Author: Andrew Sullivan

Polly Mosendz analyzes Amazon’s escalating war with publishing giant Hachette:

As Amazon works to negotiate prices for e-books with Hachette, they are exercising a number of powerful tactics: pulling pre-orders, buying less inventory, extending shipping time, and not offering promotional pricing. You can still buy Hachette books from Amazon, it will just take longer and cost more. In a statement released today, Amazon said that if book buyers don’t like it, they’re welcome to shop elsewhere. They are flexing their business muscles. They’ve used that muscle before, and they’ll do it again.

Hachette’s authors are understandably upset, because this fight is hurting their sales. Now the seller is reminding Hachette and their authors why they wanted to do business with them in the first place: Amazon moves books. Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers, both in the medium and long-term. Amazon is squeezing Hachette with all their might, because, as they said in statement today, “when we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers.”

Richard L. Brandt argues that the dispute will end well for consumers:

Jeff Bezos is once again using ruthlessly self-serving tactics to pressure book publishers into lowering prices. In an attempt to force Hachette to lower its wholesale price of e-books, Bezos has started delaying delivery of some hard- and soft-cover Hachette books and raising prices on others. Will his move further weaken book publishers, which are already operating under whisper-slim margins and are looking to e-books to save them? As the author of three books myself, all published by mainstream publishers, I worry about that myself.

But I very much doubt that will be the outcome. The ultimate winner of this battle will be buyers and readers of books. If Bezos wins this battle, I would bet that publishers and book authors may just come out ahead as well. And, yes, Amazon most certainly will, too.

But Jeremy Greenfield imagines “a scenario where [Amazon] controls three-quarters of all book sales in the U.S.”:

Long-time industry consultant (and partner in Digital Book World, my employer) Mike Shatzkin explained to me what would happen next:

Let’s say Amazon goes to 70 percent and they’re basically the pipes for everything and they’re indispensable and you can’t publish a book without them. So, what do they do then?

If they’re still trying to maximize profits, we’ll still have lots of romance books and James Patterson will still write his books. But serious nonfiction books won’t get published. Those are the books that will go first.

Nonfiction books, like Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, are expensive and risky to produce and rarely sell well, yet many of these books drive intellectual thinking in the U.S. Robert Caro’s latest book on Lyndon Johnson The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson took nearly a decade to write—and that means investment and risk.

Jack Shafer has decided to close his Amazon account:

[W]hile Amazon may have captured my wallet, its recent behavior has convinced me to take my business elsewhere. As long as the company’s high-pressured negotiating tactics served my interests — lower prices, expansive selection, superb service — I was on board. But the company has erred in this dispute. It would have been okay with me if it had hard-balled the publisher by refusing to discount its books or even insisted on selling them at a premium. In that case, I could do what I usually do — make individual decisions about where to buy stuff based on price and availability.

But by essentially banishing many Hachette titles from its stock, Amazon, which ordinarily puts its customers first, has put them last, telling them they can’t buy certain titles from it for any price. If Amazon prevails in this clash, will it put me and my material needs last whenever a supplier resists its will? I don’t know for sure, but I can guess.

However, Martin Shepard, a small publisher, gives Amazon “a four star review for not only their efficiency and work they do, but for leveling the playing field”:

In truth, everyone wants more of the pie. We’ve been publishing literary fiction for 35 years, and in the past found that the chain bookstores took few if any of our titles, that distributors like Ingram demanded bigger discounts from us than they charged the conglomerates, or that despite winning more literary awards per title than any other publisher in America we could not match the print review coverage afforded to authors of the five big conglomerates. But we’re not calling these other organizations Mafia inspired or asking for government intervention. Surely one  must come to recognize that all these companies are—and should be—free to set their own terms based on their bottom-lines, and publishers like Hachette might consider tempering their  complaints about Amazon’s discrimination or restraint of trade. Jeff Bezos didn’t create Amazon for Hachette, and Hachette isn’t forced to use Amazon for distribution. What is Amazon anyway, other than an incredibly successful on-line store that sells almost every product  one can think of. …

I always have a lingering suspicion that when one of the large publishing cartels complains they are being treated unfairly by Amazon, it’s probably good for most all of the smaller, independent presses.

