It never ceases to amaze me how Ollie can find just the right button to push and derail all of my best laid plans for the day. I recently received my credentials to upload my audiobooks for sale via Kobo and that was at the top of my list this morning. Made the mistake of looking at my email first. Be it known up front we are deep into January and this post won’t appear until we are almost as deep into March, but I had to take issue with a post Ollie forwarded to our little group.
You really need to take a moment to read that post to understand much of the following rant. While predictions are a wonderful thing, if you are going to talk about history, get the facts right. Here are a few quotes really stuck in my craw.
In the late 90s, Borders and Barnes & Noble, in an act of unrepentant greed, obliterated the small indie bookstores. This move also wiped out the author middle class. The Big Six was all for these giant stores reinventing the book business because literacy and choices and…literacy!
Was it really necessary for Borders and Barnes & Noble to drive virtually every last mom and pop store and small chain out of business? The answer is NO. No it was not.
Then there was this thing board members of Borders and Barnes & Noble probably should’ve paid better attention to in the late 90s: the imminent rise of a user-friendly Internet and the very real threat of viable e-commerce.
Non-tech people shouldn’t ever talk about tech. There will always be someone involved in tech who actually lived through what happened. We will start slow with the non-tech fact that somehow got missed.
Amazon founded July 5, 1994
Faithful readers of this blog will already have read “Amazon is a Malignant Tumor Which Will One Day End the Human Race.” For those of you who do not know, the first book I ever wrote was “Zinc It! Interfacing Third Party Libraries with Cross Platform GUIs.” It was published in 1995. If you carefully scroll down a ways in that link you will also notice Google Books doesn’t bother to scan the copyright page when putting a book on-line. Not that it matters much, but Zinc now has an OpenSource version so that book series is living on.
Barnes & Noble did not obliterate small indie book stores. There were an entire host of things which lead to their downfall, the biggest one of these was the fraud Gartner and other “business analysts” were paid to promote during the mid 1990s with the catchy phrase of “right sizing.” This allowed CEOs to decimate their IT staffs, taking huge bonuses for themselves, right in front of Y2K. With tens of thousands of highly skilled people who previously earned north of $100K/year out on the street, the pool of disposable income moved to the ever shrinking pool of the one percenters. Even if those people did purchase books, they certainly didn’t do it in the shopping malls which catered to the middle and upper middle classes.
Adding insult to injury, purchases via on-line retailers such as Amazon didn’t automatically get sales tax applied. Many of the on-line retailers of the day, including Amazon, didn’t stock most of their titles, opting instead to drop ship from the wholesaler so they didn’t have the overhead of warehousing. Before anyone tries to refute that claim, read up on Amazon history. It essentially started in Bezo’s parents garage. Even if you have a two car garage and park the cars outside, you don’t have the physical space for one million titles.
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