Amazon is pushing its ebook business harder than ever, and indie bookstores are pushing right back.
The online retail giant announced yesterday that it plans to build on its relationship with Waterstones, which stocks its Kindles, by extending the olive branch to small independent bookstores through its programme, Amazon Source.
The idea is to increase Amazon’s market reach by having the indies stock its ereaders, with the booksellers pocketing 10% of the price of any ebooks bought on those devices for the first two years after purchase.
According to Kindle VP Russ Grandinetti: "We believe that retailers, online or offline, small or large, should be striving to offer customers what they want – and many customers want to read both digital and print books.
"With Amazon Source, customers don’t have to choose between ebooks and their favorite neighborhood bookstore – they can have both."
What he doesn’t say is that the indie stores only get 6% off the purchase of each Kindle they choose to stock, meaning that’s also how much they make on the devices selling them at the RRP.
Publisher Melville House solicited responses from booksellers to see what they thought about the Source scheme, and it got some fairly damning responses.
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Lissa Muscatine, of Politics and Prose bookshop in DC, said: "We are not enticed in the least by the latest ‘offer’ from Amazon. It’s a dagger disguised as an olive branch – the latest effort by Amazon to gain traction with indie customers and loyalists."
And Harvard Book Store staff member Carol Horne pithily summed up the programme, writing: "We sell Kindles for essentially no profit, the new Kindle customer is in our store where they can browse and discover books, the new Kindle customer can then check the price on Amazon and order the ebook.
"We make a little on their ebook purchases, but then lose them as a customer completely after two years."
Colin McDonald, of Common Good Books, adds: "Getting 10% of every book purchased on a Kindle is like getting to keep the autograph of a celebrity caught pissing on your lawn. For two years."
Amazon’s approach seems to be that local bookstores are merely more grist to the mill, and arrogantly assumes the rollout of its Source programme will go swimmingly because – as Grandinetti suggests – booksellers have an apparent responsibility to provide ebooks.
Except that they don’t. They have a responsibility to keep their customers well supplied with a wide and interesting range of reading material, not to become pseudo-franchisees of a corporate giant.
Many people love ebooks – myself included – but when I visit my local indie it’s because I want to browse and find something new and exciting and different, with the help of staff more knowledgeable than a search algorithm, and to buy something that I can pick up and take away with me.
Grandinetti is right that there is appetite for both ebooks and print books, but Amazon’s goal isn’t to foster a symbiotic relationship between digital and print – nor should it be, as the two are different things entirely.
Its goal is more a boring version of a James Bond villain’s – to try and take over the world (of, er, bookselling).
