Who Decides What Gets Sold In The Bookstore?

We're heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook...) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won't carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.
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We can probably agree that the local supermarket has no moral or ethical or business obligation to sell cherry-flavored Cap'n Crunch. If the owner doesn't like cherries, she doesn't have to sell them.

And the cereal maker shouldn't work under the assumption that every store that sells food will necessarily carry the Cap'n, even on special order.

But what about books?

There's been a long history of ubiquity at the bookstore. With a few extreme exceptions, just about every book is available at every bookstore if you're willing to order it. Universal availability feels like part of the contract we make with bookstores-we expect them to sell everything. In the digital world, this goes triple, because there's no issue of shelf space to deal with.

I just found out that Apple is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won't carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography.

Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: "Multiple links to Amazon store. IE page 35, David Weinberger link."

And there's the conflict. We're heading to a world where there are just a handful of influential bookstores (Amazon, Apple, Nook...) and one by one, the principles of open access are disappearing. Apple, apparently, won't carry an ebook that contains a link to buy a hardcover book from Amazon.

That's amazing to me. It must be a mistake, right?

First, because the web, like your mind, works best when it's open. Second, because once bookstores start to censor the books they carry (business reasons, personal taste, etc.) then the door is open for any interest group to work hard to block books with which they disagree. Where does the line get drawn?

A key part of the argument about SOPA was that choke points and blacklists break a system that works best when information is allowed to flow freely.

I've evolved my thinking on this over the years. At Yahoo, I was a proponent of having the company buy Netscape and integrate Yahoo into the browser. And I think there's nothing much wrong with merchants and vendors working hard with exclusives and deals to increase market share. When it comes to a content screen, though, I get nervous, particularly when the device is part of the store. Once you are reading your books on a device that is hooked into a store, the person curating the store has a great deal more power than a local bookseller ever did.

I think that Amazon and Apple and B&N need to take a deep breath and make a decision on principle: what's inside the book shouldn't be of concern to a bookstore with a substantial choke on the marketplace. If it's legal, they ought to let people read it if they choose to. A small bookstore doesn't have that obligation, but if they're seeking to be the one and only, if they have a big share of the market, then they do, particularly if they're integrating the device into the store. I also think that if any of these companies publish a book, they ought to think really hard before they refuse to let the others sell it.

[Should YouTube be able to block videos that promote Vimeo? Should Bing refuse to link to Google docs if you search for it? What about the Comcast cable box on your TV--should CBS be off limits?]

It's easy for me to have a workaround here with this project. Just visit the site on your iPad or iPhone, choose the ePub edition and open it. But many authors won't have the same ability, particularly if they want to use enhanced functionality on a given platform.

These stores can't have it both ways. The web works because it's open. The stores (all three of them) need to be too.

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