Opinion Amazon
Bad for the trade, bad for customers
This year’s LBF Great Debate is Amazon: Friend of Foe? One of the speakers, BA c.e.o. Tim Godfray outlines his reasons why Amazon is a negative infl uence on not just other booksellers, but publishers, agents, authors and the consumer
THE HIGH STREET bookshops I represent are cultural and community beacons on the high street. T ey are full of enterprising and passionate booksellers, who run local events, innovate and—what’s more—are a key to the “discovery” of books for many book buyers. However, there is no doubt they are facing tough times. Bookshops are closing and the majority of our members tell us that Amazon is the number one threat to their businesses. But I believe high street bookshops
are only the tip of the iceberg. T ere is more to consider, and what is bad for bookshops now is also having an increasingly negative infl uence on the book trade as a whole. It is not only booksellers under the cosh, but publishers and agents too run the risk of being excluded due to Amazon’s wish to be a book retailer and publisher, and its aggressive plans to vertically integrate within the company’s structure. Amazon has achieved its
phenomenal growth and infl uence because consumers like what it does, but, in my view, if it continues to threaten large parts of the book trade, this will not only be bad for the industry, but also, in the long run, for the consumer too.
Amazon is H-U-G-E
Amazon.co.uk’s website was responsible in 2011 for £2.91bn turnover. Moreover, it is believed to be responsible for 95% of e-book purchases in the UK. Amazingly, 92% of the 1.3 million e-readers sold in the
22 THE BOOKSELLER DAILY AT LBF | 15 APRIL 2013
than Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins combined”
Amazon has more market value and disposable cash
UK before Christmas were Kindles; this is more than double the EU monopoly threshold. If that isn’t domination of the
marketplace, I don’t know what is. What’s more, Amazon is moving
into the entire publishing chain; not just selling publishers’ books, but commissioning its own books, marketing them and selling them on its own proprietary devices. Amazon has more market value and disposable cash than Hachette, Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, Random House and HarperCollins combined. When we last looked at the
company structure, there were 18 separate companies owned by Amazon that covered book printing and publishing, book marketplaces, audio and digital reading. T ere is not only Kindle Singles, but self- publishing companies Kindle Digital Text Platform (for e-books) and AmazonEncore; then Mortlake Romance, T omas & Mercer (mysteries and thrillers), T e Domino Project (Seth Godin imprint); AmazonCrossing (books in translation); Brilliance (audio); and CreateSpace (POD). Wow! And within the last few days, Amazon has announced its decision to purchase the book recommendation website, Goodreads, at a rumoured purchase price of $150m. So the writer goes straight to
Amazon. Amazon publishes the author’s work and can then promote the book to targeted users—because Amazon has the ability from data mining its consumer data to know what its customers buy, when they buy it, what books they actually read on their Kindles and even which books are not read in full. Scary. With such a set up, they really do have the ability to destroy the book trade as we know it. Having such a dominant position
enables Amazon to put huge pressure on individual publishers for higher trade discounts to be given, enabling it to sell books at much lower prices than competing booksellers. And if the publisher refuses, then, of course, there’s the possibility of delisting, as happened with the Independent Publishers Guild recently when Amazon pulled the sale of more than 4,000 e-books in the US after a fracas over terms.
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