Hugh Howey writes up a sharp piece on the massive bias against Amazon in the reporting of news around the publishing industry. Howey frames his argument in the bigger picture of technology disrupting industry. Tesla is disrupting the legacy car industry. Netflix is disrupting the legacy movie and tv industry. And the list goes on, in all of them we see the same tug of war between old and new.
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Two forces tug legacy industries from opposite directions. On the one side, you have customer demand. On the other side you have a mix of fear and laziness. In-between is where corporations and industries find themselves, and they face a choice. Sadly, in most cases, the fear and laziness win out. It’s left to radical new upstarts to provide customers with what they actually want.
via Give Customers What They Want | Hugh Howey.
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But I think Howey misses the brutal truth in his analysis. Amazon isn’t just disrupting publishing, it is butchering it before our eyes. The bookstores still in business like Waterstones in the UK are on their last legs. Established mid-sized publishers like Quercus and Osprey hit major financial problems this year, making redundancies and selling off imprints in recent months, with many more in extremely difficult circumstances. The entire legacy publishing industry is at risk, because Amazon stole the digital publishing market out from under them and is exploiting this to the full. Why is the publishing industry so biased against Amazon? No one likes the person who is murdering them.