 Hello everybody. My name is Barry Lynn and I run the Open Markets program here at New America and just wanted to start off by thanking you all for coming out today and braving the giant snowdrift to get here. And we kind of have a pretty packed agenda, so I'm just gonna try and start more or less on time, which is not always what we do in New America. So anyway, I'm just gonna have a couple of brief comments and then I'm gonna turn it over to Doug Preston. But, you know, in recent years, the reason we're here today is because in recent years two technological revolutions have entirely transformed how books are produced and sold in America. The internet has made it far easier for readers to buy any physical book they want, even the most obscure. The e-book has readily cut the cost of producing and distributing books by in essence eliminating the physical book entirely. On the surface, these two revolutions are great news for both the reader and the author. There's more information, more readily available, more ways for the author and reader to interact directly. Yet behind this heartening evolution is something, we see something very different entirely. What we see is extreme and growing concentration of power in the American market for books. A generation ago, the four largest retailers together held less than 12% of book sales in the United States. Among publishers, the top 75% of book sales were distributed among 50 independent companies. Today, by contrast, we see a single company that dominates retailing entirely, controlling 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% of different market sectors. This same company is increasingly powerful force in publishing. This one company indeed dominates this vital marketplace of ideas to a degree that we have never before seen in the United States, not in television or radio, not in film or newspapers, not in telephony or telegraphy. Now, there are many people who say, many people who believe that Amazon uses its monopoly powers in ways that are good for the reader, that are good for society. They say that Amazon wields its power in ways that result in more books at lower prices. I believe we're going to hear some stories today that will throw that idea that cheaper is always better into some doubt. But even if that were so, even if Amazon truly has lowered prices and truly continues to lower prices, we must also deal with the fact that Amazon actively, aggressively manipulates the flow of books between the author and reader. That Amazon favors some books and some authors and disfavors others. That Amazon routinely interferes in the ability of individual citizens to have their say or to find their truth. This is not a theoretical problem. Amazon's manipulation of the flow of books across its platform is not something that Amazon might do in the future. It is, on the contrary, something that Amazon has done repeatedly in the past. Amazon did so most dramatically in its effort in 2014 to force the publisher has shed to accept its terms of service. In that fight, Amazon simply cut off the sale of hashet books to American readers and I think we'll hear more about that later. This was a blunt tool and it's not one that Amazon uses every day. But I do think we'll hear later today about some of the other ways that Amazon warps the flow of books and information in America. Ways that may be more subtle but are perhaps just as effective. So anyway, we're here today to discuss whether this manipulation of the interaction between the citizen as author and the citizen as reader, whether this emergence of a master intermediary mediator in the U.S. book market is a problem that requires the government to act. And if so, what might the government do? We have a really excellent collection of folks to discuss this today. We're going to start off with a presentation by Doug Preston. He's the head of Authors United. He's a journalist. He's the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction. We're going to follow it up with a discussion between the author Scott Darrow and Chris Leonard of New America. Scott is a lawyer and he's the author of many bestselling books and he's also the former president of the Authors Guild. He knows this issue quite well. We then have two panels. One of the panels is composed of both traditional authors and self-published authors. And the other is mainly made up of antitrust lawyers and experts in data and discrimination. And I'm not going to introduce those people yet. The moderators of those panels will do so. Well, we're going to also hear a short presentation to give us some historical perspective from the author and legal scholar Jeffrey Rosen, who's the executive director of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Just a few quick points before I turn it over to Doug. First, this event is not sponsored by any private company. We have not accepted any money from any publisher. We have not accepted any money from any booksellers or association of booksellers. We are holding this discussion only because we think this is a topic of vital importance for the American public. Second, many of the people we asked to stand with us today chose not to do so. They chose to not to do so not because they disagree with us as to whether Amazon's monopoly is a problem. They chose not to be here because they were afraid to speak in public about their experiences with Amazon because they were afraid to speak their opinions to their fellow citizens. They were afraid that Amazon would retaliate against them or people dear to them. And third, as I think we'll hear from our last panel, the various problems posed by Amazon's concentration of power of the American market for books may be a lot easier for us to fix than might now seem the case. America's past offers many lessons about how to deal with similar problems. Two simple principles stand out. First is that when you have a monopoly network, a monopolized network, you do not allow the people that run that monopoly to vertically integrate into lines of business that are run by people who depend on them. It creates a clear, simple, and inescapable conflict of interest. In this case, bluntly, Amazon probably should not be allowed to be in the publishing business. Second, monopoly networks should always be kept neutral. They should never be allowed to discriminate, not in service, not in pricing, not in quality. Amazon, in this case, should be required to deliver the exact same terms to all comers. So there's a little bit, for more information about this, there's an article that was in the New York Times last summer, last July 12th, about some of our efforts. It's by David Straitfeld. A