALISM

SUNDAY RANT

   Sunday Rant will be a new semi-regular feature on the blog. Where I give my opinions on some of the things that has either happened in the week that passed, or just generally is something I want to talk about.

AMAZON PROPAGANDA AND BAD JOURNALISM

   I'm going to start with a little bit about myself, that will give you some background for why I feel passionately about this subject. My father has been a journalist since before I was born, and he still is one. All my life I have been around journalists, and I have several journalist friends. 

   This means that I have some insight into how journalists work, both for good and bad. It's always more fascinating for me to look behind the headlines to see what they don't write.

    I will elaborate in the comments if anyone wishes me to, but now on with this article.

   This week have seen a press release from Amazon that has gotten quite a lot of attention. The main focus has of course been on the claim that Amazon now sells more Kindle books than paper books. I quote:

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperback books. Since the beginning of the year, for every 100 paperback books Amazon has sold, the Company has sold 115 Kindle books. Additionally, during this same time period the Company has sold three times as many Kindle books as hardcover books. This is across Amazon.com's entire U.S. book business and includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher.

   Looks rather good doesn't it? But let's take a closer look at this statement:

   Firstly Amazon does not in any way back up its claim. They show absolutely no sales figures, and without any way of independently verify what they say, this is just a PR statement. The figures may very well be accurate, but I'm not just going to take a commercial business' word for it.
  
   Did you also notice the emphasis on some facts, while some where left out entirely?
   Amazon goes out of its way to tell us that this;
"[...]includes sales of books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the numbers even higher" 
   What they, of course, make no mention of is that these figures certainly include books that are only available on Kindle.  Which if you ask me is a pretty significant point, and one I think any good journalist writing about this should have brought up.
   This leaves me with the question why Amazon don't publish a comparison of sales between books that are available both as paper books from a (non self-publishing) publisher and on the Kindle. 
   I don't think I'm stretching it when I say they would have IF those books sold better on Kindle than in paper. Let's face it,  why would they hide something like that?

NOTE: A quick check of the Science Fiction and Fantasy bestseller list on amazon.com shows that 13 of the top 20 books (at 12.55 CET.) are Kindle editions costing $5.00 and under. Of these five are kindle only, and four are available in print only as self-published books costing $11.16 to $19.99 in paperback. (Interestingly, Amazon charges $2 extra on Kindle books under $5 if I want them here in Norway.)

   I think all of the points I've made above are valid questions, and it pisses me off that the media has not made them, but instead just repeated Amazon's PR-statement/propaganda.
   Fortunately there are some media reports of Amazon that are a bit more critical:


   This article from the NYTimes reports that Amazon's profit margin fell from 5% in the fourth quarter of 2009, to 3.7% in the forth quarter of 2010. And that this has made their stock fall 9.2%.
   Something I was not able to see easily (, in fact at all,) in Amazon's statement. This has as far as I know not been widely reported, and certainly not by the Kindle fans. Some of whom I saw calling Wall Street insane, or words to that effect, because the stock fell when Amazon published such good news.
   I'm no financial expert, but a 26% drop (,if I understand this correctly,) in the profit margin, sounds bad to me. And a 3.7% profit margin seems slim, even when we are talking about huge sums of money.


   A good example of bad journalism when it comes to Amazon, and Kindle in particular, is the headline to this article from The Bookseller.com, published the day before Amazon's statement. 
   The headline says: "Kindle sales reaching 80% of physical sales, DBW told". However if you actually take time to read the article, this is the original statement: "Grandinetti said it was “not uncommon” for Kindle sales “to be 20-30-40-50-80% of a BookScan number” in 2010."
   Not exactly the same, but I bet it is the headline that people remember.
 
   The same article also mentions a interesting fact, that in my opinion would make a better headline: "[...]James Patterson's Jack and Jill pre-and-post agency pricing. He said: "There was a 48% drop in units with the $2 increase in price."
   This  was interesting to me. Is this a sign that e-books can not sustain sales levels if they have to be priced in a way that includes pre-"printing" production costs? As it is now, e-books are a bi-product of paper books, and are getting a piggyback ride on the editorial costs of the hardcover release, as I see it. Mind you, this is something I believe, not something I know. I would very much like to see a working journalist take up this point, research it, and publish an article about it.

   I have seen several cases over the past year where journalists seemingly print Amazon's press statements and unverified numbers as fact. That is not journalism, that is PR, and usually you have to pay someone to do it for you. I'd like to see much more critical journalism when it comes to Amazon specifically , and e-books in general. I will certainly keep trying to look behind every headline I see on the subject until journalists start doing journalism.

   So what do you think about what I've said? The comments are open.