I Think We Broke It…

Jeff Bezos was asked on a 60 Minutes interview if he felt bad about potentially destroying businesses as a result of Amazon’s growing success. The business in question was more brick and mortar book stores and independent booksellers. He shrugged and basically said it’s on every business to do whatever they can to be successful. Companies go out of business. Amazon will too someday.

But for now bottom line, he’s giving the customer what they want and if that kills book stores then too bad. At the end of the day the customer decides. And while in some ways this makes me sad, I do see his point. He didn’t set out to destroy brick and mortar stores. He set out to provide a service. Which ultimately customers loved.

It’s like You’ve Got Mail. Tom Hanks ate Meg Ryan’s cute little children’s book store. Well Jeff Bezos just ate Tom Hanks. It’s the way of business.

But the other industry that he’s irrevocably altering is publishing. Again, not Jeff’s fault. A platform was provided for authors to sell their books directly to consumers. Some see this as a huge advancement.

And the same business logic holds true. It’s up to every business to do what it can to be successful. Every individual author is now their own business.

I think that’s the problem though. I think that’s what we broke. I think authors because we are now “the business” started thinking less about writing books and more about selling books. In this race to the Amazon Bestseller list we bought fake reviews, flooded the market with content, and dropped prices to .99. Impacting the overall the quality of books themselves and the trust we have with readers.

Some might dispute the quality issue, but I don’t think it can be. Yes, there are some self-published books out there that are better than some traditionally published books. But if we’re just looking at over all grammatical structure, spelling, homophones, cohesiveness of storytelling, accurate research – with the thousands and thousands of self-published books out there when considering ALL the books – the quality as a whole has dropped.

We did this. We became our own Walmart and we ate publishing. In a race for finding that hidden gold where you could somehow tap into the zeitgeist of readers and make millions on a book that took very little effort to write.

But that’s business right?

Here’s where I think we lost sight of something important. Publishing wasn’t just a business about money. At least not in its conception. It was about finding the best stories out there and making them better and bringing them to the masses. Yes, if you were good at what you did you made money. But publishing was also part of the creative process. It was about making art.

Maybe that got lost somewhere in traditional publishing’s best-seller or bust mentality. It’s certainly taking a hit now with so many books being put out there for purchase that haven’t been properly edited.

And so maybe this post is a bummer about how everything is ruined and will never be the same, BUT here is the rub. This will change again. Business will evolve, readers expectations will change, authors will try new strategies. Who knows what is coming next.

That’s the real ending of You’ve Got Mail. Tom Hanks goes bust because his book store goes under. Meg Ryan starts up a new boutique children’s book store – because children’s books are still doing well in print form – and he ends up working for her.