A case for Openness- Book Publishing and the Role of Amazon’

Antje Kreutzmann- Gallasch; Simone Schroff

doi:10.1007/s40319-022-01159-w

A case for Openness- Book Publishing and the Role of Amazon’

Antje Kreutzmann- Gallasch
, Simone Schroff

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

5 Citations (SciVal)

Abstract

The presence of Amazon is ubiquitous, especially in the online bookstore and e-book market. The introduction of the “Kindle” further cemented Amazon’s dominant position and business model in the market, having negative implications for authors, publishers and consumers. Publishers have less control over setting the price to have access to Amazon’s customer base. This will affect the authors’ remuneration and attribution. On the other hand, Kindle users are locked-in consumers, limited to Amazon’s e-book offering. This not only affects consumer choice but also reinforces Amazon’s market power due to the significant network effects. The European Commission attempted to increase competition in the e-book market by banning most-favourite-nation clauses, but this has seemingly failed. This article advocates for enforcing the Kindle’s interoperability with the e-book formats of other e-book providers. The proposed approach is beneficial for publishers as well as consumers. It safeguards copyright aims while alleviating the contractual constraints imposed by Amazon. Furthermore, consumers would benefit from broader flexibility when using their Kindle, allowing them to store and read e-books from the provider of their choice.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	194-218
Number of pages	25
Journal	International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law
Volume	53
Issue number	2
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s40319-022-01159-w
Publication status	Published - 2 Mar 2022

Bibliographical note

© The Authors 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License,which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long asyou give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the CreativeCommons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in thisarticle are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit lineto the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intendeduse is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtainpermission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Funding

Open Access funding enabled and organized by CAUL and its Member Institutions.

Keywords

Article 102 TFEU
EU competition law
Interoperability
Abuse of dominance
Amazon
e-book

Access to Document

10.1007/s40319-022-01159-wLicence: CC BY 4.0

https://researchportal.plymouth.ac.uk/en/publications/a-case-for-openness-book-publishing-and-the-role-of-amazon/Licence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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A case for Openness- Book Publishing and the Role of Amazon’

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Funding

Keywords

Access to Document

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