The Buy Button Is the Business

At 10:30 on the night of January 23, 2025, about ninety minutes before a midnight deadline, Amazon and Bloomsbury reached an agreement in principle on a new contract. If they hadn't, Amazon was prepared to stop selling Bloomsbury's print books in the UK, Europe, and Australia, and its Kindle editions worldwide. Sarah J. Maas, JK Rowling, Gillian Anderson: gone from the world's biggest bookstore at the stroke of twelve, available only through third-party sellers.

Bloomsbury was not some struggling midlist house. That same month, trade press coverage crowned it the UK market leader for 2024, with growth more than double Penguin Random House's, powered by the most commercially unstoppable author of the decade. The Bookseller estimated that as much as £100 million in trade sales was at stake if the blackout went ahead.

The strongest publisher in Britain, holding the strongest author in the world, negotiated with a countdown clock running. That is what leverage looks like when one retailer controls the shelf.

Not a partnership. A dependency.

Amazon did something unusual during the Bloomsbury standoff: it went public. In a statement, it said Bloomsbury was "far out of sync with other publishers" and had refused seven months of good-faith negotiation. Maybe so. We weren't in the room, and Bloomsbury never gave its side. But notice the shape of the fight. When a bookshop and a publisher fall out, the publisher loses one account. When Amazon and a publisher fall out, the publisher loses the market.

The scale here is hard to overstate. Estimates cited in the trade press put Amazon at roughly half of UK print book sales and around 90 percent of digital and audiobook sales. Those aren't the numbers of a big customer. They're the numbers of the market itself.

The Bookseller noted a fine irony in the timing: Amazon's deadline landed on the very day the UK government announced that Google and Apple would be investigated under a new competition regime built for exactly this kind of entrenched market power. Books, somehow, were not on the agenda.

The publishers finally say the quiet part in parliament

They are now. This month, Dan Conway, chief executive of the Publishers Association, stood up in parliament and called on the Competition and Markets Authority to designate Amazon with Strategic Market Status. SMS is the CMA's newest and sharpest tool. It allows regulators to impose binding conduct requirements on companies whose market power is so entrenched that ordinary competition can't discipline them.

Conway came prepared. He cited a survey of 150 publishers describing a familiar toolkit of pressure tactics: buy buttons removed, titles marked out of stock, products de-listed, and de-listing threatened as a bargaining chip during commercial negotiations. His ask is modest, almost polite. Fairer trading terms. A functioning complaints process. Limits on self-preferencing and enforced bundling.

The Publishers Association has been making a version of this argument for years, telling regulators in written evidence that Amazon is the book industry's lone gatekeeper, with no realistic prospect of challenge. What's changed is the context around the argument.

The tool exists. It's already in use.

Here's the part that makes this a live question rather than a lobbying wish. The CMA has already put the SMS framework to work against companies that are not Amazon. It imposed conduct requirements on Google over how publisher content feeds its AI and search products. It opened an SMS investigation into Microsoft's software empire over cloud licensing. The machinery works. It is running right now.

So the question is no longer whether a British regulator should have the power to set rules for dominant platforms. That debate is over, and the platforms lost. The question is why the retailer that sits between nearly every British reader and nearly every British book has so far escaped a designation that Google could not.

Where a small press stands in all this

We'll be honest about our own position, because it's complicated. Staten House books are sold on Amazon. So are the books of nearly every independent press and self-published author on earth. Amazon built the rails that made modern indie publishing possible, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

But gratitude for the rails is not an argument against rules for the railroad. Our view is that Conway is right, and if anything he's late. A market where the leading publisher in the country can be marched to a midnight deadline is not a market where a small press negotiates anything at all. We don't negotiate with Amazon. Nobody our size does. We accept terms, and the terms can change, and the buy button that constitutes our entire retail presence can vanish in a contract dispute we'd have no power to contest.

Defenders of the status quo will say Amazon earned its position by serving readers well, with low prices and everything in stock. Often true. But the Bloomsbury affair showed how quickly "everything in stock" becomes conditional. The shelf is infinite until the negotiation gets hard, and then it isn't.

Publishing has survived upheavals in who controls the shelf before. The collapse of the Net Book Agreement, the chain-store consolidation of the nineties, the supermarket discounters that followed. Each time, the industry adapted and the books kept coming. What's different now is that there has never been a single account whose loss means near-total invisibility, and there has never been less pretense that the relationship is a partnership between equals.

The regulators will decide what they decide. The more interesting question is for readers: when one company controls which books you can see, does it matter that, so far, it has mostly chosen to show you all of them?