Amazon Honors Distributors

Today, Publishers Marketplace had a very interesting news item - at least to me! It is copied below:

Amazon Honors 3 Distributors
Apparently Amazon recognizes distributors of the year, and this year they are honoring Macmillan, Random House Publisher Service, and IPG. Criteria include "the shortest and most consistent receive lead times" for books, "actively growing" Kindle availability, using Amazon's print-on-demand, providing correct ONIX data, and strong search inside the book participation.Amazon books vp Russell Grandinetti says in the announcement, "By working together, we're able to improve the rate at
which their books are in stock on Amazon, lower prices through lowering
operational costs and help customers find, discover and buy great books....
We're proud to work with such great distributors on behalf of their client publishers."

What was so interesting (to me) is that Macmillan, and IPG are Firebrand customers and use our Title Management database to help manage lead times, and determine which books will be in the Kindle program, and the Search Inside Program. They are also eloquence customers, and eloquence is the service they use to create and distribute their ONIX data.

It's nice to be behind the scenes of an award like this!

The above news item was copied from Publisher's Marketplace because you need a password to have access to their content. Publisher's Marketplace is a great source of daily news about the book publishing world, and I would strongly suggest signing up (it's free), to get their daily emails.

Reading Amazon's Tea-leaves: a fool's errand

Michael Cairns posted an insightful piece this morning that really humbled me. In his opening paragraph he talks about an audience he had with Jeff Bezos in 1998, and how wrong he was at the time about trying to project where Amazon was going.

This reminded me of a similar experience I had with Mr. Bezos. It must also have been in early 1998. Jeff Bezos was the keynote speaker at a publishing conference hosted by the University of Virginia, held at the Library of Congress. At a cocktail reception after his keynote, I actually had a one-on-one conversation with him for about 10 minutes, until the host ushered me away. At that meeting I gave him my original business plan for eloquence.

About 2 months later at BEA, several people from Amazon descended on our small booth, and demanded a meeting. Now remember, this is pre-ONIX, pre-everything related to bibliographic metadata. When I arrived at their booth for the meeting, they produced the business plan that I had given to Jeff a couple of months earlier. It was highlighted and underlined, and obviously well read - by somebody.

In the meeting, however, they only wanted to talk about one thing. About 10 pages into the document I wrote about the collection and dissemination of rights information. That paragraph was circled, highlighted, and starred. They wanted to know how I could do it. Whatever my answer was, I don't remember, but it was obviously not compelling enough for them to continue the meeting. They ushered me out, and that was the last I heard from them.

What I was left with was a strong sense that Amazon was not going to be what it appeared to be. They were looking way beyond where they were. In 1998, they were a small, US only, website for books. They knew then that they had to try and tackle the issue of rights one way or another to be the international power that they are today.

Michael's story was further corroborated today by a couple of other interesting items that came to my attention today. Unfortunately, due to confidentiality, I can't share them here. Suffice it to say one had to do with asking publishers for a specific type of content, and the other had to do with Amazon's use of the EVDO platform for purposes other than downloading content.

I guess the bottom line for me is that we are all wasting our time trying to figure out what Amazon's next move is. There are many very smart people there, and they are thinking two or three moves ahead all the time. In this age of 'now', it seems difficult to get our heads around the notion that a company is thinking and acting in a long term way. Clearly, if the past is any teacher, Amazon's Kindle launch is just a baby step in a much larger plan, that will be revealed when they want us to know it.

Amazon going underground?

This blog was never intended to be a report on Amazon, but there have been some disturbing trends coming from Seattle in recent months. In my last entry, I wrote about the issues related to descriptive copy issues that arise when a publisher changes distributors. In this entry, I'd like to talk about two other Amazon related things that have come up recently.

The first issue is related to Amazon's EDI initiatives. To their credit, Amazon wants to automate every aspect of communication with the entire supply chain - from product information to payments. But, a couple of weeks ago, several of our customers received emails from Amazon asking if they could provide the EDI 832 transaction. (I know I just lost every non-technical reader, but I'll explain). The '832' is an industry standard for product information that pre-dates ONIX. Given the rise in adoption of ONIX as a standard for product information, the '832' has almost become extinct as an electronic communication tool.

So, why bring it back? And why go to IT departments behind the backs of the account managers? For years, in account review meetings, Amazon has been telling their publisher vendors to use ONIX, ONIX, ONIX. Now, someone on the operations side of Amazon is asking for the '832'? The reason the industry went to ONIX in the first place was because of the inadequacy of the '832' to convey proper product information. The other issue here is that EDI transactions usually emanate from legacy order processing systems that have shortened titles and relatively little product information compared to Title Management tools (like the kind we supply). Product data in order processing systems is generally not regarded as good for anything but internal documents and EDI transactions, where abbreviated titles and author names are fine for labeling purposes.

