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[See update for link to a post from a former FTC economist who explains the concept of an "illegal tie."]
I’m just now catching up on the news about Amazon.com forcing print-on-demand publishers to use its printing and distribution service, Book Surge, if the publishers want their books to be sold on Amazon.com. The news was covered on Friday by the Wall Street Journal. Later on Friday, O’Reilly’s Andrew Savikas wrote a detailed post explaining the kinds of lock-in Amazon.com is attempting with this move.
And yes, there is a Nashville angle to this story as one of the on-demand printing services that is being targeted by this move is Ingram Industries subsidiary Lightning Source.
Quote from WSJ.com:
“Amazon’s decision means that any of those publishers who want their books sold on the giant Web site will have to use BookSurge. Not only will that squeeze rivals like Lightning Source, it will reduce publishers’ bargaining power. Publishers will “have to abide by Amazon’s pricing,” said Bob Young, CEO of Lulu Inc, a print-on-demand publisher based in Raleigh, N.C. Mr. Young said he believed BookSurge’s prices to be “slightly higher” than other printers. An Amazon spokesman declined to comment on that issue.”
I guess it’s somewhat ironic that this year marks the 10th anniversary of the attempt by Barnes & Noble to acquire Ingram Industries’ Ingram Book Group, a move that was withdrawn later after the Federal Trade Commission indicated it would contest the transaction. The transaction, which was blasted by independent booksellers because it merged the largest wholesaler with the largest retailer of books, was seen as a bold grab by Barnes & Noble to vertically integrate a competition-stiffling segment of the book distribution channel.
I say ironic, because at the time, Jeff Bezos was one of the most outspoken opponents of the B&N, Ingram deal, issuing a message to Amazon customers in which Bezos said, “To our customers: Worry not … Those who make choices that are genuinely good for customers, authors, and publishers will prevail. Goliath is always in range of a good slingshot … Our long-term strategy has been to diversify our supplier base and to increase our direct purchasing from publishers.”
So, in 1998, the concentration of book distribution and book retailing was opposed by Amazon. In 2008, at least when it comes to the print-on-demand segment of the book industry, Amazon apparently now likes playing Goliath. However, I’m sure Amazon will see it another way — as in, they are still just trying to cut out the middle guy. That spin worked ten years ago. I wonder if it will now. I wonder if it will when all those independent booksellers realize they’ll have to purchase books from Amazon?
Update: Luke Froeb, a former chief economist for the Federal Trade Commssion posted some insight into the legality of what Amazon is doing and asks, “Is it an illegal tie?”
Quote:
“Here the tying good would be on-line sales of books and the tied product would be BookSurge. If the plaintiff could show that Amazon has market power in the sale of on-line books, the plaintiff would have a pretty good chance. (This requires a market definition that excludes brick and mortar stores.) Also, if there is a dangerous probability that competition [is lessened] in the tied product market (”POD books”), the plaintiff could very well make a case that this is a per se violation.
Bonus link: Rafat Ali posts a follow-up piece regarding Amazon’s damage control on this issue that includes some great comments by some Amazon and book-publishing insiders.
Update: More on Amazon’s response to the criticism at PublishersWeekly.com, including coverage of a response from John Ingram:
In his statement, John Ingram said that while “the questions that are being raised about Amazon.com and its Booksurge division don’t directly relate to Ingram - either Lightning Source Inc. or Ingram Book Group - it clearly is alarming many of our publisher partners.†According to John Ingram, “publishers are telling us they feel Amazon.com’s actions are not appropriate.†John Ingram’s statement adds that the company has been unable to get a direct response from Amazon about its pod shift. “We all live in a world where decisions are made about insourcing and outsourcing, and free choice is important,†the statement continues. “At Ingram Book and Lightning Source, we are going to work really hard to continue to be the compelling choice as publishers make their outsourcing decisions. Our breadth of distribution channels including the online retailers remains the same, and Ingram still provides one day turnaround in the fulfillment of orders for books including print on demand titles.â€
(Thanks, Lewis Pennock, for several heads-up related to this post.)
[This is also being posted at Hammock Inc.'s Custom Media Craft weblog.]
