Last week, Amazon.com unveiled Amazon Source-a partnership through which retailers, including independent bookstores, can sell Amazon’s Kindle e-readers. In its press release, the online retailer described a literary utopia in which e-books and indie bookstores would peacefully coexist: “With Amazon Source, customers don’t have to choose between e-books and their favorite neighborhood bookstore-they can have both . “
Amazon’s program offers US retailers two options. As “Booksellers,” an option available to retailers in twenty-four states, they receive Kindles from Amazon at a six-per-cent discount off the suggested retail price and earn a commission of ten per cent on e-book sales in the two years following the sale of a Kindle. As “General Retailers,” available to stores in any state, they profit only from the sale of the device, but obtain it from Amazon at a discount of nine per cent.
It should come as no surprise that Amazon’s utopia looks, to many independent booksellers, like a deal with the Devil.
Kinley Pearsall, an Amazon spokeswoman, told me, “The response we’ve seen so far from retailers has been very strong.” Amazon’s press release mentioned two pilot participants, both near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters: the University of Puget Sound Campus Bookstore, in Tacoma, and JJ Books, in Bothell. I asked Jason Bailey, who opened JJ Books with his wife, June, in 2010, why he decided to partner with Amazon. “The e-book readers are something that more and more people are adopting,” he told me. “This is one way to try to capture that market in the store.”
But, so far, Bailey doesn’t appear to have a lot of company among independent booksellers, who are understandably wary of a program meant to boost sales of a product that could put them out of business, sold by a corporation that hasn’t been much of an ally in the past. (In 2011, Amazon infamously offered a five-per-cent discount to shoppers who visited brick-and-mortar stores, sent Amazon information about the stores’ prices for a given product, and then bought the item from Amazon instead.) The American Booksellers Association released a statement describing Amazon Source as “a program that benefits the retailer it cares about most-that is, Amazon.”
Compared with the reactions from some bookstore owners, that was putting it mildly. “If anyone thinks Amazon is going to do you a favor, you better have someone walking behind you so you don’t feel the stab,” David Bolduc, who owns the Boulder Book Store, in Boulder, Colorado, told the book-trade newsletter Shelf Awareness.
I spoke with Lissa Muscatine and Bradley Graham, who have owned the iconic bookstore Politics and Prose, in Washington, DC, since 2011. Muscatine described Amazon Source as “a dagger disguised as an olive branch.” Graham called it a “Faustian bargain.”
“They keep trying similar schemes that sound sort of superficially, potentially reasonable, but when you think about them you realize they’re absolutely not in the interest of the independent-bookstore business,” Muscatine said.
Even Bailey’s enthusiasm flagged, when we discussed the two-year sunset provision on e-book commissions. “The terms are tight,” he said. “I’ll admit that.”
If Amazon Source represented the only path through which independent booksellers could access the e-book market, Amazon’s two-year deal might make more sense. But about four hundred and eighty independent booksellers are already selling the Kobo, a Canadian Kindle competitor with a small but growing market share in the United States. Bookstores obtain devices from Kobo at a five-per-cent discount, slightly less than the six-per-cent discount “Booksellers” get through Amazon Source. They split the profits on content with Kobo-which usually works out to eight per cent to twenty per cent of the sale price, according to Jeremy Greenfield of Digital Book World, compared with Amazon’s ten-per-cent commission-and the profit-sharing arrangement lasts indefinitely, compared to Amazon’s two years. While bookstores still appear to get much more of their revenue from selling physical books than from e-book sales, they seem generally happy with Kobo and committed to the partnership.
Amazon’s proposal seems even less compelling when you consider the recent trajectory of the independent-bookstore business. Amazon has certainly hurt brick-and-mortar book sales over all, but as several observers have pointed out, independent booksellers were always more directly threatened by large chains, whose stores offered many of the same services as the small guys but with lower prices and larger inventories. Now that Amazon has forced the collapse of Borders and the humbling of Barnes & Noble, independents are gaining ground with customers who value the experience they offer: author events, cappuccinos, lovingly curated selections, relationships with salespeople. According to Oren Teicher, C.E.O. of the American Booksellers Association, sales at member stores rose eight per cent last year. If e-books had taken off ten years ago or if Amazon had introduced Source along with the Kindle in 2007, indie stores might have felt more pressure to sign on. Today they have-and seem to be relishing-the luxury of saying no.
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