Some of the strongest criticism of Amazon comes from authors most closely aligned with the prestigious parts of the old system, many of those complaints appearing as reviews of “The Everything Store”, Brad Stone’s recent book on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. Steve Coll, Dean of the Columbia Journalism School, wrote one such, “Citizen Bezos,” in The New York Review of Books:

At least two qualities distinguished Bezos from other pioneers of e-commerce and help to explain his subsequent success. The first was his gargantuan vision. He did not see himself merely chipping away at Barnes & Noble’s share of retail book sales; he saw himself developing one of the greatest retailers in history, on the scale of Sears Roebuck or Walmart. Secondly, Bezos focused relentlessly on customer service — low prices, ease of use on his website, boundless inventory, and reliable shipping. To this day, Amazon is remarkably successful at pleasing customers.

Coll does not intend any of this as a compliment.

He writes about book-making and selling as if there are only two possible modes: Either the current elites remain firmly in charge, or else Amazon will become a soul-crushing monopoly. The apres nous, le deluge!-ness of this should be enough to convince anyone that the publishers are bullshitting, but if your worry is market manipulation, the publishing cartel we have today has has already created decidedly non-hypothetical harms.

Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.

Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to shield expensive hardbacks from competition with cheap ebooks, so ebook prices had to rise. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.

Faced with evidence of their connivance, the publishers all settled with the Department of Justice. (Apple argued they’d done nothing wrong, took the case to court, and lost.) For all the worries about a future where Justice has to investigate Amazon, nothing that company has done comes close to conspiring against their customers. Coll concedes that these publishers did, in fact, break the law, but excuses them on the grounds that had they not colluded, they might make less money.

To defend this conclusion, Coll commits himself to an odd hypothesis: “There is no evidence that high retail book prices today discourage reading.” Set aside that fact that such a statement would contradict everything we know about the effect of price on human behavior; the book industry’s own practice produces just such evidence—the market for paperbacks. If prices didn’t deflect demand, there would be no bump in sales when the paperback appears. Instead, there is just such a bump, and for popular books, it is accompanied by a separate marketing campaign, designed to bring out the very customers previously discouraged by the high cost of the hardback.

The weaker reading of Coll’s statement — there’s always something to read for free, so no whining if you have to wait a year to get hold of Piketty’s “Capital” or Strayed’s “Wild”— is an odd underestimation of the importance of reading from someone who cares about writing. Reading is especially important when a book comes along and synchronizes public conversation; the publishers’ preferred pricing model—wait a year for the cheap copy—means that people who can only afford the paperback can’t be part of that conversation.

As has been widely noted, the last time the industry panicked about increased access to reading material was with the original spread of paperbacks, an invention that occasioned similar hand-wringing about the economics and prestige of publishing. “Successful authors are not interested in original publishing at 25 cents,” said one publisher at the time, a sentiment as vain as it was wrong. Whole genres were born after the spread of low-cost publishing, a happy colloquium of new writers and new readers previously thwarted by high prices.

Although Hachette’s CEO recently claimed “The invention of mass-market paperbacks was great for all”, the real story is one of co-optation. When paperback publishers were independent, prices fell for the first two decades of the new format. Agitated publishers worried that the new format “could undermine the whole structure of publishing.” They finally figured out how to restore that structure in the early 1960s, through industry-wide consolidation. Over the next two decades, hardback publishers merged with the competition and increased the price of paperbacks by almost 300%, while delaying their publication for a year or more.

All this had the effect of degrading paperbacks as a substitute for hardbacks. The industry’s idea of co-existence looks like a reduction in competition rather than a response to it. The same dynamics are playing out today. The big publishers complain about the Kindle, but they could create a competitive market for ebook readers tomorrow morning, by simply publishing without DRM (as Tor, O’Reilly, Baen and other publishers currently do.) This would make digital distribution more attractive, though, which is the last thing they want.

Ebooks return the industry to the dynamics of pre-1960 paperback publishing, but this time publishers can’t bring readers to heel by buying up the competition. This threat to legacy revenues so worries Coll that he ends his essay with a revenge fantasy of sorts, imagining that the Department of Justice itself would commit to preventing competition on price. This would presumably save the big publishers the bother of unlawful conspiracy, by making screwing the reader a matter of Federal policy, not just mercantile desire.