 It’s been a while since I’ve made an “audio post” to a blog (I’m more “video” these days). However, some recent blog posts and Twitter comments by online political strategy consultant (and analyst) Patrick Ruffini inspired me to dust-off the Skype account and Audio Hijack software and give him a call. Ruffini works with GOP candidates, but in this interview we talk about his indepth tracking of the online campaigns of all the candidates in both parties. While the 16 minute audio focuses heavily on the historical significance of the online fundraising by the Obama campaign (see this article in the Washington Post), I also asked Patrick to discuss his thoughts on the current role of blogs in presidential news coverage (vs. 2004) — and, more recently, Twitter.
Download MP3
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Were you born in 1954? Then this will be your Beddian year, the year in which your age = the last two digits of the year in which you were born. If you have a four-year-old, it’s his or her Beddian year also.
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Doc and I share this peeve — Airports/hotels should not be in the Internet access business. Sidenote: Free airport wifi list is most visited page on smallbusiness.com - http://tinyurl.com/38j9gv
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What people forget is that industries peak at the top. Which is to say, at the very time that the first and second derivative people are writing off a business, those who can stand back and see the value still left in it can make a mint.
I love The Onion. They have talented and very funny writers who know how to create news parodies that are biting and clever — in other words, not stupid or cruel.
For some reason, during several days surrounding April 1, those who maintain blogs feel compelled to give the whole fake-post humor thing a shot. Inevitably, many (if not most) of the people reading such posts fail to pick up the joke and point to the post, thinking that it’s news. And then, there is a round of posts about how stupid people are who point to fake news.
If you blog or Tweet or bookmark, consider this the kind of reminder you get twice a year to move up or back your clocks: April Fools Day is next Tuesday.
To track fake stuff, Wikipedia users typically have a page like this (just change 2007 to 2008). [Later: i wonder if there is another place that tracks stuff Wikipedia users do the site on April Fools Day?]
Ironically, everyday on the blogosphere and in the news (and on Wikipedia), I read stuff that sounds like April Fools jokes. Unfortunately, it’s often true.
Side advice for anyone with a product to launch or news to announce: Don’t do it during the next few days as the cliche lede on blog posts will be, “Is this news some sort of April Fools Day joke?”
Later: Here’s a great example of why I don’t like April Fools posts. This article on the website of the BBC with the headline, “Magazines harm male body image,” is obviously an April Fools joke, right? Or, if not, they should have saved it for another weekend as it seems like a parody that would appear in The Onion. (Although, in the The Onion, such a story would be much more clever — even if 11 years old.) In the BBC article, “Dr Giles from the University of Winchester” has surveyed 161 readers of “lads” magazines and concludes that the content “may” drive them to “try to become more muscular.” (How can evidence be both conclusive and conditional (it may)?) Dr Giles and “specialists” call the “maybe” condition, “athletica nervosa.”
Upside if the article is legit: Magazines are relevant to an important demographic…and images that appear in magazines can trigger consumer behavior.
Bonus link: Anil Dash has a long tradition of pointing out how tech-bloggers April Fools Day jokes are lame.
Why is there a “vs.” between the names of the two companies in this headline? PaidContent vs. TechCrunch: Two Visions of Blogging’s Future.
Remind me in what way the two companies compete? Advertising? Readers? Their vision? Huh? They don’t even cover the same industries or markets — so in what way do they compete again?
I can think of several business-to-business media companies that PaidContent.org competes with and out-performs, but TechCrunch is not on that list. I can think of several business-to-business media companies that TechCrunch competes with and out-performs, but PaidContent.org is not on that list.
The only quote in the post that makes any sense to me is this one from Rafat:
“If CNet is the only target you can aspire to be, that is selling yourself really short.”
I agree. I think Rafat should be targeting Crain or Reed Business and Michael should be targeting IDG. Those billion-dollar companies can all trace their lineage directly to founders who were the bloggers of their day — men sitting around kitchen tables putting out dinky publications in nascent industries.
In January, I wrote about the format-busting Apple ad that was running on the front of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal websites. A week later, I pointed out how the ad format compromised the visual effect of editorial following a breaking news story. While I’m a fan of the creative execution of the Apple ad (but still not a fan of its mean-spiritedness and, frankly, don’t believe the veracity of the core message), I pointed out that what was taking place would never be allowed by business magazines or in the print New York Times or Wall Street Journal.
Today, NYTimes.com is running another execution of the ad, however, the ad is not appearing on WSJ.com. Perhaps after the close of market today, the WSJ.com will run it? I’ll watch.
