Bookseller campaigns against Amazon while judging the prize Amazon sponsors
An American independent bookseller has set up a blog called Against Amazon, despite serving as a judge for an award sponsored by the online retailer. The move re-ignites a row that erupted in October over Amazon's sponsorship of the Best Translated Book Award, the US literary prize run by the University of Rochester's translation website, Three Percent.
The bookseller is Jeff Waxman of 57th Street Books in Chicago, one of nine fiction judges. His objection is to Amazon, not to the prize. The prize, however, now runs on Amazon's money.
How the money arrived
Melville House, a US publisher whose work has previously won the award, declared it would boycott the prize in future after Amazon agreed to give it 25,000 dollars in sponsorship. That grant let the award carry a cash prize for the first time in its history.
Award organiser Chad Post was unmoved. He said he would not be changing the sponsorship deal. "Jeff Waxman, of 57th Street Books, is one judge of nine for fiction, and as a young, outspoken bookseller, he's entitled to his opinion," he said.
Post went further, and the passage is worth reading in full, because it explains why the award exists at all. "My goal, as it was in 2007 when I started the Best Translated Book Award by myself with absolutely no funding, is to bring attention and admiration to translators and the beautiful books they translate. The fact that this April we'll be giving 5,000 dollars apiece to two international authors and two translators makes me very happy. The books and the translators are the most important thing here."
He then took aim at his critics. "In the end all the Melville House and Jeff Waxman stuff will hopefully bring more attention to the awards. But I wonder how they'd feel if their complaining about a minor piece of a massive pie ended up hindering the possible readership for these books. That wouldn't be all that cool."
The actual dilemma
Strip away the personalities and the problem is uncomfortably simple. From 2007 the award ran on nothing. No prize money, no budget, no cheque for the translator who spent eighteen months on a novel that sold nine hundred copies. Amazon offered 25,000 dollars. Nobody else did.
Independent booksellers regard Amazon as an existential threat, and they are not being hysterical: discounting, loss-leading and the sheer gravitational pull of the platform have closed a great many shops. Publishers like Melville House see a company that squeezes their margins while positioning itself as literature's patron. Both are entitled to refuse its money.
What neither has done is replace it. That is the whole argument, and it never gets stated plainly. Refusing a sponsor is only a moral position if somebody funds the alternative.
Why this prize in particular
The Best Translated Book Award matters more than its size suggests, because translated fiction in the United States operates on the thinnest of margins. Roughly three per cent of books published in America are translations, which is where the Three Percent site got its name. Within that, literary fiction and poetry account for a sliver.
The books on the list are published by tiny presses. A prize with 5,000 dollars attached, and the attention that comes with it, can genuinely change a small publisher's year. For the translator, being named and paid is not symbolic; it is the difference between a viable profession and an expensive hobby.
The awkward position of the judge
Waxman's critics say he cannot campaign against a company while accepting its patronage. His defenders say a judge reads books and votes, and that Amazon's cheque buys no editorial influence whatsoever. Post's response, that a judge is entitled to his opinion, suggests the organisers see no conflict at all.
There is a serious question underneath. Sponsorship buys legitimacy, not just publicity. A company that funds the leading prize for literature in translation acquires a plausible claim to be literature's friend, and that claim is worth considerably more than 25,000 dollars to a corporation the bookshops are fighting.
Amazon was also publishing translations
The detail that made the row sharper is that Amazon was not merely writing cheques. It was moving into publishing itself, and specifically into translated literature, building an imprint that would go on to publish more foreign fiction in English than almost anyone else in the country. That put the company in an unusual position: simultaneously the retailer independent shops blamed for their decline, the sponsor of the prize honouring translated work, and a publisher whose own titles were eligible for it.
Defenders point out, reasonably, that a company willing to lose money on Icelandic novels is doing something no commercial publisher in New York would touch. Critics reply that a monopolist funding the ecosystem it dominates is not philanthropy, it is vertical integration with a bow on it. Both positions survive contact with the evidence, which is why the argument has never been settled and periodically flares up in bookshops, on panels and across forums such as r/books.
Where it lands
The 25-strong shortlist for the 2011 award is due at the end of January. Amazon.co.uk did not respond to a request for comment. The books will be read, the translators will be paid, and the shops that object will keep objecting, which is roughly how these arrangements usually settle: uneasily, and with the money still on the table.