Disrupt This
It's been a minute since I've heard people complaining about Amazon disrupting publishing. With the lawsuit about price fixing being revisited[1], I expect it to resurface. It might be a good time to discuss what market disruption is, why I believe Amazon did not disrupt publishing, where I think disruption occurred, and who caused it.
The concept of disruptive innovation comes from Clayton Christensen and Joseph L. Power in a Harvard Business Review article[2]. Christensen describes two forms of disruption – “low-end” and “new market[3].”
With low-end disruption, an innovation with lesser performance than existing products attracts buyers who don't need the capabilities of high-end goods. The innovation gets a foothold in the market and either continues to improve, sometimes supplanting the originals.
New market disruption happens when an innovation serves customers whom existing products didn't serve. The underserved market segment spreads as the innovation improves, again, sometimes threatening the originals.
This idea intersects with Amazon's business in two ways.
First, Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) opened a wide door for self-publishers. Previous iterations involving Create Space, Lulu, and other paper producers gave entrée to market participation on the Amazon storefront. KDP made ebook production simple.
Second, The Kindle (introduced in 2007) made reading ebooks frictionless for a wide swath of readers. KDP opened the door for writers, but Kindle blew the doors off for readers when the devices reached mainstream adoption levels for heavy readers in late 2010. A few weeks later, the device entered the mainstream for general readers.
Shortly thereafter, the noise started about Amazon disrupting publishing[4].
But disruption involves under served customers.
While publishers license writers' work, they never seem to lack for opportunities to buy. Writers, some represented by agents, line up at the slush pile for the opportunity to license their work to publishers. So few get purchased it's become cliché. Writers collecting rejection notices like trophies they've won in the war to get published. Some paper their walls with them and argue about how many you need to collect before you're considered a real writer.
Publishers don't seem to be underserved.
Perhaps contrary to popular belief, neither are writers. Writers purchase software and computers. They buy word processors and outliners. They don't lack for the tools they need to write. One might argue that they have too many.
In this discussion, writers are not customers. They're producers. They're not underserved. They lack markets. Or they did before KDP and Kindle and the expanding universe of online bookstores.
Following the chain down to bookstores, bookstores could be disrupted only if publishers didn't sell to them. One valid argument can be made that bookstores are not offered a wide enough selection. They're forced to buy whatever the publisher will sell them. Books from women authors? Books from under represented voice? Nope. There's a reason they're referred to as “under represented.”
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bookstores don't order them because publishers don't offer them. Publishers don't offer those books because bookstores don't order them. Prophecy becomes policy and those voices get “I love it but I can't sell it” manuscript rejections.
Bookstores get squeezed by publishers returns policies. A common policy allows bookstores to return unsold stock within 90 days – the “fresh produce” model. If it hasn't sold in three months, it goes back. The policy has been the bane of series writers for decades. By the time the second or third book hit the shelves, the first book had already been returned. Nobody wants to start on book two so “readers don't like series” became common wisdom.
From that standpoint, bookstores might be under served, but bookstores – by and large – shun books that fall outside their normal distribution channels. They have good business reasons for that. I'm not convinced that bookstores are under served as much as economically squeezed between a rock – publishers – and a hard place – readers who want books they can't find on the shelves but can find on their desktops and devices.
What does that leave? Readers. The last link in the chain. The source of all revenue and the reason writers write. Without readers – and the follow on industries like film and tv – none of this exists.
No, Amazon and the subsequent flood of self-publishing didn't disrupt publishing. It disrupted reading.
Before KDP, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, and the rest made ebooks common, readers had to wait for the stores to open, get to them, and – too often – found the same selection of titles they already exhausted the previous week. Even the previous month. They're left with whatever remains on the shelf. Whatever the bookstore ordered in the last three months and hadn't sold. Whatever the publisher contracted the year before and offered to the bookstores in the latest quarterly catalog.
After 2010, readers no longer had to wait for the bookstore to open before they could get another book to read. They didn't even have to get out of bed or get up from their chair. For heavy readers – those who siphoned up five or more books a week – ebooks became a boon, mana from the literary gods. For general readers, they represent a fast, easy way to pick up a copy of the book their friends keep harping about. The one that wasn't on the bookshelf the last time they went in.
For readers who simply wanted something else, they became a lifeline as self-publishing challenged the status quo. Books by marginalized voices proliferated. Books from women. LGBTQ+ authors writing books representing themselves.
Sure, a lot of the books had flaws. A lot still do. Crappy, amateur covers. A complete disregard for grammar and spelling. Typos abound.
I'll always remember an acquisitions librarian from Houston's response to the “typo problem in self-published books” at an ALA convention panel. “I'm not worried about typos. I still buy from Random House.”
So, where's the disruption?
The low-end disruption Christensen talks about happened as the ebook ecosystem evolved and self-publishers became more polished and sophisticated.
In the early days, it was good enough for the people who wouldn't or couldn't get to the bookstores. It was good enough for those readers looking for the stories they couldn't find on the shelves. Those readers turned to the low-end innovation – ebooks – because they didn't need the high-end – physical – books to find entertainment.
The new market disruption happened when millions of readers discovered that stories they'd never seen before became available. Apocryphal stories about men reading romance (GASP!) without being embarrassed because nobody could see the covers on their ereaders. New markets developed for self-published LGBTQ+ and women's fiction. For stories representing minorities and other under represented voices. For stories that weren't the same often-formulaic stories they'd been offered before.
Those stories are beginning to show up in publishers' catalogs and on bookstore shelves. They're hitting the big time with the book banning contingent trying to silence the voices that had little or no presence before.
Why? Not because Amazon disrupted publishing.
But because they disrupted reading.
Up Next: Polly Wanna Cracker
1. Albanese, A. Amazon, Big Five E-Book Price Fixing Suit Is Revived (Nov 22, 2022) 2. Bower, J. L., and C. M. Christensen. “Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave.” Harvard Business Review 73, no. 1 (January–February 1995): 43–53. 3. Christensen, Clayton M. (2003). The innovator's solution : creating and sustaining successful growth. Harvard Business Press. 4. Streitfield, D. (2011). “Amazon Signs Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal” New York Times.