"If the business terms and conditions end up being dictated to publishers by one bookseller who has a chokehold over the value chain, publishers are going to have a hard time staying profitable," said Bill McCoy, general manager for Adobe's digital publishing business.
After years of feeling captive to bookstore chains, publishers have quietly seized on electronic books as a way to sell directly to consumers.
Q: Do you agree with the argument that while fraud is happening and while bots are imitating real people, there's a lack of incentive to stamp it out because in the end, everyone throughout the supply chain from publisher to ad tech vendors to the trading desks gets paid?
Those familiar with the disagreement — who spoke on condition of anonymity because the negotiations are confidential — say Barnes & Noble believes that because its physical display space is so important to publishers, and because it is the last major retail chain remaining, publishers should be doing more to support it.
After Borders called it quits two years ago this week, Barnes & Noble became the last big chain where publishers could get the exposure for their books that allows readers to discover them, and to sell all manner of books big and small that are still part of the foundation of the industry.
Since Google controls a lot of the inventory through AdSense, it can make money at different points along the chain, from publishers as well as advertisers.
The demand was always there, but exploiting it was never in the interests of the chains and publishers who dominate the book industry.
"You hear the extortion comment all the time, but I prefer to look at it as, it just honestly negatively impacts the value chain between the publisher and consumer".
In the case of Google, they also flag up reports that suggest it has used its dominance of the adtech market to "encourage publishers to reduce the number of ad tech vendors and thus the number of trackers on their sites" — via a consent gathering tool that restricts the number of supply chain partners a publisher can share consent with to 12 vendors. .
The lists will be compiled from weekly data from publishers, chain bookstores, independent booksellers and online retailers, among other sources.
