Response from DOJ regarding antitrust complaint against Amazon

I received this email response today from the department of justice regarding my complaint that Amazon is violating antitrust laws in their move to force POD publishers to use Amazon's inferior Booksurge printer.

Dear. Dr. Beckman

Thank you for contacting the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The Citizen Complaint Center has reviewed your complaint, and we have forwarded it to the appropriate legal staff for further review. We have your information on file and should the legal staff need further information, they may contact you in the future.

We appreciate your interest in the enforcement of federal antitrust laws.

Sincerely,

Citizen Complaint Center
Antitrust Division
Department of Justice

-----Original Message-----
From: Dr. Jeanne Beckman [mailto:bullies@jeannebeckman.com]
Sent: Saturday, April 12, 2008 5:31 PM
To: ATR-OPS Citizen Complaint Center
Subject: Amazon.com

To whom it may concern:
Please investigate Amazon for antitrust and restraint of trade over its print on demand (POD) requirements that authors and publishers will not be able to list and sell their books on the Amazon website unless they use Amazon's Booksurge.

I have great concern about actions currently being taken by Amazon.com. Amazon has traditionally made its platform open to independent authors using publish-on-demand (POD) services provided by numerous companies. Now, Amazon is moving to exclude any author who does not use Amazon's own POD service, Booksurge. Many, many authors have had problems with Booksurge, including not getting paid. In addition, authors who do make the transition will be forced to charge more in order to cover the costs of using Amazon's printing services in addition to the fees Amazon charges for selling products on its web site. To force all independent authors to use a single, inferior service, a service owned by the same company providing the marketplace, that will also result in higher prices for consumers, seems to be a good fit for the following, as described in the Sherman Antritrust Act:

An unlawful monopoly exists when only one firm controls the market for a product or service, and it has obtained that market power, not because its product or service is superior to others, but by suppressing competition with anticompetitive conduct.

Amazon controls such a large portion of the print-on-demand book market that by forcing authors to use its print-on-demand service, it is reducing the number of POD options to one. The harm to consumers comes in the form of products of poorer quality (as evidenced by the large number of complaints about the Booksurge service) and higher prices. I respectfully ask that you take a serious look at this new practice by Amazon.com and make a fair judgement about whether or not the company is in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act.

Sincerely,
Dr. Jeanne Beckman

Have you contacted the attorney general in Washington or the U.S. department of justice (DOJ) yet?

jb

Update on Amazon Strong-arm tactics

Wondering why you should care about Amazon's bullying? Please read a previous post: Why readers should care what Amazon is doing

Here's an article by Angela Hoy about the Amazon Bullying

Sent: Friday, April 04, 2008 3:15 PM
Subject: Amazon Tightens Grip on Long Tail; Info Requested

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move -- claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that's another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries' Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It's a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What's the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the "long tail" of publishing -- the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it's uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount -- or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books -- to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors -- since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher's gross revenues -- and publishers.

We're reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon's bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to staff@authorsguild.org.

Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.

Copyright 2008, The Authors Guild. The Authors Guild (http://www.authorsguild.org) is the nation's largest society of published book authors.

If you're interested in signing a petition with a complaint to the attorney general in Washington, Helen Gallagher has a link on her blog at http://releaseyourwriting.blogspot.com/2008/03/amazongolliath-takes-on-little-guys.html

jb

Martin Luther King died but was not silenced

April 4, 2008
Forty years ago today, racist bullies thought they would silence the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior. Since that time, there have certainly been gains in the civil rights movement, but there has also been stagnation.

Today, we still have classrooms that are segregated, by "ability" although those "slow learning" classrooms in many cities are predominantly students of color. These students are denied full access to a curriculum that competently teaches basic reading and math skills as well as critical thinking. If the school fails to provide a curriculum from which a student can derive reasonable benefit, the student is punished by being held back to suffer through the same failed curriculum a second time. Almost half of all students EVER held back will never graduate from high school.

• To read a blog about the difference between resource and segregated classrooms, please see http://www.dimsapproach.com/2007/08/self-contained-versus-resource-classes.html or http://tinyurl.com/4nhczm

Without having been taught these basic and critical thinking skills, students grow up and cannot read the diverse information and opinions available on the Internet that would help them to fully participate in the political process. We still have voter intimidation and caging (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkSc6xUs92I&feature=related to silence the voices of those who would dare question the policies of current political officeholders.

Stand against the bullies, Dare to ask why, Dare to ask why not.
JB

Why should readers care what Amazon is doing?

With the great accessibility to purchasing almost any book online that Amazon seems to be providing, why should the buying public care whether a small POD publisher or a monolithic Amazon provides the book?

I am a citizen who tries to advocate for doing "the right thing;" I am a parent who has to advocate for my children when we face convoluted bureaucratic decisions that affect my children's ability to benefit from their public education; I am a psychologist/technology expert who advocates for disabled students on a daily basis; and I am an author who chose to use a small POD publisher (VirtualBookWorm.com) so that I could quickly get my message to families about how to find and utilize the necessary technology to learn and be productive in school.

If I think of the hours I spent writing and editing my book, I will probably never see a a profitable return on those unbilled hours, yet the profit I have already seen is in the thank yous from the families who were able to use information in my book to advocate for their technology.

My book is not the type of book that big book publishers would probably ever pick up, because I don't have a big name and it is not a riveting read for a diverse audience like best sellers tend to be. Instead, I wrote it to be a tool, a sharing of information, a voice from a fellow parent to help families through the bureaucratic mazes.

Without POD publishers, my kind of book would never be available for families. If Amazon succeeds in their monopolistic takeover of POD publishing, every little person who had a belief that his or her book might make a difference in the world would be shut out.

So, even if you are not part of the publishing world except as a reader, please speak up to stand united against this latest bully in town.

What can you do? Find out the name of the publisher of the book you want to buy, and go to the publisher's website to purchase it directly from the publisher. The author benefits, the publisher benefits, and you've supported a process that has given regular citizens a voice. If you're thinking about ordering something from Amazon, consider whether there are other ways to find the book you want. Local independent bookstores are a great place to find passionate readers who love to share their favorite books, and they will also gladly order almost any book still in print.

For an update on the Amazon situation (because it's not over yet), please read (including the comments) http://www.paidcontent.org/entry/419-amazon-does-damage-control-on-its-print-on-demand-demands/

jb