This post went up around midnight last night (Saturday, 4/14) in London, or between 6 and 7 NY time. I had been concerned about a part of it that has been edited below. If you read it before 5 pm today (Sunday, 4/15), you’ll not have seen this correction. And you’ll see some comments that obviously pre-date the update.
Well, we certainly have a confused book business on our hands following the announcement of the Department of Justice intervention last week.
According to my (admittedly tentative) understanding:
1. We have three Big Six publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster) that have agreed to a settlement with Justice that obliges them to modify their agency arrangements over the next 60 days in ways that will eliminate their ability to control discounting in the supply chain for the next two years.
2. We have two Big Six publishers (Macmillan and Penguin) that will contest the DoJ position that they acted illegally (in collusion). They can apparently continue to manage their business with agency pricing the way they have, at least until a court rules. And, as we know, that can take a while.
3. We have one Big Six publisher, the biggest of all (Random House), which can continue to sell under agency terms without restriction and without a lawsuit to defend. Why? Because they didn’t take simultaneous action with the other five and were, therefore, not implicated in the alleged collusion.
4. Agency terms, including even most favored nation clauses (which never really affected the Big Six anyway), have not been ruled illegal. (Cader said in his post on Friday, blocked by paywalls I think, that, as a result of this set of legal actions “agency itself is demonstrably considered legal.” If that is accurate, and he almost always is, that is certainly an unintended consequence.)
5. The DoJ delivered some convincing evidence, surfaced on the Melville House blog, that despite my conjecture to the contrary, big publishers did discuss agency among each other before they implemented it. That certainly doesn’t look good. But whether or not it was implemented legally does not affect my opinion about the value of agency or the damage from losing it.
Added later. But, aha!!! This is not convincing evidence of a conspiracy. It is most likely that this discussion, assuming the email quotes are all legitimate to begin with, was about Bookish, the book retailing initiative funded by Hachette, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin. If that’s true, it would suggest that HarperCollins was an early participant in the conversations about starting it. That makes sense. HarperCollins is a partner with Penguin in the financing of Anobii, an ebook retailing site in the UK.
And hats off to my great friend and favorite consulting competitor, Lorraine Shanley of Market Partners, who made the penny drop for me in a conversation at the Digital Minds Conference today in London! I was only comforted when I spoke to one of the smartest guys in trans-Atlantic digital publishing who said, “of course” to this when I told him, just as I did when Lorraine told me. Like me, he didn’t get this right off the bat!
6. The publishers who settled appear to be on notice that the new arrangements they create to replace the status quo better not look too similar to each other’s when they’re done. (This seems extraordinarily difficult to me. The accounts actually limit the amount of variation that can exist…)
7. In a separate proceeding from DoJ, the settling publishers appear on the verge of refunding money to consumers who “overpaid” for ebooks. (This is a result of settling lawsuits arising from States, not DoJ.)
8. “Loss-leading” sales were addressed by Justice in a very creative way. They are banned, not on a “per-sale” basis, but rather on a “aggregate” basis. So retailers can give away ebooks. Heck, they can pay customers to take some ebooks, as long as they make back the margin they shed on other ebook sales from the same publisher. Since Amazon has never done anything else (they told me very clearly, and not under NDA, two years ago that they discount a small percentage of the total titles that constitute a big minority slice of total sales and their overall ebook sales deliver positive margin) and nobody else could afford to, that’s a restriction without any real meaning.
Looking back at the post I wrote six weeks ago when the possibility that agency would be ended or damaged first surfaced, I find nothing I want to take back or change.
I would summarize the situation this way. Amazon (which includes any other player largely dependent on Amazon) and the most price-conscious ebook consumers have won. Everybody else in the ecosystem: authors, publishers, and other vendors, have lost. The reaction from all quarters seems to confirm that analysis.
The biggest question going forward is how Amazon will react to this. Cader’s unique and invaluable analysis says that Amazon will have a “pool” of about $113 million for discounting and incentives in the coming year. B&N, with half their market share, would have about $57 million.
It will be fascinating to see how Bookish, owned by three Big Six publishers (two that settled, one that didn’t) navigates all this if it opens, as rumored, between now and BEA.
The Digital Book World website (a fine institution I have nothing to do with; we just program their annual NYC conference) reports that James McQuivey of Forrester expects Amazon to be very restrained in how they’ll employ discounting when the dust on this all settles (in about 60 days). I’d actually expect precisely the opposite. I think Amazon will do the splashiest discounting they possibly can, making the point as loudly as possible that they deliver the lowest prices to the consumer and daring their competiton to match them.
Every company in the industry is going back to the drawing board. Only one is not unhappy about it.
There’s a response from Dick Heffernan, President of Sales at Penguin buried in the comment string after my last post making the point that Penguin has also not cut its sales force in recent years. I congratulate them for that and I’m sorry that I jumped to the conclusion that because the major house senior executive who mused about Random House saw their behavior as unique that it must be so. I think the insights from Random House were useful — the comment string and traffic to the post seem to confirm that — but I’m also happy to also acknowledge Penguin’s persistence in maintaining service to the bookstore channel.