Bookstores May Boycott New Amazon-Published Books

destinyland writes "Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers 'wary' as Amazon 'tries to have it all,' according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon's new line of books, complaining, 'They are a huge competitor, and they don't collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.' A children's bookstore noted that 'the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I'd be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.' Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become 'digital downloading' stations — or a 'living history' museum where future generations can learn what a 'magazine rack' was."

Comments

Re:The "tax excuse" for not adapting

[destinyland]

Actually, Amazon has already calculated the taxes for every region where they sell. They actually collect that tax when they're re-selling items from other retailers (for example, K-Mart).

http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=2990

So their opposition has nothing to do with the "OMG it'd be an unholy nightmare" scenario. Bezos has even said Amazon incorporated in Seattle specifically for the tax advantage, and Amazon's own shareholder's documents specifically identify sales taxes as a competitive advantage.

But in fact, Amazon's CEO, Jeff Bezos, likes to say that Amazon already collecting state sales taxes. In this year's shareholders' call in June, Bezos told investors that "in more than half of the geographies where we do business - certain states, as well as Europe and Asia - all together, more than half of our business is in jurisdictions where we already collect sales tax or its equivalent, like the value-added tax."