If you didn’t notice, Amazon and Macmillan Publishing have been having a hissy fit over the price of books. Because of this argument, Amazon pulled all the books published by Macmillan off of their virtual shelves, with no announcement or reason made public.

I’d recommend you read John Scalzi’s most excellent post for the details. Since he lays this weekend’s events much better than I can, I’ll take it up a level and talk about the e-reader in general.

If the arguments against the e-reader sound familiar, it’s because they are. Everyone is trying to do with books what Apple did with music. Create a great device, put up a walled garden, and control all rights and access to that product from the inside. It was a bad idea with music, and even worse with books.

What can happen when you “buy in” to a Monopoly?

1) Your purchases can be revoked, at any time, without your permission. Overly dramatic? Nope. Amazon did this with – of all books – 1984 by George Orwell in July of last year.

2) You are locked into one store. - So Kindle owners starting this weekend, and continuing at the time of writing this, cannot buy any books from Macmillan Publishing, or subsidiaries. If you want to read anything from them on your e-reader, you are trapped. You paid upwards of $250.00 and still have to buy a big chunk of pulp to read what you want.

3) You are subject to being “released from support” – There will come a day when every e-reader out there reaches an end of life. What happens to your e-books when that happens? Will you have to repurchase them all? will you have to do an “upgrade conversion” to the next iteration of hardware? What if the company you contract with for the e-reader pulls an Enron and implodes? Since they are no longer around to manage the books’ digital rights, your unit just might become a doorstop.

4) Monopolies create price inflation – Your e-reader can only get books from one source. What’s stopping the e-book distributor for charging over fair market value for your book? What’s stopping them from keep raising that price?

Artist's rendering of Jeff Bezos

I’m not trying to pick on Amazon. It’s just that they are working their way down this list of hypotheticals and turning them into realities. They’ve completed items one and two. They are working on four, and three is yet to be seen.

An e-reader is an idea who’s time has come, but this device has to come from a third party, and has to be able to accept and read e-books from multiple different stores, and in a standard format. It must work with libraries and allow for lending. Until that device happens, which is looking less and less likely, I’m staying away.

I really don’t want to rely on other people’s content too much on this blog, but this video really stuck a chord inside of me.

There really is two types of failure. One is eluded to in this video by Honda Performance Engineer John Kessler:

“Failure is a byproduct of pushing the envelope….When you fail, it’s not nessarilly looked at as a bad thing as long as you learn from it, and make something positive out of it.”

It’s such an important point, but buried deep in the video (check around 2:56) Push the envelope, never make the same mistake twice.

The other is when you don’t do what Mr. Kessler suggests, and make the same mistakes over and over. You can see this at all levels of business. That’s a bad failure. 

It’s the company that only wants to protect market share. It’s the Vice president only looking towards the next quarterly report. It’s the department just trying to get through the year. It’s the individual rushing to clear the assignments. 

If the proper time is not given to any of these, you have failure.

Even in the soulless world of business, there are cosmic forces at play

Let’s be honest from the start. Business is about making money, and the more money you make, and the quicker you make it, the better you are doing. Sometimes, however, in that rush to the bottom line, the people you end up trampling is yourself. Funny little story…

A couple years ago, we did some cost analysis, and determined that a function of our business we were outsourcing could be done cheaper inside. We drew up the business case, crunched the numbers, and generated a plan. One little thing – we didn’t bother to tell our vendor until we executed the cancellation. 

This left them in a bit of a lurch. They had a number of customized consumables on hand, and although the loss of business wasn’t enough to really hurt them, it was big enough to put a little pothole in their financial forecast. 

Legally, we were well within our contractual rights, and the end-game transaction was done on the “up and up” and without problem. Everyone remained calm and professional, although one could tell on the phone calls that the friendship was strained.

Fast forward a couple years, to present time. Things have changed, and we find ourselves in a place where we have toonce again, go to this vendor to assist us. This time, however, the conversation has taken a different tone. 

“Well, why are you not doing this work yourself?” asked the sales guy, “We know you can, you did it before.”

“We are out of capacity – this is new work, and we can’t take it on with the existing equipment.” state I.

“How do I know that a year or two down the line you won’t drop us again?” 

Well, here’s where I switch the subject to the technical. Truth is, there’s no saying we WON’T dump them again. The conversation continued, and he is digging up the numbers for us (after all, even if short term, it IS new revenue)

Looking back, it would not have hurt us to give them a chance to come back with a better price. If they couldn’t, then they would have probably understood why we were departing, and likely let us go with their blessings. They might actually respond to future inquiries like a long lost friend, instead of a jaded lover.

We didn’t do that then, and I wish we did.

Lesson learned.