A Quote by Nick Harkaway
Amazon makes money differently from a conventional publisher. It is an infrastructure player.
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Booksellers are tied to publishing - they need conventional publishing models to continue - but for those companies, that's not the case. Amazon is an infrastructure company; Apple sells hardware; Google is really an advertising company. You can't afford as a publisher to have those companies control your route to market.
When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there's something amiss.
There are lots of retailers that are now scrambling to emulate the Amazon model, so Amazon does not have a monopoly on same-day distribution or broad selection or low prices. All that said, there are advantages that accrue to the largest player, so I don't see much in the way of Amazon slowing down.
To walk in money through the night crowd, protected by money, lulled by money, dulled by money, the crowd itself a money, the breath money, no least single object anywhere that is not money. Money, money everywhere and still not enough! And then no money, or a little money, or less money, or more money but money always money. and if you have money, or you don't have money, it is the money that counts, and money makes money, but what makes money make money?
We'd realized in the first ten years we'd built an infrastructure competence deep in the stack - reliable, scalable cost effective data centers to grow the Amazon retail biz the way we needed to. But we'd built Amazon so quickly that a number of the pieces of the platform had become entangled.
As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.
I think that a really good agent should be able to get the right publisher, which the agent has already figured out, get as much money as she can from that publisher, and make a deal, rather than have the amount of money determine the sale. That's what the best agents do.
What makes the Amazon-Whole Foods deal so problematic is that they are going into an industry with large infrastructure, brick-and-mortar cost, and seeking to build consolidation where we already suffer from consolidation. It's not like Walmarts and Targets have been good for wages or local grocery stores or niche producers.
One of the nice things about publishing with Amazon is that the window for marketing is much longer than with a traditional publisher because these titles are not coming off of shelves.
You know, if you look back in the 1930s, the money went to infrastructure. The bridges, the municipal buildings, the roads, those were all built with stimulus money spent on infrastructure. This stimulus bill has fundamentally gone, started out with a $500 rebate check, remember. That went to buy flat-screen TVs made in China.
I've drunk Amazon's free Diet Coke. Nothing makes more sense to me than a company trying to make bookselling into a profitable business. I'm not anti-Amazon, and I'm not pro-publishers either. I'm pro-books.
As China's retailing champion, Alibaba makes Amazon look like a company that carefully picks its spots. Sure, Amazon does e-tailing. So does Alibaba.
It is interesting that cyberwarfare is developing into something conventional and attacking objects, infrastructure, and critical services.
Infrastructure done right can help working people; infrastructure done wrong is just more money for private equity.
If increasing income equality is the goal, it might be wiser to put money into infrastructure than to subsidize manufacturing. Construction also pays good wages, but with lower educational requirements. And America's infrastructure needs are enormous.
Amazon drove Borders out of business, and the vast majority of Borders employees are not qualified to work at Amazon. That's an actual, full-on problem. But should Amazon have been prevented from doing that? In my view, no.
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