Authors Guild: Amazon Kindle library a breach of contract
The Authors Guild, a nonprofit advocate for authors, has lashed out at Amazon’s new Kindle lending library, claiming it’s a breach of contract and an “exercise in brute economic power.”
Amazon launched its Kindle Owners’ Lending Library earlier this month. The library lets Prime users — those who pony up $79 per year for free shipping and other benefits — download one book per month for free to their Kindle devices.
At the time of the launch, Amazon said it can offer more than 5,000 titles through paying a fixed fee to publishers. For those publishers concerned with the new model, Amazon had said it will purchase a title each time it’s checked out by a reader to demonstrate the “incremental growth and revenue opportunity that this new service presents.”
None of the Big Six publishers — Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette and Macmillan — signed up to participate, citing fears that the program would harm book sales. The books Amazon does offer come from the next tier of publishers, slightly smaller ones such as Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
The Authors Guild claims that many of the smaller publishers also refused to participate in the program, but Amazon “simply disregarded these publishers’ wishes, and enrolled many of their titles in the program anyway.”
According to the Guild, Amazon believes it doesn’t need publisher permission because its contracts only require that it pay publishers the wholesale price of books downloaded by customers.
“By reasoning this way, Amazon claims it can sell e-books at any price, even giving them away, so long as the publishers are paid,”
But the Guild says most publishers have never surrendered that level of control to the retailer and, thus, Amazon is breaching its contracts with publishers.
“This is an exercise of brute economic power. Amazon knows it can largely dictate terms to non-Big Six publishers, and it badly wanted to launch this program with some notable titles,” said the Guild
The organization also says those publishers who willingly signed up for the Kindle library don’t have the right to do so without getting approval from the books’ authors. The Guild has invited any author who doesn’t want his or her book in the program to talk with one of its attorneys.
Amazon hasn’t responded to a request for comment.