It is good to see one publisher giving voice to the blindingly obvious: that “Amazon have got publishers in their sights and they’re going to kill us”. Of course it is disappointing that these comments are both anonymous and originate in the US, because if the view from over there is doom laden, it is positively apocalyptic here.

92% of the 1.3 million e-readers sold in the UK before Christmas were Kindles. The domination of our market by Amazon is off the chart by comparison with America where they at least have genuine competition from Barnes and Noble.  92% market share is more than double the EU monopoly threshold.

There are only a small number of things that can save publishers as things currently stand.

1. We’ve all misjudged the size of the e-book market and it’ll start to flatline – there are already indications this is happening in America. But even if it does settle at say 30% of the market that’s enough to do serious damage.
2. Amazon makes a mistake. The internet is fickle and the Kindle is far from being a brilliant device. But it’s probably good enough and so far they’ve barely put a foot wrong so let’s not hold our breath that we are all going to migrate to some other system.
3. The office of fair trading takes a pop at them. Eventually they will be deemed a monopoly and they will be broken up, but the OFT have no interest currently (I know because I have asked) and when they do it will be far too late.

The other option – and the only one that doesn’t involve publishers sitting passively waiting for something to come along and rescue them is to face up to the threat posed by Amazon, and refuse to do business with them. De-list.

Any senior publisher reading this will scoff – the notion of taking such a massive hit to their bottom line by refusing to do business with their biggest single customer is simply unthinkable. It is a way of guaranteeing a massive loss at years end and how are they going to justify that to the board? And what about authors, how are they going to feel about their sales collapsing?

All of it true. None of it to the point. There is only one question that needs answering. Are Amazon trying to kill publishers? If the answer is yes, then why wait, why go down without a fight? Sure, something might show up, but in the meantime Amazon are  bleeding them to death.

I’m almost tempted not to acknowledge the possibility there are those who think the answer is No. But, just briefly, take the example of e-book pricing, source of the most open conflict between publishers and Amazon thus far.

The kindle chart is very price sensitive – for all but big brands even £1.99 seems ambitious (despite the fact that it is the price point Amazon likes for its own authors).

This has favoured self published authors, who don’t mind slapping a 99p price on a book – they have no overhead and are principally interested in getting readers anyway. From a business perspective 99p (and I know because I have a client who has had a Kindle number one at 99p) makes no sense whatsoever.

All Amazon need do is to say that anything priced below £1.99 (and that’s terribly low) shall be deemed a promotional edition and therefore shall not go into the chart. They would make more money, publishers would make more money and authors would make more money.

But they don’t – they prefer the inefficiencies of the current system because their entire business strategy from day one of their existence has been that in order to win big you have to spend big. Think of all those years they announced yet another eye watering loss. How everyone laughed. Hilarious.

Amazon is explicitly seeking to dominate the entire publishing chain: they commission the books, market them (I love the fact that they are so good at getting the books they publish into the bestseller lists they control) and sell them onto their own proprietary devices and make money three ways.

Where is the space for big publishers in this scenario? They have a choice, they can either sit on their hands and hope something shows up with the prospect of years of diminishing profits, rounds of redundancies and years of ‘publishing in crisis’ stories in the media or they can fight.

But they’re too big? We’d never win! Perhaps. But Amazon do have their weak spots.

1. They have encouraged a flood of terrible books onto the market and there are signs this is pissing off consumers because whatever they pay they do not want to waste their time reading fifty pages of a novel before deciding it is crap.
2. It is peculiar the way that Amazon published books by authors with no profile in the UK appear so regularly in the Kindle top ten. It would be wrong to say that they are simply parachuting them in, but even if they simply know how to pull the levers of their own marketing machine better than anyone is that because they are not sharing information? If so where does that leave all those self published authors who Amazon promise a level playing field? Most importantly, where does that leave customers who might reasonably wonder if they are being mislead?
3. Given their incredible market strength in the UK why do they treat us like second class citizens? They don’t allow us access to the kindle development kit and their publishing presence in the UK is non-existent. Don’t UK authors matter? Doesn’t British culture matter? It would seem not.
4. Publishing matters. We tend to be a diffident/ironic lot (particularly in the UK) but what we do is valuable and we could communicate the shared passion for books that there is in this industry so much better than we do. Everyone I know who works in this business cares and cares passionately.

But, yeah, they are big and they are scary so: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Probably. But the rewards are potentially enormous. One only has to look at the incalculable benefit to Penguin just because it ‘got’ paperbacks seventy years ago. And one thing is certain, whoever that is, it will be a publisher who drives the process and is not driven by it. At the moment that is Amazon.