Shortening The Long Tail

Amazon is indicating they will list any book, however, if the book is not printed at Booksurge or the publisher/author is not part of the Advantage program, any orders will be sent to resellers.

We are curious as to how this is going to work based on a situation from our own company. We chose to reissue a fully revised, updated book that had seen first/last print in 2000. We made the unfortunate mistake of keeping the old title. When it was picked up from Ingram by Amazon, all the ancient information attached to it including links to some resellers. The copies offered by the resellers were the 2000 version by the prior publishing house. They in no way resembled the new edition.

That led us to wonder: is Amazon going to make it clear on a book’s page that they are not supplying the book; that it will be coming from a third-party reseller? (Caveat emptor?) What happens when there are no books available from resellers?

Does even putting up a page for a book which they have no intention of selling themselves because of their self-imposed rules create a violation of the Federal Trade Commission Act? The FTC says an ad is deceptive (a page on Amazon is an ad since they are offering a product for sale) if it is likely to mislead consumers acting reasonable under the circumstances and is “material”, that is, important to a consumer’s decision to buy the product. If a customer sees a book on Amazon, don’t they have the expectation of actually being able to buy that book from Amazon?

And where exactly will resellers be getting the books, if the books can’t be purchased from Amazon in the first place? Somehow, it seems a little weird that resellers will only have something to sell because they purchased it from someone else first.

Gosh, and have the brainiacs leading the POD charge done the math? If a book is listed for $14.95 and short-discounted for 25%, then that is $3.74. Now if a reseller puts the same book up for $7.00 and Amazon charges 15% (according to their Marketplace pricing info) plus 99 cents per transaction, they now have made $2.04. Oh, wait, they also charge a closing fee of $1.35 to sellers. Okay, that brings their total to $3.39. Yea, they only lost 35 cents on the deal!

Yes, we understand books can be sold for more to ensure the feeding of Amazon’s insatiable appetite but seriously, how many people are going to pay close to retail for a book they will also have to shell out heftily for shipping when they could click over to competitor A, B, or C and get a new book with the shipping thrown in?

Our thoughts are if you are small enough the gorillas wearing the big A haven’t shown up yet, don’t panic and sign up for anything. Amazon is maneuvering itself into a losing proposition. It made its reputation on being the go-to place for all those books from small and niche publishers that couldn’t be found on the local chain book shelves. (That’s us, right?)

Sit tight. Resellers have to get a book from somewhere in order to sell it on Amazon. Barnes & Noble or Borders won’t mind making money on new books while Amazon loses money on used books. The more of us that don’t sign, the greater the losses will be eventually.

And the odds are the FTC will eventually require even mighty Amazon to obey the rules about truth in advertising; either by clearly marking the pages as not available except through resellers or possibly taking the pages down altogether since they are not actually making the books available to be purchased. Remove a few hundred thousand book pages to comply with the FTC and guess what…you begin to look just like every other chain store.