Thread by @doctorow

I'm grateful to @AndrewRichard and @PublishersWeekly for the chance to lay out the logic behind the Kickstarter campaign to sell the audiobook for Attack Surface, the third Little Brother book, in a column called "We Need to Talk About Audible."

publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/in…

1/

The fact that traditional media companies like publishers are now beholden to Amazon - their direct competitor - is somewhat attributable to a lack of foresight on their part, but it largely the result of real chicanery on the part of the Big Tech monopolists.

2/

I mean, it's not like the publishers were stupid the way Borders (RIP) was: remember when the largest books retailer in the USA decided to make Amazon its online division in 2000? They cancelled the deal in 2007 and went bankrupt in 2011. That was slow suicide.

3/

But trad publishing has been rightfully suspicious of Amazon from the start and has used whatever weapons it had to resist the company's hegemony...unsuccessfully.

4/

Today, the publishers' largest competitor knows (far) more about who buys and reads their books, and how, and why, than the publishers do.

5/

To make things worse, Amazon's Audible division, an absolute, iron-clad monopolist in the audibooks market, with total dominance over a format that makes nearly as much as hardcovers, REQUIRES that all books it sells be restricted with its DRM.

6/

That DRM doesn't stop piracy (one Google search will find you instructions for stripping DRM; two searches will find you Audible books, without DRM, as free downloads), but it does stop competition - it protects Audible, not authors.

7/

Every audiobook the publishers sell to Audible is locked to Amazon's platform...forever. Only Amazon (not the author, not the publisher) is legally allowed to remove the DRM so the book can play on a player Amazon hasn't approved (say, a direct competitor's player).

8/

After all, this is the company that blocked Chromecast as part of its bid to gain dominance for Prime Video. If you think they won't do that for audiobooks, I've got an essential-oil covid cure multi-level marketing scheme to sell you.

techhive.com/article/298209…

9/

That's why the point of this Kickstarter isn't merely to sell a bunch of my books (though it's doing that): it's to chart a course where publishers and bestselling authors can have successful audiobooks without Amazon.

10/

To create a new kind of "Audible Exclusive" - a bestseller for sale anywhere EXCEPT Amazon. To get authors to switch because they get more money; to get readers to switch (to rivals like libro.fm and downpour.com) because they have better books.

11/

To get Amazon to deal fairly: to let rightsholders (not a monopoly retailer whose sole contribution to my book is to allow me to upload it to their server and process a payment for it) decide whether it has DRM.

12/

And if we can get Amazon to budge on this, let's not forget our brothers and sisters working in and relying on libraries - libraries where Amazon refuses to sell ANY Audible audiobooks, so ~50% of bestsellers are not available in our libraries.

13/

Here's the closer for my op-ed: "Look, you can't shop your way out of monopoly capitalism any more than you can recycle your way out of climate change. Monopoly is a structural problem created by more than 40 years of lax antitrust enforcement.

14/

"If there was any doubt, last month's Congressional antitrust hearings, which included a litany of complaints from Amazon suppliers who've been comprehensively chickenized, laid that to rest.

"But reversing monopolies is an iterative process.

15/

"My effort to whittle away at Amazon's audiobook hegemony I believe will help show authors, publishers, and readers that there is a path to a more pluralistic and fair marketplace. And, in the process, fuel the growing support for more stringent antitrust enforcement."

16/

Here's that Kickstarter:

kickstarter.com/projects/docto…

eof/

Derp: cc @PublishersWkly