Zack Beauchamp highlights the president’s new agenda for the Syrian crisis, which he laid out in his West Point commencement address yesterday:

The section on support for Syrian rebels seems to mean US military training for the more moderate anti-Assad factions, like the comparatively secular fighting forces coordinated by the Supreme Military Council. The Wall Street Journal reports that Obama is “close” to authorizing the US military to help out moderate rebels, and post-speech comments from a senior Obama aide confirmed that option was on the table.

We know roughy what this training would look like because the CIA is already doing it.

Syrian rebels told PBS Frontline that CIA operatives have trained them in military tactics and the use of heavy American-made weapons. “They trained us to ambush regime or enemy vehicles and cut off the road,” a rebel identified as Hussein explained.

The big difference between this ongoing CIA operation and Obama’s potential new policy is that training would be overt instead of covert: uniformed US troops, not CIA spooks, will train Syrian rebels. That’ll likely mean more extensive training for the rebels. But, without a truly massive effort, it’s unlikely that this will fundamentally change the military balance of power between the rebels and Assad.

Leslie Gelb fears that Obama has “jumped out of the Afghan frying pan only to leap back into the Mideast fire”:

Obama’s instincts are wrong if he’s letting himself be pushed into a renewed effort to unseat Syrian President Assad without a plausible plan to do so. Perhaps Obama thought that a new anti-terrorist emergency fund he was asking Congress to fund would distinguish his approach. It’s to be a $5 billion barrel to support friends and allies with arms, training and the like. But Obama and President George W. Bush provided Afghans and Iraqis with hundreds of billions in arms and economic aid to a very modest effect indeed.

Obama will have to explain much more to demonstrate that his strategy is truly new and that it can be effective—and also that his small steps approach won’t lead to bigger ones later on in the face of likely failures—much as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Motyl sees last Sunday’s successful presidential election as a huge defeat for Russia’s ambitions in Ukraine:

First, Ukraine is hardly the unstable almost-failed state that Putin and his Western apologists say it is. The terrorist violence was confined to two provinces—Luhansk and Donetsk. In the rest of the country, the voting proceeded smoothly. On top of that, Ukraine’s security forces were able to maintain law and order in much of the country, a positive development that builds on the armed forces’ creditable performance in their “anti-terrorist operations” in April and May.

Second, Ukraine is anything but the illegitimate state Putin and his western apologists say it is. Voting participation for the entire country was high: about 60 percent. Not including the two provinces that were terrorized by Putin’s commandos, participation was even higher. Everyone knows that the only thing that kept Ukrainians in the Donbas from voting was Putin’s terrorists.

Third, Putin’s terrorist commandos have been outflanked by the elections. People want stability; they want a return to normality. And they know that elections can bring about both.

But Marc Champion doesn’t believe for one second that Putin intends to back off, noting the presence of Russian citizens, including Chechens, in this week’s fighting in Donetsk:

Although transparent, Russia’s subterfuge is useful. It provides Europe’s leaders cover to avoid imposing costly economic sanctions on Russia. Putin withdrew troops from its border with Ukraine just before Sunday’s election there, the failure of which German Chancellor Angela Merkel had set as a trip wire for broader sanctions. European Union leaders who met on Tuesday were plainly relieved that they would not have to follow through on her threat.

However, the clash in Donetsk demonstrates that Ukraine’s presidential election alone will not stabilize the country. The decision by the city’s separatist leaders to declare martial law and send troops to seize the airport the next day showed they saw the vote as a starting pistol to renew hostilities rather than a signal to de-escalate.

Anna Nemtsova analyzes the discrepancy between Russia’s words and deeds:

Why would the Kremlin embrace Poroshenko’s victory with one hand, and feed violence and atrocities with the other, if indeed that is what’s going on?

Igor Bunin of the Center for Political Technologies, a think tank in Moscow, told The Daily Beast on Tuesday that the Kremlin gave up on the previous designs to annex the southeast regions of Ukraine (Plan A); or make them independent from Kiev (Plan B). “Now,” says Bunin, “we see the realization of Plan C: turning the east of Ukraine into a region of chaos and lawlessness, so neither the European Union nor NATO would dare to ever put their bases in that region.” It is this chaos by design that may become the biggest challenge for Poroshenko’s presidency, Bunin explains, “unless he finds a way to agree with the Kremlin.”

