Amazoniana

Our friends at Amazon have been in the news.

First off is the fallout from their quarrel with IPG, the country’s second-largest book distributor.  Amazon tried to renegotiate a better deal for IPG’s ebooks, IPG declined to budge, and now all IPG’s ebooks are no longer available for Kindle.

Because IPG’s list is long on cookbooks and textbooks, and short on super-popular fiction, this will only impact about five percent of their business.  So they’re not taking a huge hit.  Not yet anyway.

But still, this raises a number of points.  First, Amazon is beginning to use its market muscle in the ebook realm, demanding the same sorts of concessions from suppliers that they’re used to getting with print books.   Which means that IPG isn’t going to be the last distributor or publisher to feel this kind of pressure.  As contracts expire and become subject to renegotiation, will publishers find they can afford to say no to a market powerhouse that sells over 60% of ebooks, when ebooks are the part of the market that is growing the fastest?

(And as a side note: why is IPG selling ebooks anyway?  Why do publishers feel they have to go through a distributor for ebooks when they can sell their ebooks directly to Amazon and keep more of the money?  I suspect that distributors will also be renegotiating contracts with publishers in the near future.)

And more strangely, it turns out that Amazon has been invaded by bots. (Thanks to Ed for this link.)    Bots— the same kinds of automated bots that make 70% of the trades on Wall Street— are now speculating in used book prices on Amazon.

And not only are they doing the same kind of trades, they’re making the same kind of wacky mistakes:

. . . a biologist at UC-Berkeley documented a bidding fight between two bots over a “classic work in developmental biology” called The Making of a Fly. By the time they were done, copies of the book were advertised for $2,198,177.95

Can speculation in the used book market really be that profitable? Maybe, if you’re a bot capable of making zillions of small trades every day, each at a tiny profit.  But maybe it’s not books they’re actually trading in.

Bueno and his friends have speculated that perhaps the point of these bots isn’t actually to game Amazon’s markets, but to use them for other purposes, perhaps laundering money from stolen credit cards by purchasing goods from fellow conspirators at inflated prices. Some of the resellers are based internationally; perhaps they are gaming exchange rates.

Which just shows you that, if there’s a market anywhere, in anything, bots are soon going to be a part of it.  They’ll be ubiquitous. 

I’ll be looking forward to their appearance in my local online flea market.  When the price for that waffle maker hits two mil, I’ll know they’ve arrived.