Inefficiency is not a quality usually associated with Amazon but Jeff Bezos’s company is behaving as if it is a small, disorganised bookstore that cannot quite control its stock. “You want that book, do you? Very sorry but we have run out. We can order you another copy but they are taking a long time to arrive at the moment. How about buying another title instead?”
It is a ruse, of course. When Amazon tells its US customers that The Silkworm, the new novel by Robert Galbraith, a pseudonym for JK Rowling, is “currently unavailable”, it is not telling the truth. What it means is that it is not making the book available for preorder because it is published by Hachette, from which Amazon is trying to force discounts.
This is the moment publishers have feared since they lost an antitrust case in the US and Europe last year. “They were concerned that, should Amazon continue to dominate the sale of ebooks to consumers, it would start to demand lower wholesale prices,” wrote Denise Cote, the US district judge. She ruled that the publishers had conspired with Apple to raise book prices in its store.