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will-brown
12th November 2014

Where have all the book Amagone?

There’s a rumble in the jungle, but this time it’s our small book retailers getting knocked out
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TLDR

In the business world there’s a saying: “cornering the market.” Essentially it means finding your niche. Amazon hasn’t done this, it has enveloped portions of the market whole.

If you want something, whether it be a book, a TV show, a child’s rocking horse, drinking helmet or a sex toy, you can Amazon it; the online retailer will cater to the consumers every desire.

What with speedy delivery services and irresistible prices, it is difficult not to indulge in those guilty moments of online retail therapy. “Buy in one click,” how magical! Never mind the fact that it’s all backed up by a poorly paid workforce whose workload is such that they are at an increased risk of mental illness, according to a recent BBC report. Never mind the whopping gap in our public finances, or where the tax from Amazon’s £4.3 billion worth of UK sales should be. We love it.

For Amazon, the sky is literally the limit, last year Amazon was toying with the idea of drone delivery systems. One can almost envision a dystopian future where the skies are dotted not by birds, but by Amazon deliveries.

Amazon started off simply as an online book retailer and although it expanded into new markets quickly, predictably that’s where its influence is most felt today.

Last year in the USA Amazon held a whopping 65 per cent share of books sold online and a 41 per cent share of all new book sales. Britain isn’t far off with Amazon holding a near 35 per cent share of the book market. The e-book market in both countries is similarly dominated: Amazon accounting for over 70 per cent of all e-book sales. And today Amazon’s expansion shows no sign of waning.

Think about the power that such a market share gives to Amazon; an author knows that nearly half of their sales will be through the retail giant. Recently, while the political writer Owen Jones was publicising his new book The Establishment he pointed to Amazon as having the power to make or break any author’s success.

The key lies in Amazon’s ability to withhold the sale of small or independent publishers’ books—unless they agree to often extortionate and unacceptable business deals. The editor of magazine The Bookseller, Philip Jones, told the BBC that effectively Amazon’s terms were a “form of assisted suicide for the industry,” as they push small players out of the market.

However, the effect more noticeable to the average reader is Amazon’s devastating impact on independent bookstores. Thatcherite reforms in the 1990s heralded a deregulation of the book market, later allowing pricing to be slashed tremendously on online sales. This has resulted in a third of independent bookshops closing within the last nine years, leaving the UK with fewer than 1000 independent bookstores. If you exclude charity shops, Google will show you that Manchester only possesses five to cover a population of over 2.5 million.

I’m not one to fetishize independent bookshops, which can often be incredibly stuffy and pretentious, but we are losing something of cultural significance here to the mechanised commodification of literature.

The French certainly think so. The protection of independent bookstores is one of the few things that both the political far right and the far left unite on. In France, regulation has been in place since the late 80s to limit pricing discounts. Today the continuation of these discounts into the online world limits Amazon’s ability to offer free delivery on orders.

Now this may sound fastidious and dull—it is—but this legislation has had a very real effect on French high streets where there are presently more than 2700 independent book stores, nearly three times more than the similarly populated UK. Effectively, the French have given the Davids of the literary world a fighting chance against Goliath.

Now I’d be a hypocrite to call for a boycott of Amazon, my order history from the company goes on for several pages; just today my flatmate was complaining about answering the door in the early morning for a package I’d ordered.

In a world where people read less and less, the value and efficiency of the company in providing accessibility to information cannot be downplayed. However, sustained pressure must be put on the company by us, as the consumers, to be accommodating to the wider literary world.


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