couple little points. Paul Eid, who from Freshfields and antitrust lawyer who was on our second panel, is not going to be able to make it because of the snow storm. And Mark Coker, who's on our first panel, he's in California, we're going to be skyping him in. This is going to be available for streaming. So whatever you're saying, there are people out there watching it. It's also going to be recorded and available for people to watch in the future. And anyway, now I want to turn it over to Doug Preston, who is the head of Authors United. Thank you, Barry, and thank you, everyone, for coming, braving the snow, which doesn't look too bad, but thanks for coming anyway. I founded Authors United. I'm a Haschette author, and I discovered that along with all the 3000 other Haschette authors that our books were being targeted by Amazon for punitive action as a way to try to intimidate our publisher into agreeing to its terms. And some of the things they did, they delayed delivery by two to four weeks. They refused to pre-sell the books. And also, I remember going to my site, because I'm an author, I'm obsessively going to my site to look at my own books. And this big window popped up and it said, instead of buying this book, wouldn't you rather buy a book by Lee Child just as good an author and it's a lot cheaper and you'll get it right away. So I called up Lee Child and I said, what the hell's going on? He said, I didn't do it. I didn't do it. But these are examples of Amazon's dirty tactics. So we formed Authors United. We had over a thousand authors, many Nobel laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners. We took out a two-page open letter in the New York Times to Jeff Bezos protesting his tactics. And eventually the dispute was settled. But the problem has not gone away. Right now, Amazon, according to Paul Krugman, the economist, Amazon has as large a market share in the entire book business as Standard Oil did in 1911 right before it was broken up into 34 companies. Now this would be concerning if the company in question, even if the company in question were benign, but we all know that Amazon is not a benign company. I have some statistics here that I hope are not damned lies, but Amazon now controls 75% of online sales of physical books, not e-books. 65% of e-book sales, more than 40% of new book sales and about 85% of e-book sales of self-published authors. To give you a small example of that, the largest publisher, physical publisher in the world, Penguin Random House sells 15,000 titles a year. Amazon uploads 500,000 titles a year to its website. It has as many titles as there are books in the Weidner Library at Harvard. That just shows you what kind of market share we're talking about. Now I have some statistics here that I just picked up. They haven't been published by the Codex Group and it shows that, and I'm only talking about physical books now, the retail share of physical books sold in bookstores has gone from 72% in 2010 to 33% today. And this statistical chart created by the Codex Group is entitled, Amazon and online share move to total domination. Amazon is a monopoly in absolutely every sense of the word. And so we wrote, Authors United, the Authors Guild and the American Book Association wrote a report or a letter to the Justice Department asking it to investigate Amazon's monopoly and the ways that we believe it has abused that monopoly power in search of a greater market share. And we submitted the letter in August. We had a very good meeting with the Justice Department in September. They listened to us. We don't know if they're going to do anything, but we hope they will. Now I have some more statistics for you. And this is only about physical books. Amazon completely dominates e-books. Physical books, $5.6 billion in book sales. That's equivalent to 3,600 bookstore equivalents with 40,000 bookstore jobs lost because of this. And Amazon has avoided collecting $625 million in state sales taxes in the half of the states that it doesn't have to collect sales taxes in. So this is a company that is, has dominated, is completely, has a monopolistic domination of the market. Now in our letter to the Justice Department, we argued two things. One was we had a lot of antitrust arguments about specific antitrust laws that Amazon has broken. And you're going to hear a lot about that later on from the lawyers. But the second part of our argument was the freedom of information problem. Our country has never before allowed a company, a single corporation to dominate a vital marketplace of ideas the way Amazon does today. And even before there was even antitrust law in 1866 when the first telegraph wires were being strung across the continent, the Congress leapt in and prevented Western Union from having a monopoly over the information transmitted over those wires, the first example of electronic communication in history. In the 20th century, the Congress passed many laws that prevented a consolidation of power in the newspaper industry, in radio, and in television. And most recently in Internet, for example, the merger between Time Warner cable and Comcast was blocked because it would have resulted in a 57% domination of the broadband cable market. But Amazon now has monopolistic control of what maybe argued or could be argued as the most important informational market we have, which are books. They have, as Barry mentioned, they are also engaging in content control. They are interfering, we believe, already with a free flow of information of ideas in our society. And this is something that's very concerning because the biggest ideas, the most complex ideas, are first introduced in books usually. Thomas Paine, for example, starting with Thomas Paine and going on to the present day, some of the most important parts of our democratic discourse have been in books. But because of Amazon's market behavior, because of its sucking of money out of the publishing industry to itself, many books are not being published that would have been published because they are too risky for publishers. Publishers are now only publishing books by, or not only, but they're really favoring now books by bestselling authors and celebrities. They're not taking risks with unproven authors as much as they did. They're not taking risks with unpopular or quirky ideas. And as a result, since 2009, authors have seen their income, the average author has seen his or her income decline by 30%. And these are authors who have been in the business for 15 years. And a lot of that can be traced to Amazon. So that really is, I've thrown a lot of statistics at you. Thank you for listening, and we appreciate you all being here. Thank you.