First, it was Jonathan Franzen
hating on ebooks. Now, it’s Barnes & Noble telling Amazon to get lost.
So goes this war of literary attrition, in which print publishers, distributors of digital content (Amazon foremost among them) and authors wage battle over an ever-shrinking, much-suffering landscape known as The American Reading Public. If this purely profit-driven nonsense keeps up, Angry Birds will soon be considered high literature.
The latest salvo comes from Barnes & Noble, which –
since the demise of Borders last year – is seen by many as the last barricade, with its 703 stores nationwide, against the onslaught of ebooks and those who sell them (even if, some seem to fail to notice, Nook displays have eaten up so much floor space in Barnes & Noble stores that they hardly look like a bookstore anymore).
On Tuesday afternoon, a spokesman for Barnes & Noble announced that the book retailer would not stock books published by Amazon’s fledgling imprint, as Brad Stone of Bloomberg first reported:
“Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms.Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have prohibited us from offering certain e-books to our customers.
“Their actions have undermined the industry as a whole and have prevented millions of customers from having access to content. It’s clear to us that Amazon has proven they would not be a good publishing partner to Barnes & Noble as they continue to pull content off the market for their own self interest.”
Clearly, Amazon wants to make as much money as it can off each book, whether in print or digital format: that is, after all, what corporations are supposed to do. And just as clearly, Barnes & Noble feels aggrieved by what it sees as the online retail giant’s invasion of the print domain, as well as an attendant refusal to play nice when it comes to sharing the market.
Never mind that Barnes & Noble killed off plenty of smaller bookstores during the good years of the 90’s, when a healthy economy and the real estate boom that followed allowed it to expand with seeming abandon. Perhaps this is simply a case of just desserts for the diminished bookseller.
And while Barnes & Noble has gained some market share with its own ereader, the Nook, it must know, deep in its corporate bowels, that it cannot keep pace with the Kindle brand. This latest move seems like nothing so much as pointless lashing-out.
Some writers like the new Amazon publishing venture, run by old publishing hand
Larry Kirshbaum, which is free of what they feel to be the strictures of traditional publishing. Meanwhile, traditional publishers are desperately hoping that they can keep selling books the old way, and that Barnes & Noble, with its vast display space and marketing power, will enable them to do so.
Whom to feel sorry for here?
Certainly not Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I only pity the American reader caught in this war of words. If we’re all watching some hellish Kardashian reality show (don’t worry, there are younger spawn) in ten years and have become a nation of utter illiterates, I’ll know whom to blame.
