Legal director Sandeep Vaheesan and policy counsel Tara Pincock co-published a powerful piece emphasizing that even the biggest publishers are no match for Amazon’s death grip on the book market.

It’s a common trope in movies: A mob enforcer walks into a shop, looks around, and then says to the owner, “Nice place you got here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it.” Every viewer understands that a shakedown is in the works. The shop owner can either pay up immediately, or else his livelihood will burn to the ground.

But what do we call it when a large firm makes a similar, although not quite so blatant, threat to a smaller firm that is reliant on its business? What’s the laissez-faire euphemism for an arrangement that coerces the smaller firm into acquiescing to the larger firm’s unreasonable demands because if it refuses, it will lose substantial business and face financial ruin?

In the book market, this is Amazon’s position in relation to publishing houses. The antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and 17 states last fall hardly addresses the book industry—the first market that Jeff Bezos and his now trillion-dollar corporation targeted and took over. But that doesn’t mean Amazon is, or should be, off the hook.

Amazon is the largest bookseller in the world. Consequently, the publishing industry relies on it to get its product to market. Amazon earns an estimated $28 billion a year from selling books. In 2020, the House Judiciary Committee found that Amazon controlled more than 50 percent of the overall (online and offline) print book market and more than 80 percent of the e-book market. In other words, if a publisher’s titles aren’t available on Amazon, it might as well close shop and find a new line of business. Even the biggest publishers are no match for Amazon’s death grip on the book market.

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