Yanking the buy button is a punitive gesture that Amazon has been known to pull with publishers, like a tyrannical Byzantine emperor who holds ultimate sway over his court. It’s a powerful threat in business negotiations. But Macmillan wasn’t a mere vassal to some king’s court. That publisher is an empire unto itself in the publishing world. The move to yank books backfired when publishers became enraged and retaliated as a unified group. Ultimately, Amazon needed the books and the support of publishers and its customers, so the company backed down.
Some choices are tough, but leaders are judged by the decisions they make when given tough choices. I believe the Amazon leaders made a mistake. An ethical retailer has a social contract to uphold with its consumers. It’s not appropriate for a retailer to yank or censor content based only on its internal machinations, its policies for better profit margins.
Thankfully, I believe this example shows the power of public outrage to enact change. It’s possible to shame a corporation that has done something wrong or, at the very least, to make a company aware that it should have been more careful about its actions. The same public outrage was hurled at Apple when it released a “Baby Shaker” app that rewarded users who could shake a virtual baby to death. Developed by another company, this iPhone app is grisly and should never have passed Apple’s QA standards. Mercifully, public outcry caused it to be pulled from the app store in less than a day.
No company has perfect QA policies or editorial standards for what content to shelve in its store. Companies need to listen to consumers, read what people post on product reviews, and monitor the blogosphere. But reciprocally, companies need to have strong enough standards in place to avoid smear campaigns and acts of undeserved bullying. Knowing when to remove or reinstate content requires an ethical balance and strong sensibilities.
It’s a tough editorial choice: though a given book may be objectionable, where do we draw the line when it comes to free speech? And more importantly, who is drawing the line? What moral or literary sensibilities do the executives of Amazon have? What about the retailers at Barnes & Noble or Google or Apple? You have to ask yourself whether you trust these men (because they are mostly men—and mostly white men, at that). Do you trust them to make decisions for you on what books you’re permitted to buy?
The First Competitors
You can create an innovative breakthrough, but you can’t own it forever. Eventually, competitors come out of the woodwork, challenging you with similar or sometimes advanced versions of the very innovation you crafted. For Amazon, the first major competition came from an old rival, a company that Amazon was used to competing with in books. But it was a company that, back then, would have seemed most unlikely to make a tech-product marvel. Yet in November 2009, that’s exactly what it did.
Los Angeles is all sunshine and short sleeves. It’s still got a 1960s design, like it was influenced by The Jetsons, but with more palm trees and fewer spaceships. It’s got atomic roadside diners and terrific tangled, spangled freeway sprawl. It’s got the best mom-and-pop taco shacks in the most unlikely of places, like wedged between Laundromats and exotic pet stores in strip malls.
I’m at one of those strip malls on a long layover from a flight, visiting a Barnes & Noble store. I’ve been sitting here for a few hours watching people. I’ve been watching the kiosk where a saleslady named Bettina is showing off Barnes & Noble’s new Nook e-reader. A few people come every now and then to look at these Nooks. More often than not, people come up to ask her where the bathroom is or what time the store closes, like she works the information booth. The Nooks aren’t exactly selling like hotcakes.
I go over to her and show an interest in the Nook. To torment her a little, I keep calling it a Kindle. “What can these Kindles do?” I ask. She laughs, explains, and walks me through a demo. I tell her that it would be nice if some sort of sticker on books inside the store would show if they’re available on the Nook. Something on the print book’s front cover, right there on the retail shelves. It’s the sort of thing that Barnes & Noble can do but Amazon can’t because it doesn’t have a physical presence.
After a few minutes, some sweatered, grandmotherly looking men come over to look at the Nook, and so does a woman with so many facial piercings that she’d probably set off a metal detector. I slowly drift away.
I love real-world retail. It connects you right to your customers, without the web as a nameless, anonymizing barrier. Bookselling as we know it emerged at the end of the Roman Republic, around 50 BC, at a time before publishers existed. Retailers would contract directly with scribes, copyists, and authors. Then they’d create lists of books for sale and post them for customers to see outside their stores on Rome’s winding side streets. Bookselling as we know it grew more complex with the proliferation of separate roles for authors and publishers and retailers, as well as the advent of copyright and of securing rights for publication, and the explosion of mail-order and online commerce.
Though I’ve worked in online retail for two decades, I still never get tired of looking at bookstores. I’m a bookstore tourist whose first vacation priority on arriving in a new city is to check out the local independent bookstores. And I have a special place in my heart for Barnes & Noble, the biggest of the retail bookstores.
They’re sharp on the ebooks side, as well. Out of all the retailers who sell dedicated e-readers, they’re the most innovative. They were the first to release new book-reading features and to innovate on the hardware side. They were the first to have touch-sensitive eInk screens. They innovated digital book lending for swapping books between friends. Heck, if you’re in one of their stores, you can read any Nook book for free for an hour or so. They totally get the social experience of books in the way that it crosses over from the real world to the digital.
They can innovate so fast because they’re not burdened with their own R&D group. Instead, they use a company called Inventec, a sort of hired gun in the world of R&D. It’s a kind of Lab126 that hires itself out to the highest bidder. By outsourcing the nuts and bolts of their product development, Barnes & Noble can focus on innovation.
Their Nooks are downright futuristic too. When I first got my own Nook, I was just as perplexed as everyone because it had a big eInk screen for reading and a thin color screen at the bottom for navigation. The day I opened my Nook for the first time, I was sprawled out on my living room floor like a child opening a birthday present. (Okay, a birthday present I had bought for myself.) The Nook’s dual screen is clever and innovative, even if it is neurocognitively jarring. (When you get confused by all the screens you have to navigate, that can take you out of the reading experience.)
One of the reasons that Barnes & Noble makes such innovative devices is because they don’t have to worry about building their own operating system, unlike Apple and Amazon. Those two companies are slowed down by the boatloads of engineers who tweak and tune and build an operating system from scratch. Barnes & Noble simply uses Google’s free Android operating system, which lets the retailer put its engineers on other projects to make e-reading even better.
Barnes & Noble is innovative with the software as well as hardware. For example, the Nook was the first e-reader with a game platform. So you have to give credit to every engineer and director at Barnes & Noble for what they’ve done.