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Shockwaves rippled across the book industry last Wednesday (4th September) after Amazon sent customers a copy of The Testaments almost a week early, which it later apologised for and attributed to "technical error". Editor Becky Hardie said the incident, which she discovered en route to the Booker shortlist party on Tuesday, "was just chaos... it was very, very hectic, having all those pieces collected together, which all had to be reconfigured very fast."
Such is the power of Amazon and PRH, that most who spoke to The Bookseller about the breach and the embargoes insisted on anonymity. An unnamed literary agent said: "While I understand embargoes and sanctions are important, all it takes is for one poorly paid person at Amazon to hit the wrong button, and it’s over."
A senior publicist added: "[Embargoes are] just as frequent as before, if not more so with the advent of digital technology, and social media making the risk of a leak or broken embargo even more serious due to how it can spread—and how quickly." They revealed that distributing numbered proofs of eagerly awaited books for press is commonplace, so that "if one goes astray or lost, we know who did it".
An independent bookseller said : "[Amazon is] too powerful for publishers to sanction them, so it's basically above embargoes—they are only for us little guys, who could actually be hurt by sanctions."
American Booksellers Association c.e.o. Oren Teicher shared his frustration at the BA Conference: "Companies that size don’t make mistakes... I think that will catch up with it eventually."
Chair of the Booker judges Peter Florence said he had never seen a security operation like PRH’s in 35 years, and dubbed the NDA "ferocious". "As a containment operation, you have to admire its thoroughness," he said. However, he believes "the tone with which it was conducted does seem to be almost totalitarian—and the irony of that, given the content of the book, is not lost on anyone".
Yet Florence said embargoes of this type are a dying breed. "I think PRH has played it so that no one will ever sign up to it again... and maybe that’s a good thing. There is a much bigger question about equal opportunity for indie retailers and Amazon."