{"id":32586,"date":"2014-05-28T00:57:59","date_gmt":"2014-05-28T00:57:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/in-february-in-a-new-yorker-piece-originally\/"},"modified":"2014-05-28T00:57:59","modified_gmt":"2014-05-28T00:57:59","slug":"in-february-in-a-new-yorker-piece-originally","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/in-february-in-a-new-yorker-piece-originally\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>In February, in a New Yorker piece originally titled \u201cIs Amazon bad for books?,\u201d a small press publisher, Melville House co-owner Dennis Johnson, described how Amazon had bullied him into signing up for its paid distribution service despite refusing to relinquish any information to him about his actual on-site sales. <\/p>\n<p>Johnson described how, after his initial refusal to play on their terms, Amazon representatives approached him at Book Expo and advised him to \u201cget with the program.\u201d He also described the way Amazon unsummarily pulled the \u201cBuy\u201d buttons from Melville House titles after he publicly criticized the company.<\/p>\n<p>Proponents of Amazon\u2019s lower pricing strategies argue that Amazon is the underdog in the publishing monopoly, not the other way around. But the fact remains that Amazon is a company that singlehandedly controls 30% of the market share of the entire publishing industry. And unlike its competitors, it has a publishing arm, a distribution arm, and a retail arm. Although the price-fixing that the Big Six and Apple were engaged in was blatantly illegal, the maneuver was a unilateral way of competing as a group against Amazon\u2019s predatory pricing\u2014that is, its ability to leverage its other retail holdings to offer rock-bottom pricing for its books, effectively decimating the landscape of other booksellers.<\/p>\n<p>Increasingly, the rhetoric about Amazon\u2019s bullying tactics is that the company is violating the same antitrust laws that it used to spear Apple and the Big Five on the Department of Justice\u2019s hook. \u201cMonopoly achieved,\u201d Johnson wrote after the verdict.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailydot.com\/business\/hachette-amazon-contract-dispute-publishers-protest\/\"><strong>You can\u2019t pre-order JK Rowling\u2019s newest book from Amazon because Amazon is holding it hostage<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;Better for Amazon is rarely better for the publishing industry.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<p>(via <a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/bookshop.tumblr.com\/\">bookshop<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In February, in a New Yorker piece originally titled \u201cIs Amazon bad for books?,\u201d a small press publisher, Melville House co-owner Dennis Johnson, described how Amazon had bullied him into signing up for its paid distribution service despite refusing to relinquish any information to him about his actual on-site sales. Johnson described how, after his [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-32586","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8tA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32586","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32586"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32586\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32586"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32586"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32586"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}