Why ICANN Should Approve Amazon's Application to Own the .BOOK Domain from a Member of the Association of American Publishers

HOUSTON, March 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- While traditional book publishers and author rights groups lambaste Amazon.com, Inc's application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) for the closed generic gTLD domain string .BOOK, the Seattle-based retail giant has found an unlikely ally in two members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), one of Amazon, Inc.'s most vocal critics, who both have full voting rights on the AAP's board.

Schiel & Denver Book Publishers and its children's division Heirloom Children's Book Publishers, who have been members of the Association of American Publishers for a number of years, have come out in support of Amazon; citing the retailer's constitutional rights to freedom of speech. Schiel & Denver is publicly applauding Jeff Bezos's company for the innovative and fresh lens they say Amazon uniquely brings to the book business.

Rather than Amazon's potential control of generic book-related domains being an antitrust issue or monopoly, Schiel & Denver said Amazon makes the book publishing industry a fairer and more operable environment for consumer rights, and that the commercial benefits that Amazon's ownership of the domain strings .BOOK, .READ and .AUTHOR domains, would bring to independent authors, vastly outweigh any perceived reduction as the Author Guild claim.

Citing Literary Brooklyn author Evan Hughes's recent opinion in Wired.com dated 19 March 2013, in which big book publishers are described as being "saddled with the costs of getting dead trees to customers—paper, printing, binding, warehousing, and shipping, that accounts for roughly 80 percent of their business," Schiel & Denver said that as an independent book publisher, it believes it has an important Christian role to fulfill as a member of the American book publishing community, in supporting Amazon, Inc's innovative methods.

Schiel & Denver, which is a member of the United Nations Global Compact Office, said it recognizes that Amazon's dominance is healthy for competition, and although acknowledging that a giant corporation as successful as Amazon certainly does not need its vote, Schiel & Denver said it wishes to stress that part of the reason the book publishing industry is not already dead is due to Amazon's single-handed genius in transforming the landscape. It's only because Amazon has done so much good, Schiel & Denver said, that independent authors like the many quality talents the Houston-based book publishing company represents, have any literary voice in the marketplace at all. Without Amazon's growth, were the status quo left to be set by the traditional publishers, Schiel & Denver stated speaking on a closed company teleconference, the book buying public would never have even heard of success stories like E L James's Fifty Shades of Grey.

Schiel & Denver's advice to their larger multi-national colleagues at the Association of American Publishers, who are complaining about Amazon's success, is that they should use their classical backlists and talented staff to set new heights, by building a new business model that book consumers will flock to – and in essence, to do what America does best - innovate, and succeed through hard work and outcompeting rivals through coming up with better products that the book buying consumer will prefer.

James Egan
Schiel & Denver Book Publishers
10685-B Hazelhurst Drive
Suite 8575
Houston, TX
77043
832-699-0264

Schiel & Denver Book Publishers enables independent authors to professionally publish a book to major booksellers in the USA, Canada, Europe, Australia and South Africa, with full support from an expert book publishing company team.

Learn more at http://www.schieldenver.com and http://www.schieldenver.co.uk.

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SOURCE Schiel & Denver Book Publishers