In the end, what has Putin gained from all this, Drum wonders. What he comes up with:

Crimea. And possibly a slowdown in the pace of Ukraine’s integration with the West. That’s about it. But I wouldn’t underestimate the cost of this to Putin. Threats of military force are flashy, but unless you’re willing to back them up regularly, they do a lot more harm than good. I’m not sure why so many people who are generally clear-sighted about the drawbacks of military action suddenly get so smitten by it when it’s wielded by a thug like Putin. Hell, he doesn’t even use it well.

When the dust settles, it’s hard to see Putin gaining much from all this in the places that count.

Brad Plumer deflates some of the hype over Google’s new driverless car prototype:

Now, before anyone gets too excited, note that self-driving cars are still a ways off from reality, especially given all the legal and regulatory hurdles they face. (And, for now, Google’s cars will only go 25 miles per hour — so the cars won’t run on highways.) But why not dream a bit? It’s worth thinking through what a future filled with self-driving cars might actually look like. Boosters often claim that the technology will have massive benefits for everyone: traffic jams will become a rarity, deadly crashes will drop dramatically, commuting will become far less stressful. We’ll all be happier, healthier, and wealthier. Maybe so. Yet self-driving cars could also have a number of downsides and unexpected consequences, too — from more suburban sprawl to layoffs for the nation’s millions of truckers and taxi drivers.

McArdle examines Google’s approach to the liability issue:

Essentially, Google is building a driverless golf cart, not a driverless car. With a top speed of 25 mph — therefore making collisions less likely to be fatal — there’s less risk that your vehicle will hurt someone if something goes wrong. There’s a lot to like about this approach. Of course, it means you lose some speed. On the other hand, most commutes aren’t that speedy. And I think many people would rather have a 45-minute commute during which they can read than a 35-minute commute during which they have to listen to talk radio while white-knuckling the steering wheel and silently wishing elaborately horrible deaths on the drivers around them. It also offers Google a way to prove the concept at relatively low risk.

But she also sees downsides:

The 25-mph speed is dictated by a regulatory threshold; try to take your car to 45 mph, and suddenly you’re in a different regulatory class, with higher safety standards (read: a lot more weight on the car) and various other requirements. So while in theory it’s easy to start slow and incrementally improve, in practice, Google is eventually going to have to get regulators to let it push beyond the current limitations.

Joshua Gans counters:

[A]s McArdle notes, slowing down cars to golf carts speeds of 25 mph as Google appears to be doing, does change the picture as it reduces the probability of accidents substantially. In which case, it seems that the liability system is working as intended. It isn’t stopping driverless cars but promoting their development in a healthy direction.

For this reason I have started to wonder whether the ‘regulation kills innovation’ theme is far more nuanced than many have been thinking. Why do we think that regulation will hold back driverless cars rather than actually promote them?

In Timothy Lee’s view, driverless cars will mean the end of mass car ownership:

Because the US is a high-wage country, it’s cheaper to own a car that sits idle 23 hours per day than to hire a human driver for one hour every day.

But as Uber CEO Travis Kalanick pointed out at the Code Conference today, that’s going to change once cars can drive themselves. Renting a car instead of owning one has a lot of advantages. People will be spared the hassle of buying gas, changing the oil, and taking the car in for repairs. Both workers and their employers will be spared the expense of finding somewhere to park our vehicles. Driverless taxis will improve average fuel economies too.

Edward Niedermeyer adds, “Google’s decision to abandon traditional vehicle controls is what will keep auto executives up at night”:

[T]he overwhelming fixed costs of the traditional business model has always hindered automakers from really changing things. The companies are also largely made up of people who genuinely love cars and driving, making them highly adverse to autonomous technology. By fostering the automotive enthusiast culture, to the tune of trillions of dollars over the last century, automakers have created performance-related profit centers that pad their bottom lines. Good luck convincing Google’s robot driver to upgrade to the turbocharger or sport suspension.