A range war is brewing on the e-book front as a result of Amazon’s pre-emptive strike in introducing Amazon KDP Select, a 3-month optional contract operating above and beyond the normal Amazon KDP program available to authors. If an author hits the Select button, for the time their book is enrolled in the Select program, they must agree not to distribute or sell the book ANYWHERE ELSE! This includes their own personal blog or web site. Their title must be 100% exclusive to Amazon.
Before Amazon KDP decided to introduce Select, self-published authors had the opportunity to distribute their books across a large number of platforms — Amazon itself, Apple iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Sony, Kobo, Smashwords, Books a Million and others. This was good for the writers, good for the e-book publishers and distributors. A nice competitive industry.
To retaliate against Amazon’s pre-emptive strike, Barnes & Noble, the other distribution giant, has decided to withdraw from its lists all titles published by Amazon. It would seem, at this stage, that even if a book is published on some other platform and merely distributed through Amazon, Barnes & Noble will withdraw it. Books a Million and the Canadian Indigo have followed B & N’s lead.
E-books are the new cash cow of book publishing, and indie e-book sales are rising at a phenomenal rate. In the US, in the last three months of 2010, Amazon’s sales of e-books surpassed that of paperbacks for the first time, and self-published e-books are beginning to appear in bestseller lists. But self-published authors are about to lose their freedom of choice and the wide distribution platforms their books enjoyed in the past. Because B&N and Amazon deliver the greatest volumes of sales, a self-published author or a small press will be forced to choose between these two giants. Going with only one distributor, however large, carries potentially huge risks for the user for the distributor can change the conditions at any time.
Range wars never benefit the peons. In this case, it’s the writers and small publishers who are caught in the crossfire. Is Amazon breaking the law with KDP Select? Should some kind of legal safeguards be put in place to prevent monopolistic practices in the young e-book industry?
For more details on Amazon KDP Select, see my previous post: Amazon KDP Select – a poisoned apple?
Danielle de Valera 
Thank you Danielle.
Perhaps Amazon will one day topple under its own weight … Hmm … not likely.
There will be a reckoning of some sort. I think it will be along the lines of quality. Perhaps a large number of readers will look for a site where they know the quality of the story and the formatting is reliable and good.
Thanks, Lucy. Your idea is an interesting one. Is the formatting better on some other sites than Amazon’s? Never having published an ebook yet, I have no first hand experience of this.
I doubt that there’s anything illegal about the Select program. It’s voluntary, and there are already a lot of writers who’ve tried it and won’t be signing up again. What that says is that it doesn’t work for everybody. If Amazon tries to make it a condition of publishing for the Kindle, that would be another matter, entirely.
Although I will never sign up for it, and I can understand that it hurts other retailers, including Smashwords, B & N refusing to carry Amazon’s print publications is just cutting off their nose to spite their face. It isn’t going to slow Amazon down, but it does deprive B & N customers of books they might have bought there.
An important thing to remember is that most people don’t know or care who the publisher is. That fact has been pretty well established. I saw an ad for a new book the other day. Very prominent at the top were the words “By the publishers of The Hunger Games.” Do most people even know who published The Hunger Games? I doubt it. It’s the association with the book itself that’s important.
Thanks, Catana. I moved this post over from Ecademy without deleting the questions at the end, which are fashionable in Ecademy to prompt comments. I meant to delete them, but something came up and the thing went across without change.
You’re right when you say most people don’t know or care who the publisher is. I suspect, as you do, that B&N are going to lose this stoush. Amazon is just too big, and if what Derek Haines suspects is true (see my comment to Armand) people will go with Select anyway to up the sales of their books.
B&N is only refusing to carry Amazon’s own imprint releases, not independent authors… I have several eBooks in the KDP Select and most not, and some of the eBooks have sold well with plenty of borrows, but others have not.
For me, about half of the books will stay in another 90 days but the rest pulled, and about 50% of my new releases will go in for 90 days… there still isn’t enough time and data to make an educated guess as an author whether or not this works.
Amazon is still about 75% of my sales and that hasn’t really changed in the last 60 days with the KDP Select program.
Armand Rosamilia
Thanks for that info, Armand. As you say, it’s early days yet. I’ve been following Derek Haines of Whizzbuzz on this subject. He’s been doing a lot of experimenting with his books with and without Select, and also on the free giveaway days and their effect on sales. Although it’s too early yet for any conclusive results, he seems to feel that the giveaway days do help sales by getting you known.
I agree with that… after every free day of a specific book, I saw my sales in my other similar books spike… so by putting a zombie book up for free, I get 3-5 other zombie books selling well right after that… but not every book is selling well, it’s all still a crapshoot and luck…
Armand