Amazon Vs. Hachette: What Would Orwell Think?

“Review of Penguin Books” might qualify as the single most obscure thing that George Orwell ever wrote. It was published in the March 5, 1936, issue of New English Weekly, when the writer was thirty-two years old. Like other struggling novelists, Orwell was doing a lot of reviewing to get his name in print, and, in this case, he’d undertaken the thankless task of reviewing a batch of ten Penguin paperbacks, sold at sixpence apiece, including such immortal titles as “The Owls’ House,” by Crosbie Garstin, and “Dr. Serocold,” by Helen Ashton. A few years ago, when I was compiling a two-volume edition of Orwell’s essays, “Review of Penguin Books” would not have made the long list even if I’d remembered that it existed. All the stranger, then, that this eight-decade-old trifle surfaced last weekend in the business dispute between Amazon and Hachette and, from there, moved onto Twitter and into the Times.

For the past four months, Amazon has been making it hard for customers to buy Hachette books while the two companies fight over e-book terms. A group of nine hundred writers signed an open letter that appeared in Sunday’s Times, calling on Amazon to leave authors out of the contract dispute. The Amazon Books Team preëmptively replied by creating a Web site called readersunited.com. (In politics, this is known as “grasstops”—a fake-grassroots campaign created by special interests.) The Web site provided Kindle customers with talking points to help convince the C.E.O. of Hachette to “stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks.”

Members of the Amazon Books Team—they aren’t stupid—unearthed Orwell’s “Review of Penguin Books” and quoted its first sentence: “The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.” In 1936, mass-market paperbacks were a new technological innovation, as e-books are now. Orwell thought that cheaper books would not lead to higher revenues, because buyers would spend less money on books and more “on seats at the ‘movies.’ ” Readers might benefit—publishers, booksellers, and authors wouldn’t. Amazon chided Orwell for his shortsightedness: “[W]hen a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books—he was wrong about that.” No one could miss the analogy to the e-book revolution and its critics.

The Times jumped in to mock Amazon for missing the note of irony in Orwell’s words. He wasn’t actually urging the formation of a publishing cartel, just pointing out the danger that cheap paperbacks posed for “the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller.” In fact, the advent of paperbacks left Orwell ambivalent. “In my capacity as reader I applaud the Penguin Books; in my capacity as writer I pronounce them anathema,” he wrote. Orwell didn’t have much of a head for business, and his powers of prediction sometimes failed him. In another 1936 piece, “Bookshop Memories,” he wrote, “The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.” Around the same time, he argued that the Nazi threat wasn’t as dangerous as a war of the “imperialist powers.” (He changed his mind about that.) So maybe Orwell was wrong about paperbacks, too. But then, so is Amazon.

When paperbacks started out, they cost about ten per cent of the price of hardcovers (a quarter versus $2.50). Today, the figure is at least fifty per cent. If paperbacks have turned out to be good for writers and publishers, it must in part be that their price has risen disproportionately since Orwell’s time. But Amazon believes in an iron law of cheapness: “When the price goes down, customers buy much more.” Specifically, they claim that an e-book priced at $14.99 that sells a hundred thousand copies will sell a hundred and seventy-four thousand if priced at $9.99. In this books-as-widgets thinking, sales of one-cent books would be nearly limitless. So, in the future, everyone will own billions of virtually free e-book titles on their Kindles that they’ll barely have time to download, let alone to read. What author wouldn’t want a piece of that action?

Amazon’s broader argument is disingenuous. Hardly anyone—certainly not the big publishers—is saying that e-books should be suppressed, any more than Orwell was saying that Penguins should be smothered in the crib. The question is how the market and profits should be divided. Amazon has its own corporate lexicon, its own uses of language. Warehouses are “fulfillment centers,” algorithmic recommendations are “personalization.” I won’t call it Orwellian, because that poor, much-abused term should be reserved for special occasions, like North Korea. But it’s a style conducive to cheerful deception, and Orwell would have seen straight through it. When I was interviewing Amazon executives for a magazine piece, “Cheap Words,” earlier this year, they talked about the company as if it were a literary nonprofit dedicated to helping readers and writers. That’s the style of readersunited.com, which states: “[B]ooks compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.”

As I wrote in “Cheap Words,” making books less expensive might benefit Amazon and its customers, but it sucks the life out of publishers and the authors who need their services. Big publishers bear much of the blame for their troubles. They pay out vast sums for dubious projects, often ignore their “midlist,” publish far too many titles, and generally treat the book trade as if it were a business like TV, when, in fact, it’s closer to an artisanal craft. But Amazon’s goal is to eliminate all “gatekeepers” except for itself, which would undermine the structure that still allows good books to find readers, while devaluing the worth of books to the vanishing point.

Like Orwell, we ought to be able to hold in our heads the complex idea that what is good for readers might ultimately be bad for writers. After all, Amazon is not a literary nonprofit; it’s a corporate giant that wants to sell everything to everyone. Lately, Wall Street has been unhappy with the company’s financial performance, and, in response, Amazon has started to raise prices on, for example, its Prime memberships. That’s what the dispute with Hachette is really about: Amazon’s need for higher profits. Which is why, according to publishing sources, the heart of the contract fight is Amazon’s drive to keep fifty per cent on each e-book it sells, rather than the current thirty per cent. [Update: An Amazon spokeswoman directed me to a statement the company released last month, saying that Amazon’s key objective was to lower the price of most e-books to $9.99 or less; it added that the company has “no problem” with only a thirty per cent revenue on those sales.] In other words, this isn’t about a “healthy reading culture.” It’s about the company’s bottom line. That should not be hard to understand, but, in Orwell’s words, “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com/
Author: BY GEORGE PACKER