Hachette Job

“Amazon has begun discouraging customers from buying books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, J. D. Salinger and other popular writers, a flexing of its muscle as a battle with a publisher spills into the open.

     The Internet retailer, which controls more than a third of the book trade in the United States, is marking many books published by Hachette Book Group as not available for at least two or three weeks. [...]
     Generally, most popular books are available from Amazon within two days. [...]
     'We have been asked legitimate questions about why many of our books are at present marked out of stock with relatively long estimated shipping times on the Amazon website, in contrast to immediate availability on other websites and in stores,' said Sophie Cottrell, a Hachette spokeswoman. 'We are satisfying all Amazon’s orders promptly.'
     But, she added, 'Amazon is holding minimal stock' and restocking some of Hachette’s books 'slowly, causing "available 2-4 weeks" messages.'
     For at least a decade, Amazon has not been shy about throwing its weight around with publishers, demanding bigger discounts and more time to pay its bills. When a publisher balked, it would withdraw the house’s titles from its recommendation algorithms.
     ‘Typically, it was about 30 days before they’d come back and say, “Ouch, how do we make this work?”’ an Amazon buyer told the journalist Brad Stone in his book about the company, The Everything Store.”
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times
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sold down the river

“‘A shilling life will give you all the facts,’ wrote W. H. Auden, tipping his hat to the biographer’s art while lamenting its utter inadequacy. Jeff Bezos, whose total conquest of e-commerce has made him one of the most famous people on the planet, has until now evaded any serious biographer. There have been shilling lives in the strictest sense, from the cut-and-paste job of Richard L. Brandt’s One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com to the YA hagiography of Josepha Sherman’s Jeff Bezos: King of Amazon.com (“From the time he was a toddler, Bezos was busy trying to change his world. He felt he was too old to sleep in a ‘baby’ crib, so he found a screwdriver and took the crib apart!”).
     But Bezos has tightly controlled the flow of information about himself and his company. What readers have encountered is the same small fund of recycled anecdotes, most of them focusing on his childhood (brilliant nerd, inveterate tinkerer, ardent Trekkie) and the creation myth of Amazon itself, complete with the now obligatory reference to the role played by the founder’s suburban garage.
     Now, nearly twenty years after Bezos sold his first book online — for the record, it was Douglas Hofstadter’s appropriately brilliant and nerdy consideration of artificial intelligence Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies — a skilled, stubborn biographer has finally caught up with him.”
— James Marcus, Harper’s Magazine
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"...massive money sink of a mausoleum."

"In a Q+A session with Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone, the Canadian author of The Tipping Point and Blink [Malcolm Gladwell of Elmira, Ontario] described the flagship NYPL building in Manhattan as a 'massive money sink of a mausoleum.'

     'Every time I turn around, there's some new extravagant renovation going on in the main building. Why? In my mind, the New York Public Library should be focused on keeping small libraries open, on its branches all over the city.'
     The NYPL announced a major $300 million renovation of its flagship location last year, to be completed in 2018.
     Gladwell continued, 'Luxury condos would look wonderful there. Go back into the business of reaching people who do not have access to books. And that is not on the corner of 42nd and Fifth [Avenue].'
     ...A little earlier in the discussion, Gladwell spoke about libraries as 'the only place where you can browse [books]. A world in which you can only find things that you have chosen to pursue is an incredibly impoverished one.
     'Libraries are also safe havens for people who are not from privileged backgrounds, who do not have access to books and where there is no quiet space to work.'"
— Huffington Post
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