Customers adore Amazon for its ability to deliver almost anything almost instantly. Publishers’ feelings about the online retail giant are a lot more complicated.
They love how it can boost book sales. They are less enamored of the negotiating power its size and reach give it. The New York Times summed up the dilemma in a July headline: “Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed.” It accompanied an article, one of many in recent weeks, about the standoff between Amazon and a major commercial publisher, Hachette, reportedly over e-book pricing and other issues.
Compared with trade publishers like Hachette, most university presses are small fry in the very large sea that Amazon trawls. For the presses, however, Amazon plays “an enormous role,” says Rebekah Darksmith, deputy director of the University of California Press. “Amazon and its technology are ubiquitous at this point.”
That puts scholarly publishers in the sometimes-uncomfortable spot of trying to position themselves to take advantage of Amazon’s strength without being swept away by it—particularly because the retailer has a reputation for tough bargaining, even with university presses, and for seeking to renegotiate deals regularly.
Amazon now accounts for a quarter to a third of sales for many university presses. At the University of Minnesota Press, for instance, 31 percent of print sales now come through Amazon, according to Douglas A. Armato, the press’s director. Amazon Kindle sales make up a majority of the press’s retail e-book sales, he says.
‘Our Biggest Customer’
Other press directors mention similar figures, although many are reluctant to share exact numbers. “Some will tell you it’s as little as 20 percent, some will say it’s as high as 50 percent,” says Joseph J. Esposito, a publishing consultant who works closely with university presses. Mr. Esposito thinks that some presses’ estimates may be low because they don’t necessarily take into account Amazon orders placed through wholesalers like Baker & Taylor. “When you work through these various work flows and value chains, you see Amazon is a very significant player in the university-press world,” he says.
John Sherer, director of the University of North Carolina Press, sums up Amazon’s importance like this: “They are our biggest customer.”
Like most publishers, university presses appreciate Amazon for its ability to help readers find books. “Before Amazon, it was exceedingly difficult to get the range of books that we do into the hands of individual scholars and readers,” says Minnesota’s Mr. Armato. Amazon “makes these works immediately purchasable.”
Mr. Armato says he frequently hears from scholars that they turn to Amazon for the books they need, especially when interlibrary loan proves too slow or cumbersome. The downside is that “this has gone hand in hand with the decline of library sales for the university-press monograph,” he says. Scholars might buy fewer books through Amazon if their libraries were buying more of those books in the first place.
University presses also wonder to what extent libraries are buying books directly from Amazon as well as through the distributors that traditionally deliver scholarly books to the library market. Amazon doesn’t really share customer data, so “we just don’t know where those books are going,” Mr. Armato says. “We have no idea who the final purchasers are.” (Ms. Darksmith at California’s press says that, as a retailer with a focus on customer service, Amazon isn’t really “set up to feed back that kind of information” to the suppliers whose goods it sells.)
For its part, Amazon considers university presses “an important and growing business for us, and we appreciate the role they play in disseminating research and education content,” a company spokeswoman says via email. “We don’t comment on our business terms, but we always work to develop strong professional relationships with publishers, including university presses, so together we can deliver low prices and a great experience for our customers.”
Talking Terms
By all accounts, Amazon is a formidable negotiator in pursuit of that customer experience. “Almost any press director will say they’re the toughest ones to negotiate with every year,” says the UNC Press’s Mr. Sherer, who describes his press’s relationship with the company as positive.
Like Amazon’s ability to satisfy customers, its approach to negotiations has become part of its signature style—and a departure for the book business, according to Mr. Sherer, who worked in trade publishing before moving to North Carolina.
“They’re unique in the fact that they come back every year with new requests,” he says. In an Amazon world, “terms are always going to be up for negotiation.”
Common bones of contention include how much books will be discounted and how much “co-op” advertising money publishers will kick in to have their books promoted or well placed on Amazon’s site—"nothing too surprising,” Mr. Sherer says. Commercial publishers too have long wrangled with Amazon over those issues, since well before the Hachette drama.
If university presses have felt the pressures Hachette has experienced—hearing that it will take weeks to process orders, for instance—they’re reluctant to say so publicly. Some cite contract negotiations in progress. But Amazon’s influence makes it tricky for them to say anything negative about how the company does business.
“In some ways it’s a challenging conversation,” says Ms. Darksmith, of California, adding that she has not seen evidence of undue pressure in the company’s dealings with her press.
