Agents pick sides on Hachette v Amazon
The author and agent community has backed Hachette Livre UK in its terms dispute with Amazon, with leading agents spearheading a backlash against the online retailer.
The dispute has seen Amazon remove its “Buy new” button from key Hachette front and backlist titles, and drop books from promotional positions. In a letter sent to agents and authors last week, Hachette c.e.o. Tim Hely Hutchinson said he would stand firm against conceding additional trading terms, and asked authors for their patience.
He said Amazon’s sanctions were “creating a breach of trust between Amazon and its customers”, and its actions could “prove to be a catalyst for Amazon starting to lose its popularity with the public”. Despite advantageous terms, he said, “Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours.” At its current rate of growth, he predicted that Amazon would become the largest bookseller in Britain in three years.
Curtis Brown m.d. Jonathan Lloyd said: “I think the entire industry of publishers, authors and agents are 100% behind [Hachette]. Someone has to draw a line in the sand. Publishers have given 1% a year away to retailers, so where does it stop? Using authors as a financial football is disgraceful.”
Clare Alexander of Aitken Alexander added: “This is a disturbing glimpse of the iron in Amazon’s soul. I think its ruthlessness in bargaining is extremely disturbing.” Derek Johns of A P Watt said: “I consider [Amazon’s] attitude to terms is predatory and I entirely support Tim.”
Read the full piece from The Bookseller.
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BOOK NEWS AUCKLAND
This coming Monday, June 16, is Bloomsday, the day literature lovers everywhere celebrate James Joyce's comic Irish masterpiece Ulysses.
Acclaimed as one of the greatest modernist novels of last century, Ulysses is set during the hours of one day, June 16, 1904, and records the mock-heroic odyssey round Dublin city of Leopold Bloom, wandering Jew. Its frank depiction of sexuality, particularly female sexuality, saw it banned in its author's land of birth, with the Dublin Sunday Express providing a
fairly typical reaction: "The obscenity of Rabelais is innocent compared with the leprous and scabrous horrors of Joyce's book. All the secret sewers of vice are canalised in its flood of unimaginable thoughts, images and
pornographic words." The market had the last say: a signed first edition will now set you back half-a-million dollars.
Bloomsday will be celebrated in Auckland at the Dogs Bollix pub, corner of Karangahape Rd and Newton Gully.
· The twenty-fifth anniversary of Bloomsday was celebrated in Paris
on June 16, 1929 with Joyce and a party taking lunch on the city outskirts followed by a pub crawl back into the centre; somewhere along the way they lost Samuel Beckett.
· The fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in Dublin with five Irish literary figures attempting to tour all the Dublin sites mentioned in Ulysses; they got stuck in a pub and never made it.
· The world's first Bloomsday celebration of the new millenium was in New Zealand. At one minute past midnight, June 16, 2000, Auckland radio's Planet FM commenced broadcasting a 5-hour recorded reading of Ulysses; the
following year a celebratory cabaret became an annual Auckland event.
Bloomsday at the Dogs Bollix pub, corner of Karangahape Rd and Newton Gully: starting at 8pm with Dubliner Brian Keegan reading from The Book and with Lin Lorkin, the Jews Brothers band and mezzo-soprano Yuko Takahashi
providing an appropriate musical setting and well-known Auckland actor Michael Keir Morrissey (The Hollow Men) appearing as a variety of dreadful hiberno-Oddysean figures.
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