Plenty of people are upset at Amazon these days, but it took a small publishing company whose best-known volume is a toilet-training tome to give the mighty internet store the boot.
The Educational Development Corporation, saying it was fed up with Amazon?s scorched-earth tactics, announced at the end of February that it would remove all its titles from the retailer?s virtual shelves. That eliminated at a stroke $1.5 million in annual sales, a move that could be a significant hit to the 46-year-old EDC?s bottom line.
?Amazon is squeezing everyone out of business,? said Randall White, EDC?s chief executive.
?I don?t like that. They?re a predator. We?re better off without them,? White said.
It is an unequal contest. EDC has 77 employees, no-frill offices on an industrial strip here and a stock-market valuation of $18 million ? hardly a threat to Amazon, a Wall Street darling worth $86 billion. But White?s bold move to take his 1,800 children?s books away from the greatest retailing success of the Internet era is more evidence of the extraordinary tumult within the book world over one simple question: who gets to decide how much a book costs?
The US justice department last week sued five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, simultaneously settling with three of the houses. The publishers say they were not illegally colluding but simply taking advantage of a new device platform ? Apple?s iPad ? to sell their e-books in a different way, where they controlled the prices.
The publishers wanted to stop Amazon from using what one of them called ?the wretched $9.99 price point,? according to court papers. Selling e-books so cheaply, they feared, would solidify Amazon?s robust grip on the business while simultaneously building a low-price mind-set among consumers that could prove ruinous to other bookstores and the publishers themselves.
EDC does not produce e-books, but saw exactly this happening with its physical inventory.