A valedictory for Amazon

There’s an interesting little argument going on between Amazon and the publisher Macmillan, which led to Amazon pulling all Macmillan title from their site for a while. Whilst I won’t repeat the detail of this particular case I think there are some important lessons for us all about the power of the global players on the Internet.

What we’re seeing here are two major corporates having a fight over how much money each will get from their ebook sales. In all this thrashing about, two sets of people are being forgotten: the authors, and the readers.

So what’s likely to happen next? Amazon will continue to try to become a monopoly in the marketplace, and become a monopsony in their purchasing, and thus grab the profits from more stages is the supply chain.

But inevitably the power this brings also brings danger: if Amazon can – at a whim – decide not to sell a publisher’s products, and if Amazon are the main purchaser, then can effectively censor what is published. Of course one would like to believe this would never happen, but we’ve already seen it done with Macmillan over a petty pricing disagreement. Imagine what would happen if Amazon chose not to list books that disagreed with a particular religious, or ethical opinion.

But despite this I’m optimistic. Not because I think the global corporates will discover a moral compass, but because the Internet is bigger than them all. As soon as they loose sight of the people that matter – the suppliers (authors, in this case) and the consumers, they will cease to be the best route to market.

So what will the post-Amazon “new world order” look like? I think it will be a lot more interesting – with individual suppliers and consumers having their own websites, and a ‘semantic web’ tying it together to prevent this becoming an unmanageable tangle.

The emphasis will be on ownership and control, with people distrustful of letting corporates run their sites, or even to host them. Global players – like Google – will have a role in tying this together, but just as the ISPs have had to accept they are simple pipes, they too will have to accept that they have very simple specific roles to play.

This won’t happen overnight, and there’s going to be a lot of pain in the meantime as the global players struggle to accept their new (reduced) roles.

For the rest of us, a race is just starting, to understand the value we can offer over the Internet, and who it is of value to. Just don’t expect that the best route to market is via the likes of Amazon. It might seem like a cheap short-cut today – but that’s what they want you to think.

Next I’ll be looking in more detail at the post-Amazon era, and outlining some techniques to make the most of it. Exciting times.