Should literary agents be afraid of Amazon?

While Amazon is keeping quiet about the meetings it held last week with top U.S. agents, several commentators have begun to speculate about their significance. Crain’s reports that the talks were “freewheeling, frank, and contentious,” with e-books and aggressive discounting being the main topics under discussion. Meanwhile, MobyLives comments that the meetings are “one of the first signs that major agents are worried about the survival of the current system of author advances and royalties.”

Taking the argument one step further, GalleyCat asks the provocative question, “Literary agents … Who needs them?”

One published author who asks to be unnamed disagrees [that agents still serve a useful purpose], “What do you need an agent for anymore, really? Why? To negotiate a meager advance? You can’t get them on the phone anyway. You’re stuck promoting the book yourself because publishers don’t put any marketing dollars into your book unless you’re John Grisham. I don’t see the whole point when I can hire an attorney to negotiate my publishing contract for a flat fee or just upload the book to Kindle myself.”

Has Amazon taken discounting too far?

In the wake of poor holiday sales in brick-and-mortar bookstores in the U.S. and the U.K., Internet retailers are being accused of coming by their simultaneous sales success unfairly, via overzealous discounting. As reported by The Bookseller:

Kes Nielsen, head of book buying at Amazon.co.uk, denied that internet retailers, who had discounted some titles by more than 60% in the run-up to Christmas, were solely responsible for declining average selling price. He said: “I don’t think you can single out a particular channel as in some way leading the charge [for discounting]. It’s a very competitive environment and everybody is doing their bit to offer value and that’s what we are doing as well.”

There’s nothing new about online retailers squeezing margins, of course, but it looks like Amazon in particular might have finally taken it too far:

Nielsen refused to comment on its ongoing dispute with Hachette over terms. The impasse, over the level of discounting Amazon receives, has led to the retailer removing some “Buy New” buttons when displaying Hachette’s key titles. Despite this, Hachette-imprint Orion’s A Quiet Belief in Angels was Amazon.co.uk’s number 10 bestseller for 2008.

Resistance is futile

Entertainment Weekly’s books editor, Tina Jordan, has been writing about the conundrum she faced when she discovered that her bright, bookish daughter was reading a trashy Gossip Girl novel. Discounting taking the book away as a form of censorship, Jordan asked her readers: “What do you do when you hate what your daughter is reading?”

The responses from her colleagues and readers were instructive, less for any advice on how to redirect her daughter back into reading literature than for reminding Jordan why teens read trash. And to the surprise of no one who has ever been a teen…

Everyone pretty much agreed: This kind of surreptitious reading is a traditional rite of passage. But what surprised me was how many of my colleagues — separated not just by geography but by generation — turned to the same books for their, uh, information: The Godfather (page 27 was specifically mentioned by two people), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Jaws, The Diary of Anais Nin, The Other Side of Midnight, and anything by Judy Blume or John Jakes (though, as senior editor Thom Geier said, ”But Jakes tended to write his sex scenes in language so obscure that you’d have to go rushing to the dictionary to figure out what in the world he was trying to say. And even then, you didn’t really learn very much”).

The list is long and varied, and it makes the Peel Region’s Catholic School Board’s attempt to take David Guterson’s Snow Falling on Cedars out of school libraries in Ontario look utterly futile.