No small number of jaws hit the floor following the announcement that Amazon was taking over The Book Depository. As the UK's biggest online bookseller with an international reach, The Book Depository had been one of Amazon's primary rivals. With the rapid collapse of both independent bookstores and major bricks and mortar chains worldwide, readers are turning to the internet to get their book fix. How will Amazon's gobbling up the competition change the way readers buy books?
The major concern is the lack of detail as yet released to the public. It's unclear how much money is changing hands, and there's a risk that a restructured business model could eliminate the features that made The Book Depository so popular to begin with. Aiming at stocking 6 million titles, the company has been a major source of books that aren't otherwise easily available. Coupled with its free shipping to more than 100 countries, The Book Depository is an international winner, with three quarters of its 2010 sales outside the UK. Whether Amazon will preserve these features is anybody's guess; Monday's press release has next to no details.
Why am I so suspicious? Well, with many other readers, I switched to using The Book Depository precisely to get away from Amazon. In 2009, Amazon quietly removed a number of books classified as "adult material" from searches, suggestions and popularity charts, and stripped them of their sales rankings. Books tagged "gay" or "sexuality", for instance, were affected by way of making the site more family friendly. The thing is, that explanation didn't wash: children's book Heather Has Two Mommies was deranked, but the Playboy Centrefold Collection was not. Amazon never made its value judgement explicit, but, regardless, the result was that lots of books with gay and feminist themes lost much of their visibility. Amazon told the Guardian this was due to a "glitch" in its system, but had replied to complainants that the de-ranking of some adult-material books was carried "in consideration of our entire customer base". In any case, the site was shortly flooded by users tagging books with "amazonfail".
That wasn't the only ethical mess Amazon got itself into, however. Also in 2009, Amazon deleted a number of e-books with copyright issues from users' Kindles, Amazon's e-book reader. No one can fault Amazon's protection of intellectual property rights. The problem, as particularly ironically highlighted in the deletion of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a little scarier than that. As Farhad Manjoo noted at Slate: "The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader." Once you've bought a book, there's no guarantee you can keep it. Remote deletion capabilities entirely change the nature of buying books, and, as Manjoo points out, that's a horrifying precedent for an electronic future.
The Book Depository, then, was for many readers a worthy alternative. Since 2009, we've been using it to avoid Amazon's uncertain technical powers and in protest of that unannounced policy harming the sales of social justice-oriented material. Quite apart from concerns about Amazon's internal ethics, this takeover represents a distinct anti-competitiveness that is not going to serve readers. Here in Australia, we've recently faced the collapse of major book retailers Borders and Angus & Robertson. This was partly caused by the consumer shift to companies like Amazon and The Book Depository, and now there aren't many alternatives. The combined online powers produced by this takeover will threaten the fledgling Australian online book retail industry. We are doubtless going to see this repeated worldwide.
Anti-competitiveness harms the industry and reduces ethical options for consumers, pure and simple. Readers around the world anxiously await more news as to what Amazon's precise plans are. In any case, with the particular issues Amazon brings in its wake, it looks like many users are going to have to swallow their ethics or attempt to find an alternative to their beloved Book Depository.