So Mother's Day was last Sunday and I completely blew it, and it's Amazon's fault. Well, half Amazon's fault. Let me back up.
My mom's been reading everything by Donna Tartt for as long as I can remember owning a library card, and when The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer for fiction back in April I figured that was my gift sorted. Hardcover, nice edition, maybe I'd even get it inscribed if I could find a signing somewhere (I couldn't, don't get excited). So about ten days before Mother's Day I go to order it on Amazon like a normal person in 2014, and instead of the usual "in stock, arrives tomorrow if you're Prime" it says something like "usually ships in 2 to 4 weeks." No explanation, no apology, just a number that made no sense for a book that's been out since October and sold something like a million copies already.
Turns out I wasn't imagining it. The Goldfinch is published by Little, Brown, which is one of the Hachette imprints, and Amazon and Hachette have been in some kind of contract standoff over ebook pricing for months now. It only really became visible to regular customers in the last week or so, pre-order buttons disappearing on upcoming Hachette titles, print books getting quietly "delayed," discounts vanishing. The New York Times ran a piece on it and that's when I put it together that my mom's book wasn't stuck in a warehouse somewhere, it was a bargaining chip.
I get that this is a negotiation and Amazon has leverage and wants to use it, that's just business. But there's something a little gross about doing it through the actual physical inventory of books people are trying to buy for their mothers. It's not like Amazon posted a banner saying "we're in a dispute with this publisher, here's why your book is slow." You just get a vague shipping estimate and you're left to assume it's a warehouse problem, or your own fault for ordering late. I only found out otherwise because I happened to read about it. Most people won't.
Anyway I didn't want to give my mom an IOU on Mother's Day so Saturday afternoon I drove to the actual bookstore near my apartment, the little one that's somehow survived, and just bought a copy off the shelf for full price. Seventeen dollars more than Amazon would've charged me if Amazon were actually, you know, stocking the thing. I'm not even mad about the money. It felt kind of nice to hand cash to a person instead of clicking a button, honestly, which is not a sentence I expected to type on a tech blog I've been running since 2011, but here we are.
I don't think this makes me some anti-Amazon crusader starting today, I've got two Prime deliveries scheduled for this week and I'm not cancelling them. I just think it's worth remembering that "ships in 2-4 weeks" on a page that used to say "in stock" is not a neutral fact about the universe, it's a decision somebody made in a conference room, and it's dressed up to look like logistics instead of leverage. If you've been shopping for a book lately and the delivery estimate looked weirdly long, check who publishes it before you assume your mail carrier is slacking off.
The other thing nagging at me is how invisible the whole mechanism is by design. A shipping delay doesn't come with a footnote. There's no little icon that says "this is a labor dispute, essentially." Companies that big get to make decisions that ripple down into your Tuesday afternoon and you have basically no way of knowing why unless you go looking for it, and most people have better things to do with their Tuesday afternoon than investigate their book's supply chain. I don't have a tidy fix for that. I just noticed it, and now that I've noticed it I can't really un-notice it, and my mom got her book two days late with a story attached instead of a card.
She liked the book fine, for what it's worth. Said the ending dragged a little. I told her that's between her and Donna Tartt, I just carried it up three flights of stairs.