(via: Patrick Ruffini’s Flickr photo stream.)
I’m pleased to note that the really smart guy in this interview at WSJ.com is my friend and Congressman, Jim Cooper. I wish the WSJ.com did a better job at time-stamping their video as I don’t know when they posted this interview regarding the potential next steps that should (or should not) take place with regards to a “housing bailout.”
And speaking of smart politicians from Tennessee, the state’s governor, Phil Bredesen, is omnipresent in the national media these days for his suggestion that the Democratic Party hold a mini-primary/caucus/convention for Super Delegates in June. Sidenote: Both Cooper and Bredesen are Super Delegates. Cooper is an Obama supporter and Bredesen has not committed to a candidate yet.
A belated shout-out congratulations to my friend (and fellow business-to-business media veteran) Matt McAlister who’s leaving Yahoo! to join the Guardian, as in, he and his family are moving from San Francisco to London.
It took them awhile, but the “Street View” gang at Google Maps finally drove around Nashville and, gee, you can now do stuff like embed this panoramic view of the intersection outside my office window. That’s me up in the seventh floor of the building that looks super-thin in this photo (like, say, a MacBuilding Air). While I won’t get too privacy-invasive by displaying or linking to it, I’m happy to note that the Street View vehicle apparently drove by my home (not the location on the embedded shot, but another one) on a beautiful fall afternoon right after the lawn had been cut.
View Larger Map
As Google Maps fans know, there are individuals who enjoy going through Street View photos looking for weird happenings that got snapped during the drive-bys. No doubt, there is a strong possibility of some weird sightings among the Nashville shots.
Bonus: Link to Nashville “Street View” Map: After clicking through to this link, click on the camera icon, then click on “zoom in” and then move the little “lego-man-ish” icon to a location to view the panorama from that spot.
For some reason, there seems to be a problem with the automagic feature of del.icio.us that makes a daily post here of all the sites I’ve bookmarked during the previous 24 hours. Until I (or they) get it figured out, I’ll leave this post open for a 24 hour period and add links to it:
PaidContent.org re-orgs | Paidcontent.org
Congrats to Rafat, Staci on the solid strategy they are executing. And while I’m on this topic, what’s with the early-morning weirdness from Silicon Alley Insider this a.m.? In what can only be described as bizarre, Henry Blodget wrote — and then took down — some of the most misleading crap I’ve seen him write since, say, around 2000.
The Atlantic Hires Away Publisher of Wired | NYTimes.com
Quote: “For Mr. Lauf, 44, the move is more unorthodox, taking him from a larger, more lucrative magazine to a smaller, less prosperous one. Observation: What’s so unorthodox about that? Most magazine publishers today are moving from larger more lucrative magazines to smaller, less prosperous ones — without even changing jobs.
The Internet Effect on News | TIME
Quote: “If you say something provocatively, in a new way, or with an unexpected spin, you will succeed online. If you play it safe, you will not. So we see the difference in style between the Politico story and, say, Adam Nagourney’s more nuanced story on the same topic a day earlier or again in another story today. Suffice it to say, Friday’s Politico story earned a Drudge link over the weekend, and Nagourney’s did not. That’s money in the bank for Politico.”
Talk about your opening day.
Just in time for baseball season, Sports Illustrated opened their archival vault during the past few days and my sports-enthused friend, Staci Kramer, dove in. Staci, of course, has that business media thing going to, so she actually can make hanging out on SI a work-related activity by digging into some cool stats and insight:
“SI can drive discovery and take search engine optimization much deeper with key topic pages and by linking and aggregating to related content like video search through sibling AOL’s Truveo, eBay collectibles, the wiki links. Putting it all up required a new classification system and the thousands of tags for the most complete metadata and flexible search. The platform to host the Vault and dynamically render pages was built by sibling Turner Broadcastings’ digital group; SI.com is part of the CNN Network, so Turner benefits from any increased traffic. Eventually, SI plans to add stats feeds, trivia, original video programming, self-publishing and more. By the numbers: The Vault launched Thursday so these are early numbers. According to data provided by SI, through Monday the site drew 231,000 unique visitors (97,000 Monday) producing 2.5 million page views (900,000 Monday) and spending an average of 9.5 minutes per visit.
