Bye Bye ‘Buy New’ Button.

So Amazon and the British Publisher Hachette Livre UK are indulged (yup that’s the right word) in commercial fistycuffs over a contract renewal that has meant many of Hachette’s titles have had a ‘buy new’ button removed. Litopia’s podcast and theBookseller.com have discussed this, a couple of very reputable industry figures have waded in also, condemning this squeeze by the big bully on-line distributor on a bastion of the UK publishing industry (well they started in France but what the hell they’re physically in London ole bean and isn't bastion a French word anyway). Of course the bottom line is apparently that it’s the writers who will suffer. So very little new news there then.

But many observers (in Ireland anyway) might ask, why do I recognize that name ‘Hachette’ ? Well they were responsible for giving a deal to the irreverent Irish b(L)ogger (WARNING ON NEXT LINK CONTENT FOR SENSITIVE TYPES) twenty major for his satirical (i.e. unoriginal) book – the order of the phoenix park – so there’s a strange on-line reverse affinity thing going on here.

Hachette attempts to ‘cash in’ on the popularity of an on-line entity, by doing a two book deal, flopped partly because aggressive football terrace humor is really only popular during matches and office lunch breaks, also because blogs let you get some value out of your broadband outlay without having to fork out even more cash, unlike books for which you must hand over real money (unless you use Amazon - ironically ?). Blog viewing tends to be fairly private, I don’t know what badge of honor might be suggested by publicly carrying 20 major’s book. With its singular level of trite humorous simplicity – (think the onion without insight, or infantile opinionated news items plus additional swear word value) – 20 might be able to compete in the world of the free, but when money gets introduced so too does the proverbial quality bar. As experts Hachette didn’t consider this at any point ?

Both these companies are grown ups and playing in the same commercially conceptual space – when people started introducing the dreaded Walmart analogy – the trading temperature increased – the worst thing that ever happened the games industry was Walmarts decision to sell computer games – this immediately deflated the lower end (not really a bad thing) but also wiped out the edges of ( where the innovation mostly happens) the market – the ripple effect, fixed price points – bargain bins rather than the buried games cassettes – divided opinion in the market and the industry – turned the sales floor into a metaphorical subterranean cellar tightening the very structure of the industry in the process - a large contraction.

But Tesco is already selling books in supermarkets and that’s narrowing consumer choice – yes for consumers who shop in Tesco – its pushing down prices and profits and whinge whinge whinge. I love books and booksellers, I love bookshops, I visit both independents and the major chains, I even have loyalty cards but I also shop on-line – some of the books I buy I can only buy on-line. Unless I want to spend two hours on a train (cost 25euro) and a half day wandering around Dublin City (priceless – not in the mastercard sense but in the no money can compensate you for having to do that when you don’t want to sense) So I really do value the service that Amazon offers, sitting here typing on one screen, I can view their latest, albeit ‘automated’ recommendations for future purchase – a tad more proactively efficient than hunting down and interrogating some pimpled graduate in waterstones. But at what cost ? many book store staff are genuinely wonderful human beings and interactions with them are truthfully priceless in that mastercard sense. The robotic proficiency of Amazon is all very well but being built on brand, on a set of concepts that occur in the heads of prospective buyers – Hachette have recently managed to introduce another element to that set of concepts – the online bully and nobody (even other bullies) likes a bully. So it may well be Bye Bye Buy Button for many others, not just Hachette.

Maybe in some sense all writers are actually using Amazon ironically.