Amazon and ebooks – not evil, just clueless
By Paul Biba
This latest self-created Amazon debacle got me to thinking about Amazon’s management in the ebook area. Having been in corporate life for over 40 years, and having faced a fair number of crises and emergency situations, it has become evident to me that Amazon simply doesn’t understand the business it has entered – ebooks. And it doesn’t understand that it doesn’t understand.
From what I’ve read the Amazon personnel managing this portion of the business did not come from the publishing industry, let alone the ebook industry (if there really is one). Because of this you can see that they have not thought through all the possible issues that could arise as a result of their entering this new business. If you think about it, Amazon is really just an on-line vendor. It sells stuff. It has always sold stuff, including books. However, this is very different from going into the licensing business, which is what it is now doing. Since Amazon’s management does not come from the licensing industry Amazon has blithely gone along thinking that licensing ebooks is the same as selling pbooks. To those of us in this ebook world it is obviously not, and Amazon is learning this by a series of painful lessons. There is simply no excuse for the Orwell fiasco. Knowledgeable management could have thought of at least three other ways of handling that problem without any of the fuss and bother that has ensued.
Everything we read points to the clueless nature of many, if not all, Amazon customer service personnel when asked tough ebook questions. Why is this? Not because they are evil or trying to hide anything, but because they haven’t been trained. Why haven’t they been trained? Because, I strongly suspect, management doesn’t realize that there are issues to train them about. If you think about it for a minute, not only is Amazon entering the licensing field, but it is, probably for the first time, selling its own stuff. Amazon makes the Kindles, it is not reselling someone else’s branded product. It becomes clear it hasn’t thought this through by looking at how it mishandled the Kindle cracking issue, which resulted in a class action suit. Amazon is not used to being in a position where it, and only it, is the entity ultimately responsible. Further evidence of this is in how it has fumbled all its PR responses to some of the issues that have arisen. Where are the PR contingency plans for an emergency? Where are the pre-prepared Q&As? Where are the press releases ready to go? Where are the prepared talking points? Not there. Not there because Amazon doesn’t realize there are issues to prepare for. Amazon is a retailer, it generally don’t have to worry about PR debacles. If something goes wrong with a product it can refer the press to the product’s supplier. But now Amazon is in a new world and doesn’t understand how to prepare for it.
There are cures for all these problems, of course, and some of them are pretty obvious. However until Amazon realizes that it doesn’t even know what it doesn’t know, Amazon will continue on stumbling from one crisis to another. Amazon has no evil intent, it is just clueless.
July 19th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
While I completely agree with your premise, I’d like to add something to the mix as we discuss this debacle.
If you buy stolen property, say a car, and it’s traced to you, it’s seized. This is true whether you bought it in good faith or not. You may or may not be able to get a refund from the seller, but you don’t get to keep the car, because the seller didn’t have the right to sell it.
When a print publisher puts out an edition without correctly clearing rights, it’s recalled. Usually that only effects the publisher, the bookstores and a few libraries, because it’s nearly impossible to trace all the purchasers.
Ebook purchasers CAN be traced, and in some cases, the recall is equally easy. This isn’t a case of new law, or new ethics, as much as new practicalities. It’s now POSSIBLE to recall the book that was wrongfully published.
Of course, that also means that many other things, scarier things, are possible, but that’s true of EVERY recent development in our civilization.
Unintended consequences — words we live by.
July 19th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
Since it is easy to understand that when someone takes possession of something that you sell it is not good form to just take it back, I disagree with your position.
I think that they did it, knowingly, because they could and expected to get away with it — as with all abuses of power.
cheers,
bill
July 20th, 2009 at 2:30 am
The ability to revoke a purchase by retroactively deleting an ebook file and reimbursing funds requires logistical groundwork and preparation. It is unlikely that the ebook deletions were an accidental side effect of an overly zealous synchronization procedure. Jeff Bezos himself, or a high-level manager, must have condoned the implementation and execution of this far-reaching annulment scheme.
Marion Gropen’s insightful comment illustrates the ample dangers inherent in allowing the electronic reversal of a purchase. Amazon is enticing quarrelsome litigants. An endless series of reasons for deleting ebooks post-purchase will be offered by lawyers, and the court system will sometimes concur.
01) Improper copyright clearance
02) Libel
03) Misinterpretation of license contracts
04) Plagiarism
05) Salaciousness beyond hypothetical community bounds
06) Release of trade secrets
07) Misuse of trademarked terms
08) Harassment and distress
09) Privacy violations
10) Auctorial misgivings
The naïve consumer will discover that some of his or her ebooks have disappeared in the night or been rewritten by legalistic gremlins. The PR headaches for Amazon will never cease. The company should completely remove its ability to retroactively delete files, and it should apologize to all for ostentatious cleverness in the service of dubious goals.