So, we posed these questions to Amazon, and predictably, there was no response. To, me, this means that we hit a nerve. Amazon never even acknowledges emails when we discover an issue in their processes.

The second issue that has come up recently happened just last week. We received an email stating that Amazon was once again re-organizing it's catalog department. However in this email (which looked like a form email sent to all publishers who supply ONIX), we were told that our personal contact in the catalog department would no longer respond to our emails. We were told that if there were any data issues that we should fill out the online form, or if it was a process issue we should send an email to a generic email address.

For background, 15% of Amazon's book product information comes from our office in the form of weekly ONIX feeds. On average, we send about 5 - 10 emails per week to the catalog department to help investigate issues. These emails relate to a very small percentage of the titles we send them. Almost all are due to an unforeseen publicity event, or other extraordinary happening that requires some immediate assistance. To date, our contact in the catalog department has been incredibly helpful, and has kept the gears of the 'ONIX machine' well tended. Without a real person tending the machine, I'm am sure that it will bog down and collapse much more often than it does now.

Most of you have heard me rail against the online form. Changes made there become 'sticky' - to use Amazon's terminology. This means that once the online form is used to fix a title, then that title can NOT be updated via electronic feeds in the future. And, if publishers start using the online form instead of funneling the changes through us as they have in the past, the quality of the product information in use at Amazon will deteriorate rapidly.

I guess Amazon just doesn't care. They have 'gone underground' (credit goes to my wife for that metaphor). They are saving a head in the catalog department and that is more important than vendor relations.

I certainly hope that as publishers go through their account reviews, that they complain about this. After all, for years, Amazon has used that forum to complain to publishers about using ONIX.

Or, maybe we should just go back to the '832' and watch everyone's sales go down the toilet.

Amazon's Descriptive Content

Ok, well, now I've been told by two people that they actually read this, so I better get moving...

About six weeks or so ago, we discovered an interesting issue when we send data to Amazon. The issue is related to updating descriptive content (such as Book Descriptions, Author Bio's, etc.).

First, some background. Amazon uses the ONIX files we send them in two separate processes. The first, is what they call the bibliographic update, and the second is the descriptive copy update. Bibliograhic information - for the purposes of this entry - refers to Title, Author, price, status, Publisher, trim size, etc. This is an important distinction to make as I wouldn't want anyone to walk away from reading this thinking that the problem is bigger than it really is.

What we have found, however, is that if a Publisher changes it's Distributor (ie. vendor of record), then the Descriptive content (ONLY) cannot be updated automatically via ONIX records anymore. This is a big problem now that so many publishers have shifted distributors in the recent past.

We found this problem when several of our customers complained (independently of one another) that when they uploaded new descriptions to us, they weren't showing up on Amazon's website. Tracking through these problems and discussing them with Amazon's catalog department, only gave us the answer that these titles would have to be updated manually through the online form.

This problem has probably been around for a very long time, but it has flown under the radar - until now. Why? Because, one, publishers didn't move around very much. And, if they did, that distributor did not send data to Amazon via ONIX. Second, how often do book descriptions change after the book has been published? Not too often, but when they do, it is usually for a reason that there is some type of new publicity associated with the title, like a big endorsement, or movie tie-in. So, handling these one-offs through the catalog department was a manageable alternative to fixing the system.

But now, it's not. This is a conundrum for the publisher on three fronts:

First, publishers (at least those who use our services... plug, plug) have never had to worry about which titles they updated before. They just updated the information in the database and went about their business. The systems did the rest - identifying which titles have been changed, and which needed to be resent out to the trade via ONIX. Now, they need to track which titles have come from publishers who were distributed by someone else previously, and keep track of precisely what change was made to the record.

Second, once a publisher uses the online form to make a change to a title, that title is given a status in Amazon's systems saying it was manually updated. Amazon considers that a 'sticky' change. In other words, once a title is changed manually, nothing on that title can be changed except through the online form. So, that means that what was a descriptive copy problem now becomes a bibliographic data problem as well. So, if a publisher updates the price of a book, and that title is 'stuck', then the price update will not go through (at Amazon).

Lastly, Amazon does not have any way to give us, or any publisher a listing of which titles they consider to be 'stuck'. The only way that we can find out is to query the catalog department on a case by case basis.

So, essentially we are left with a situation where we don't know whether our ONIX updates will update Amazon's site or not. This puts all the weight back on the publisher to check and see whether Amazon really updated the information. Some of our publishers send 2000 - 5000 changes a week! There is no way to check all that!

Emails to Amazon's people about this issue have gone unanswered and unacknowledged. Hopefully, as the questions start to flood into the catalog department, now that so many publishers have changed distributors in the past 6 weeks, they will see the problem as critical enough to address. Otherwise our friend in the catalog department - who is incredibly responsive, and helps us out tremendously - won't be able to get anything else done.