Although we’ve launched WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com in response to Amazon’s wholesale removal of buy buttons from Macmillan titles, we believe Amazon should be monitored for years to come. Amazon’s developed quite a fondness for employing this draconian tactic (there’s a chronology at the website); it’s only grown bolder with its growing market clout.

Interestingly, the new kid on the e-reader block, ipad, has changed the game by allowing publishers to set their own prices for ebooks. Newser reports that “Hachette has joined Macmillan—and, seemingly, HarperCollins—in demanding control over the pricing of its e-books sold through Amazon…”

While my publisher, Random House, was not affected by the Amazon move, this was the latest in a round of wake-up calls to authors and publishers about just how aggressively Amazon is willing to be in its attempts to dictate the prices of books. We authors want to be read, and we are happy when worn-out copies of our books are passed from hand to hand. But Amazon’s price-fixing scheme is a Toys-R-Us approach to bookselling, an attempt to monopolize the market at the expense of those who write books, those who publish them, and ultimately those who read them. Much lower pricing means books have to be produced faster; the quality of books on offer can only be negatively affected by lightning fast turn-around times for authors and editors. It’s the difference between a blog post like this one and a well-researched essay in Harper’s magazine. While we all enjoy our quick fixes, we want the stuff that’s been labored over as well, the artfully written and meticulously crafted novels that make reading such a pleasure and an addiction.

If giant retailers exert a controlling force on publishers in the manner that Amazon is attempting to do, there will be less and less room in the literary market for mid-list authors who enter the publishing world as I did ten years ago, with a small literary book from a small press. I was one of the ones who eventually “got lucky,” in a commercial sense, with a major publisher and a “breakout” book. But the publisher didn’t know that The Year of Fog would be a breakout when they acquired it. It was a small acquisition by a major publisher, one of those novels that a wonderful editor decided to fight for, despite my less-than-impressive track record when it came to sales. We’ve all heard the term “too big to fail.” There is such a thing, in the publishing world, as “too small to sell”–or there will be, when every book is priced at $9.99 or less upon release. In such cases, publishers will be able to stay afloat only with the Dan Browns and J.K. Rowlings of the world, authors whose books will sell millions of copies simply on the strength of the name. The success of The Year of Fog never would have been possible had the publisher rejected my manuscript because it was “too small to sell.”

In a world where price is the predominating criteria, publishers would be unlikely to make the gamble on authors without a proven track record–in other words, authors like me, and almost every author I know. It might be a beautiful new world for zombie novels, or vampire novels, or for whatever books fit into the literary fad of the moment. But should Amazon have its way, finding literary or mainstream novels by writers simply struggling to get a book out into the world would become increasingly difficult for readers.

“While I was abroad I felt the need to find out who I was and where my soul was. I chose to be a Haitian woman,” she wrote. “We’re a country in which three-fourths of the people can’t read and don’t eat properly. I’m an integral part of the situation. I am not in Canada in a black ghetto, or an extraterrestrial from outer space. I am a Haitian woman. I don’t mean to say that I am responsible for the problems. But still, as a Haitian woman, I must make an effort so that all together we can extricate ourselves from them.”

One thing paperbacks currently have going for them in the book vs. Kindle debate is price point. The price set by publishers for e-books tends to be the lowest price at which the physical copy of the book is available. For the moment, this may be keeping brick-and-mortar doomsday at bay. If you can have a physical trade paperback for the same price as the e-book, I imagine many readers would prefer to have the physical book on their shelf.

Where I can see e-books easily gaining the lion’s share of the market is in the mass market format. For example, because THE YEAR OF FOG was published both in trade paperback ($12.00) and mass market paperback ($5.99), the lowest price point for the physical book, and therefore the base price of the e-book, is $5.99. On Amazon, that comes out to $4.79 for the Kindle version. While a mass market paperback is far less pleasing in the hand than a trade paperback, thus ensuring the trade paperback success of many books that are also available in the smaller, cheaper format, the e-book may make this distinction null and void. In fact, the heft of the Kindle, and the adjustable text size, may make an e-book preferable to a mass market version of the same book.

Defenders of the Kindle and Nook attempt to assuage the fears of luddites, publishers, and authors, by saying that e-book readers actually purchase three times more books than readers of physical books. While the evidence isn’t quite in yet on this assertion, if e-book pricing were to come down to the level of mass market pricing, I do think you would see e-book readers purchasing larger quantities of books than their more traditional counterparts. A book that you didn’t quite feel like investing in for $12.00 might be an easy impulse buy at $5.99.

Totally unscientific poll: Have you purchased an e-reader? If so, do you find yourself buying more books than before? If you do buy more books, do you think this habit will continue after the hot-new-thing quality of your Kindle/Nook has worn off?

Non e-readers: If e-book pricing were comparable to mass market pricing, would you be more likely to invest in a Kindle or Nook?

And here’s The Year of Fog:

…that a parking garage could look so mod, courtesy of photographer Jenna Brown (No Room for Necklaces) in Charleston

…that I should have saved this wine for a night when I wasn’t home alone with my kid, reading dinosaur pop-up books (not that there’s anything wrong with dinosaur pop-up books, but some wines are meant to be shared)

It wasn’t until March 2009 that a lead, on which authorities declined to elaborate, brought law enforcement officers to a town about 40 miles outside of the Managua, Nicaragua.
There, at the end of a 19-month search, authorities discovered the girls inside a messy Winnebago trailer, overfilled with items from their Delaware home, said a U.S. Marshal who arrived on the scene.

Christine Belford took the first flight she could to Nicaragua. Her girls were healthy, though disheveled. The eldest, Laura, now 7, told her mother about sleeping on the beach in Costa Rica. The once-plump girl had become thin. Her autistic daughter, Leigh, now 6, hadn’t received treatment. When Leigh smiled, Belford noticed her teeth had rotted.