Still, rumors and anxiety abound, along with a sense that “Amazon is always testing the limits,” as Mr. Esposito puts it. His sense is that, “in the last year or so, the tests and the pressure have become greater.”
“The Hachette issue just makes scholarly publishers less likely to give Amazon the benefit of the doubt,” says Michael Zeoli, vice president for strategic e-content development and partner relations at YBP Library Services, which delivers print and digital content to academic libraries, among other services. Amazon’s size could also work against it in developing trust; many publishers interact with the company primarily through its Vendor Central interface. “Most academic publishers will tell you that they don’t even have a person they can contact reliably at Amazon,” Mr. Zeoli says by email.
It may help university presses that they occupy a different niche in the publishing ecosystem than commercial publishers do. “I’m not sure it’s ever going to be our battle,” says Mr. Sherer, of North Carolina, when asked about the Hachette situation. “People don’t shop for our books the way they do for a lot of Hachette books.” A reader who goes to Amazon in search of a particular scholarly study of, say, race relations in Argentina probably wants that book and that book only. A reader who just wants a good mystery, though, has an abundance of choices from different publishers.
‘A Big Hornet’s Nest’
Even if Amazon doesn’t throw its weight around, university presses have to acknowledge that their largest customer is a for-profit entity whose primary mission is very different from theirs. Sometimes those models will clash.
“It’s unrealistic to expect that a large, profit-driven corporation that is dealing in multiple industries is going to have the interest of university-press publishers at heart. That’s just not the way they’re set up,” says Becky Brasington Clark, director of marketing and institutional outreach at the Johns Hopkins University Press. “Can they work with us productively and in good faith? Yeah. Ultimately are they going to protect their interests and their customers? Yeah.”
Some challenges that presses have reportedly faced with Amazon—like divergent opinions on what price discount the parties think they’ve agreed to—may derive from technical rather than philosophical differences. For instance, Ms. Clark’s press and Amazon just spent “the better part of a year unraveling and repairing a whole host of metadata issues that have caused problems on both sides,” she says.
The difficulty arose from how book orders are placed and processed—all handled electronically now. If the bibliographic data that a press’s system sends to Amazon doesn’t match up well with the company’s data tables, “the effect may be that we’re selling the book to Amazon at one price and they think they’re getting it from us at another.”
That kind of metadata mismatch “can scale quickly into big numbers,” Ms. Clark says. “If you can imagine thousands and thousands of line items, and each one is generating a discount discrepancy, that gets to be a big hornet’s nest.”
Amazon has “worked with us in good faith to get this resolved,” Ms. Clark says. “Are they tough negotiators? Absolutely.” But they also “helped us untangle a metadata issue that was enormous.”
Ms. Clark has “a very strong hunch” that other publishers have experienced similar trouble. For publishers who remember the days when you would just make public your “terms of sale” and expect customers to abide by them, “it’s a whole new vocabulary,” she says.
Historical perspective can be a useful way to deal with anxiety about Amazon’s large presence. In the 1990s, for instance, publishers worried about what one of Ms. Clark’s colleagues calls “the killer B’s"—Barnes & Noble and the now-defunct Borders.
“Pre-Amazon, they were the ones that we were having to negotiate with and compromise with and maybe cut deals with,” she says. “Then Amazon came in and disrupted the superstores. The history of publishing has been a move to consolidation that you see in other industries as well.”
Will something eventually disrupt Amazon? “I can’t see that Amazon will ever stop selling books,” Ms. Clark says. But as Amazon continues to expand far beyond its roots as an online bookstore, she wonders if there might be “a consumer shift” as “the scholarly community gradually migrates back to the bookstore,” she says.
Maybe university presses will find more ways to collectively promote and market their books themselves, even as they continue to work with Amazon.
Big as it is, Amazon alone is unlikely to save or sink university-press publishing. With or without the company, “there’s enormous anxiety about whether we as an industry can find ways to support scholarship,” Ms. Clark says. “We tend to talk in terms of villains or saviors, but there’s an awful lot of gray area there. Nobody can save another part of the industry at the expense of themselves.”
Correction (7/24/2014, 1:16 p.m.): This article originally reported mistakenly that Amazon had removed the “Buy” button from some Hachette books on its website as an example of the pressure it had placed on the publisher. Amazon did not remove those buttons, although it did so during a dispute with another publisher in 2010. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.