News reports say that unauthorized ebooks by Ayn Rand were deleted before the bootleg ebooks by Eric Blair disappeared. One commentator on this blog mentioned some suspiciously inexpensive ebook editions of works by Ray Bradbury that were available in the Kindle store for a short time. The publisher listed for the problematical Ayn Rand Kindle editions and the Bradbury editions was the same. Perhaps the commentator can tell us if the ebook he purchased by Bradbury was deleted retroactively.
July 20th, 2009 at 7:31 am
Amazon also needs a better FAQ and help setup for its dtp. Questions/problems are handled by other users in a forum, with little input from administrators and no reliable way to contact them.
Laura
July 20th, 2009 at 8:54 am
Garson: the deletion scheme was put in place so that when a customer requested an ebook refund the file would get deleted from their Kindle. Amazon has a much more liberal return policy for ebooks than other sites, and this may be because of its ability to delete ebooks from Kindles. It appears to me that this procedure was automatically invoked when Amazon refunded 1984 purchases.
This is evidence for Paul’s “clueless” theory, which I basically agree with. Amazon does understand the reading part of ebooks (except textbooks), but where they fall down is in designing the backend services supporting their delivery model which is completely different from every other ebook store I am familiar with. When these services inevitably fail, Amazon is not good handling the consequences.
July 20th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
We have removed all links and references to Amazon in light of our own problems with their selling model. Their lack of sales and accounting support is also of concern. On behalf of myself and other authors I contacted my congressman and sent him a lengthy report on Amazon’s behavior since March of 2008, and I understand that other lawsuits have been started to bring Amazon down to size. Much of Amazon is fluff and bombastic propoganda designed to make it look legitimate, but the true picture is much more complex.
July 20th, 2009 at 1:28 pm
Thanks to Alan Wallcraft for his valuable comment. It is reasonable to assume that some baseline capabilities were implemented to allow refunds. Yet, an ebook refund is initiated by the consumer via an explicit request. Also, one or more acknowledgements are solicited during a refund transaction usually. The deletion of 1984 was not initiated by the consumer and no acknowledgments were requested. The removal was performed unilaterally without the knowledge or consent of the purchaser according to news reports. This flouts years of practice based on human factors design.
Operating system designers have crafted a file deletion protocol based on avoiding aggravating experiences. Several fallback protection mechanisms are provided. First, the computer asks for an overt acknowledgement of the delete action. Second, the file is placed in a temporary location, e.g., the “recycle bin” or “trash folder”. Third, the file can be recovered from the temporary location and reinstated in the main file system. Fourth, even emptying the “recycle bin” entails an acknowledgement.
The Amazon designers ignored all these well known precautions in order to coerce a deletion action without acquiescence. The term “evil” seems histrionic in this context. If the purchaser was exposed to a cage of rats in Room 101 like poor Winston Smith that would be evil. Amazon’s actions were simply unwise and they backfired.
July 20th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
if the ilegitimate publishers is australia or russia based, there would be no case against the ilegitimate publisher, leaving amazon alone with the loss.
this is what could have happened
1. books goes on sale by ilegitimate publisher
2. books get sold
3. copyright holder complains.
4. amazon says fine we’ll stop selling books.
5. original publisher demands huge royalties for the books sold.
6. some mid level negotiator at amazon offers to delete the books instead of paying.
7. books gets deleted, mid level manager thinks he just dodged a bullet
8. kindle publicity nightmare.
9. damage control blaming the computers starts.
It’s not evil it’s just the amoral wheels of corporate burocracy in work. The only thing that keeps this from happening is for this to hurt the corporate burocracies.
Dont asume that the CEO of any fortune 1000 company actually know anything about what happens, one or two step down the ladder or that any manager does for that matter.
And BTW Please stop using the damn car anolgue it’s not even accurate for cars in this kind of situation.
July 20th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
I agree with Marion Gropen, and I believe the car analogy is fine for a start. If someone buys stolen goods, the purchased objects can be confiscated.
The difference here is that Amazon actually refunded the purchase, which is not what would happen if you pruchased most other stolen merchandise that was then repossessed.
Obviously, Amazon could have handled this better, but it seems that their system for retracting books does not have an ability to provide an explanatory message or perhaps they simply failed to provide one.