Help Books, Their Future
Lunch break. You remember to order your favorite book. Unlock the phone, tap on Amazon. Wow, 60% off! Buy Now! Done, yay! Now, you track it once right after placing the order, then every fifteen excited minutes.
Here's a twist. Your favourite author may one day suffer through this.
Amazon, today, has 50% control of the US print book market. There's an estimation that this figure will rise to 80% by the end of 2025.
Sounds like a monopoly, right? Let's get to the point.
Why You Should Stop Buying From Amazon?
- Algorithm-driven: Books promoted by Amazon are the ones which are already popular. The corporation only puts value on profits, and books driving revenue and customers to Amazon only have a chance to be at the top, again.This brings to light another issue…
- New Authors: Wait, if Amazon is promoting books already selling well, where will the new authors go? How will new authors find their audience? With Amazon having a monopoly, which means a single entity having control of a market, authors will work for Amazon to sell on commission, abiding to Amazon's terms and conditions. Authors will have to create content which Amazon will dictate to fulfil its algorithm, not diversity, not enemies-to-lovers nor something that readers would want to read, which leads to say...
- Amazon sells cheap, but the cost is publishers: Let me dive directly into examples.
In 2012, Amazon demanded a 45% discount deal with a small publisher, McFarland & Co. It almost doubled the discount rate, which made McFarland & Co. make zero profit on the books sold by them on Amazon.
In 2014, since Hachette gave a pushback regarding ebook pricing, Amazon temporarily disallowed customers to pre-order books published by Hachette.
How is Amazon able to do this? Its logo speaks for itself. A to Z. Amazon sells everything, a lot more than books. Due to this, they can sell books at quite a discount and make up the loss through other goods. This has led others in the publishers industry to be incompetent, from which we arrive on...
- Local Bookstores: Ah, bookstores. They are the lifeline where you can meet your favorite author, where book clubs form, where we can smell a book, where you get signed copies, where a smiling bookseller will press a book into your hand you might be thankful for, something definitely an algorithm cannot. Don’t they create a genuine connection in the community?
What Can I Do?
Good question. We will do it together.
- Library: If you're worried about finances, you're not alone but let's make sure our authors get paid properly. Borrowing books from libraries is moral, free. Everytime a library buys book/s from authors, they get paid. If your nearest library doesn’t have your required book, it can borrow that book on a request from another library. There's also a term for it, called the inter-library loan, which again is free.
- Barnes & Nobles: Barnes and Nobles have discounted rates on their websites. You can place an order, and to avoid paying shipping charges, pick up your book on the same day!
- Bookstores: Support them, please! They love you. Moreover, bookstore employees have more knowledge on books than a large chain.
- Bookshop.org, Indiebound and Book Outlet: Bookshop is an online organization, helping independent bookstores compete for online sales. As of now, the public benefit corporation helped bookstores earn $18,700,000 in profit and had taken away 1% of Amazon’s sales of books, which has served a lifeline to many bookshops.
Indiebound: I just love their website: "When you shop at small businesses, you help your community, the environment, and the economy."
Indiebound helps you find the nearest independent bookstores.
BookOutlet helps you find your books at unbelievably low prices. It may not offer every book but a check doesn’t hurt.
Wrapping Up
For the future of books, let's change the way we buy them. Help and support the publishing industry, whether you're a hopeful author, a devouring reader or maybe you just love to fill your shelf, not knowing when you might read them.