I just love sports stats stories.
Charts give blog posts
more interestingness.
I’m catching up from a couple weeks of travel, so apologies for belatedly linking to this post from Roy Peter Clark on Poynter.org. It’s a fan-post regarding “a young reporter and Nieman fellow named Josh Benton” who “offered the most dynamic presentation (he’s) ever witnessed on — of all things– blogging.”
Quote:
Benton argued that natural reporting often comes right after the experience, when the reader can catch the spark of the subject and the more authentic voice of the writer. But time passes, and the machine of conventional reporting neuters the point of view, neutralizes the language, and jams facts into standard suitcases. But then, more time passes and an investigative or feature writer recognizes the unrealized narrative potential of the story. Once again, “interestingness” becomes high. In this sense, reportorial blogging and narrative storytelling are allies against the snore-inducing, monochromatic delivery of conventional reporting. While straight reporting asks, “is it a story?” says Benton, the blogger wonders “is it interesting?” While the traditional report seems fixed in time, the blogger offers “an ongoing series of dispatches.” And just as narrative writers try to define character in stories, so bloggers “can make characters out of sources — and out of reporters, too.”
It’s not every day — or every month, for that matter — that I see a new adjective applied to the word blogging, so I felt the need to officially note that in addition to making a tremendously insightful observation, either Roy Peter Clark or Josh Benton have come up with a $5 one: reportorial blogging.
So when I grow up, I wanna be a reportorial blogger. Except wait.
Another thing I missed by traveling the past couple of weeks were the Mark Cuban posts (and here). Actually, I didn’t miss the posts as Dylan Stableford of Foliomag.com invited me to write something for him about the posts. Perhaps my head just wasn’t in the game, but despite reading what Mark was ranting about, I could never quite figure it out enough to agree or disagree. So I lost Dylan’s e-mail.
Anyway, it’s 2008, which means it’s about six years too late for me to give a rip about whether or not someone thinks the word “blog” is good or bad or professional or amateur or long tail or short tail. Here are other things I think have stupid names: e-mail, IM, RSS, google, the Dallas Mavaricks. (Just kidding.)
I think Mark Cuban likes blogging, blogs and bloggers. He just thinks that newspapers (which he sometimes doesn’t like) are crazy to go down-market with calling something a blog. (In much the same way, I guess, that TV goes down market when it airs something with good prime-time ratings (Dancing with the Stars, for example) and chooses to not air something in prime time that has bad ratings (NBA Basketball, for example.).
As for me, I have no problem with calling something “a blog” as long as it has a good, $5 adjective in front of it.
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Quote - “We’re going to continue to hire reporters and bloggers, and our new corporate parent is committed to the expansion of the Journal franchise,†he said.
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Don’t know who to credit with pointing me to Phil’s post about the demise of the phrase “just doesn’t get it.” Of course, bookmarking posts about the phrase “just doesn’t get it” is something only done by those who don’t get it.
 Interesting article in the NY Times today about scionspeak.com, a new marketing effort by Toyota. It also provides the current state of a non-blogosphere “trend story” about where social media marketing is today. From that vantage point it’s a good story for tech bloggers and social media marketing types to gauge how those from the real world perceive what it means to be a trendy social media marketer:
1. Being a trendy social media marketer means you’re not considering setting up a “Facebook for [Your Brand or Product Category Here].” You know that your customers don’t “belong” to you, even if they are “members.” (Unless, of course, you’re Nike or Apple.)
2. Trendy social media marketers are supporting current customers, not “future” ones.
3. Trendy social media marketers work for clients whose products have tiny market shares and whose customers like being “misunderstood,” “quirky,” “hip” or “superior.”
4. Trendy social media marketers work for clients who have customers who use the word “freaking” as an adjective.
5. Trendy social media marketers recognize that mainstream reporters love Flash websites.
Quotes from the article:
“The Scion Speak campaign is aimed not at future Scion owners but at current ones. StrawberryFrog says that it wants “to reduce Scion’s investment on conquering new customers and increasing the passion for the brand among its core fan base…At least some Scion owners who have created their own coats of arms seem pleased with the results. A Scion driver, writing online as Monsterslovecandy, created a design that included a harlequin pattern, crossed wrenches and a phoenix, and wrote on a fan Web site, “I think it came out freaking sweet.â€
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