Bait 'n' Beer

Comes news today that Independent Publishers Group (www.ipgbook.com/) has taken a stand against Amazon with respect to Amazon's demand for 'improved terms of sale' (Read: "Bigger Discounts") for Kindle ebooks from IPG's publisher clients. You can read Publishers Weekly's account here: bit.ly/xfXzM8 but it's a significant move by both parties.
 
For a long time, Amazon has preferred to deal with aggregators (such as distributors) in dealing with smaller presses simply to avoid the aggravation of handling multiple vendors when one distributor can feed Amazon print and digital titles for a couple of hundred publishers. I remember well my days at Consortium when Amazon begged us to supply data feeds so they wouldn't have to manage 125 accounts for each of our client publishers.
 
I suppose that with improved technology and the practice Amazon has had with the Kindle Direct and other self-publishing programs, they're no longer intimidated...at least on the digital side...by the number of vendors. And of course that makes sense in the digital world. IPG and other distributors (and publishers) are just another intermediary in Amazon's eyes and we know how they feel about intermediaries.
 
Now those of you who've been reading this blog for a bit know I'm no Amazon hater and in fact I've been a booster some of the time. But ALL of the time, I've said if you don't like how they compete, then change the game. Mark Suchomel, who's a friend, has decided to do that by refusing to be forced into new terms that he knows will ultimately make it difficult for him to maintain his business. He also apparently has the support of his publisher clients, which is huge. Amazon can hardly say it is selling 'any book you want in print or digital format' if they don't carry digital titles from IPG's 400+ clients.
 
It's a gutsy move and we'll see who blinks first, but I applaud Mark and wish him and IPG's clients luck because this is only the first of many of these battles that distributors and those who sell direct will face on this front. Distributors play an important role in maintaining the vitality of smaller, independent presses and their disintermediation would be an unfortunate event in the lives of those presses (who seldom publish books about Snooki or Justin Bieber).