Is Amazon.com monopolizing the book industry?

I have a fickle relationship with the online superstore Amazon.com: I love buying stuff from them, I even have Amazon affiliate links and ads on this blog (hey, domain hosting doesn’t pay for itself), yet I’m beginning to feel that Amazon is starting to have an unfair monopoly in the book industry.

This uneasy feeling actually started when I wrote this post, this post, and this post about Amazon’s shady policy of requiring POD publishers to use their (Amazon’s) own printing service. Then today, as I was reading my favorite blogs on Google Reader, I came across this post on the Teleread Blog about Amazon acquiring Shelfari, a book sharing and social networking site for bookworms.

So let’s run down the list of of how Amazon has a tight grasp on the book selling market:

• Amazon is the dominant seller of books online. If you’re book is going to be published, there’s a good chance it’s going to be sold by Amazon.
• As mentioned above, they insist on POD publishers to print their books using Amazon’s own POD printing service. So even self-published authors who want to sell on Amazon have their hands tied.
• Amazon owns Abe Books, another online bookstore.
• Amazon has the Kindle – its own proprietary ebook reader. While you can upload your own content onto the Kindle, it still has an unbreakable tether to Amazon.

The above list may not be very long, but each item is pretty huge by itself. What does this mean? Simply put, it means that Amazon has a lot of control. And as the Teleread blog mentions, that can be worrisome:

I know some would argue, "Who cares? We’re talking about many-to-many discussions. Will Amazon be able to control everything?" But remember, Amazon is the one who makes the rules under which discussion takes place. And it has the resources to make discussions happen on the level of many brows. Someday Amazon could well introduce some pretty sophisticated filtering schemes…

All this control means Amazon can drive the discussions to benefit them. It means the success or failure of a particular book, or even scarier, a particular publisher or author, is at the whim of Jeff Bezos. For example, with that rule they made earlier in the Spring about POD publishers must use Amazon’s printing service if they want to see their books sold on Amazon.com, they basically have their thumb on every POD publisher out there who wants to sell books! Luckily for those small mom and pop publishers, Booklocker.com decided to fight back with a lawsuit.

And what about the Kindle? Well, according to the blog TechCrunch, they can easily license out the Kindle technology to other manufacturers and keep everything streaming through the Amazon website so they get multiple cuts of each Kindle-clone sale.

Can Amazon ever be stopped?

At this point, I’d say instead of trying to stop Amazon altogether (which would probably mean trying to drive them out of business), the best alternative would be for us (the masses) to control the control Amazon has on the book industry.

How the heck do we do that?

One tactic that the Teleread Blog has been promoting, and which I support, is to keep pushing the ePub standard on all ebook reading devices. Stop tethering ebook devices to proprietary formats.

But that only addresses the Kindle and ebook issue. What about everything else? Amazon has a lot of momentum right now, and thus is hard to stop. My answer is this, and some may not like it, but we will probably just have to let the market decide this one. By that I mean Amazon will keep growing until they start making enough people mad, at which point, other alternatives will pop up and Amazon will start to lose market share. My only hope is that they don’t become another Microsoft.

What do you think about Amazon? Are they monopolizing the book selling industry? If so, how should they be stopped? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Related posts

• Amazon nixes pdf and Microsoft formats from ebook offerings
• What’s the truth about the publishing industry?
• Amazon’s Kindle driving ebook sales, but not revolutionizing industry
• UPDATE: Lawsuit filed against Amazon.com for shady POD policy
• Is the Amazon Kindle a Trojan horse?

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