Authors Guild Has Harsh Words For Amazon About Lending Library
The Authors Guild isn’t holding anything back in their criticism of Amason’s Lending Library. The library program is available to Amazon Prime members, who pay $79 per year for membership.
The Authors Guild’s main complaint is that Amazon is lending out ebooks for free without the publisher’s permission, or even the author’s permission.
The Guild posted a scathing article on their website today. It says, in part:
Amazon simply disregarded these publishers’ wishes, and enrolled many of their titles in the program anyway. Some of these publishers learned of Amazon’s unilateral decision as the first news stories about the program appeared.
How can Amazon get away with this? By giving its boilerplate contract with these publishers a tortured reading.
Amazon has decided that it doesn’t need the publishers’ permission, because, as Amazon apparently sees it, its contracts with these publishers merely require it to pay publishers the wholesale price of the books that Amazon Prime customers download. By reasoning this way, Amazon claims it can sell e-books at any price, even giving them away, so long as the publishers are paid.
It doesn’t stop there:
Amazon, in other words, appears to be boldly breaching its contracts with these publishers. This is an exercise of brute economic power. Amazon knows it can largely dictate terms to non-Big Six publishers, and it badly wanted to launch this program with some notable titles.
Why did it matter so much to Amazon? It’s all about the Kindle Fire, and Amazon’s unexpected e-book device battle with Apple and especially Barnes & Noble. (More on that, in another post.)
This last point is a cheap shot. Even if the Kindle Fire hadn’t been released they would still be touting the lending library.
I have not read the contract Amazon has with publishers, nor am I privy to their working relationship, so I’m not going to defend or or point fingers at Amazon. I just hope whatever differences they have can be worked out fairly so readers can continue to enjoy reading great ebooks.
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