If You're Planning on Bringing Out the Big Guns...

...Please make sure they're aimed correctly.

Over the weekend, I read the full-page ad that "Authors United" ran in the New York Times opposing Amazon's actions against publishing house Hachette. The ad, signed by hundreds of authors (most not published by Hachette), argued succinctly that "None of us, neither readers nor authors, benefit when books are taken hostage."

Amazon has de-listed many Hachette-published books over the price of e-books, and is now reportedly in a dispute with Disney, preventing Amazon customers from pre-ordering unreleased material (books or movies whose publishing / release date has been announced, but has not yet occurred).

Amazon had earlier posted its own "Readers United" manifesto, accusing Hachette of over-pricing ("Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there's no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market — e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive."). It has also accused Hachette of collusion with other publishers in setting those prices, and quoting George Orwell.

Now, those of us who love books and words love Orwell. This is, after all, the man who skewered the mis-use of language with the "Newspeak" of 1984, and the three great slogans of "the Party":

• War is Peace
• Freedom is Slavery
• Ignorance is Strength

According to Amazon, its e-book platform would have been seen as a threat to traditional publishing by Orwell, just as the introduction of inexpensive paperback books was:

The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if "publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them." Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. 

The Internet exploded in response, because the actual quote is:

The Penguin Books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if the other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.

A slightly different spin, wouldn't you say?

In fact, as noted by David Streitfeld in today's New York Times, Orwell went on from there (full article, here):

Orwell then went on to undermine Amazon’s argument for cheap e-books. “It is, of course, a great mistake to imagine that cheap books are good for the book trade,” he wrote, saying that the opposite was true.

“The cheaper books become,” he wrote, “the less money is spent on books.”

Instead of buying two expensive books, he said, the consumer will buy three cheap books and then use the rest of the money to go to the movies. “This is an advantage from the reader’s point of view and doesn’t hurt trade as a whole, but for the publisher, the compositor, the author and the bookseller, it is a disaster,” Orwell wrote.

 Hachette has issued its own salve (Sarah Gray article in Salon, here), in which CEO Michael Pietsch responds directly to the Amazon complaints, noting that (among other things),

We know by experience that there is not one appropriate price for all ebooks, and that all ebooks do not belong in the same $9.99 box. Unlike retailers, publishers invest heavily in individual books, often for years, before we see any revenue. We invest in advances against royalties, editing, design, production, marketing, warehousing, shipping, piracy protection, and more. We recoup these costs from sales of all the versions of the book that we publish—hardcover, paperback, large print, audio, and ebook. While ebooks do not have the $2-$3 costs of manufacturing, warehousing, and shipping that print books have, their selling price carries a share of all our investments in the book.

Amazon is under increasing pressure from Wall Street to produce profits, not just revenues. And while there are plenty of happy Amazon customers who will decry the evil profiteer publishers, I side with the publishers and Authors United on this one (this despite being -- full disclosure -- a generally satisfied Amazon Prime subscriber). I don't want prices to go so low that authors can't make a living. Because then they'll stop writing. And that won't be good for publishers like Hachette, for Internet bookstores like Amazon, or for readers like me.