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Amazon Gets Blow-Back Over Plan To Sell Kindles At Small Bookshops
Rambo Tribble writes "No sooner had Amazon revealed their plan to offer independent book shops the Kindle for re-sale, along with a kick-back on e-book purchases, than the fur began to fly. It appears the shops view the plan as Amazon-assisted suicide. Given the apparent terms of the deal, it looks like they may have a point. Amazon may well have done themselves more harm than good with this ploy. One storeowner wrote, 'Hmmm, let's see. 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 e-book. We make a little on their e-book purchases, but then lose them as a customer completely after two years. Doesn't sound like such a great partnership to me.'"
Big Warehouse Book stores kill the independent book stores. Amazon killed the Big Book stores. But the silver lining is that the death of the Big Warehouse Book stores gave new life to the independents. So now Amazon tries to kill the independents, but they are not morons.
The independents were saved by Amazon, but that doesn't mean they are stupid enough to let Amazon kill them next.
How is this any worse for the small bookstores than their customers buying a Kindle from some other retailer, or direct from amazon.com? They'd still be browsing in the store, checking online prices, buying the e-books, and eventually ceasing to be a customer. The bookstore would simply have deprived itself of an opportunity to be the one selling the Kindles and getting a cut of e-book revenues in the meantime.
Do these bookstores really think that refusing to sell the devices themselves will slow adoption?
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Meg Ryan falls in love with Jeff Bezos at the end.
But what does browsing for the book on the shelves get you over searching Amazon.com?
Well, um... you, uh, get the see the book???
Seriously. I buy almost all non-fiction books, and 2-3 minutes leafing through the book, looking up a few things in the index, and reading a couple specific passages on topics I'm looking for will immediately tell me: (1) does the book contain the information I need and care about? (2) does the author have a freakin' clue what he/she is talking about? (3) are these things valuable enough to justify the cost?
I can spend time skimming dozens of reviews on Amazon and still have no clue about the answers to those questions. Sure, for some books on Amazon I can get a limited preview or limited search capability, but that's generally not enough to really let me check what I need to.
I own a couple thousand physical books. I can only think of ONE physical book that I purchased in an actual store that I regret buying, and I was in a hurry and just picked up some Barnes & Noble special for $1.99 or something. On the other hand, I must have at least 20 or more books I purchased online that turned out to be much less useful than I imagined. I just can't tell adequately from online descriptions. And returning them is often too much of a pain to bother.
On a related note, there's also the seredipitous encounter with interesting books on a physical shelf. While Amazon may be good at telling me what other people tend to buy who buy the books I'm already searching for, it's very unlikely to tell me about the really cool books out there that people like me may not always know about. Library shelves, on the other hand, are great for containing those hidden treasures, sitting there right next to a book I know on a similar topic. Actual physical bookstores can be good about that as well, though only if they have the kind of specialized non-fiction I like to browse for (and very few do anymore).
I'm very likely to walk out of a physical bookstore with some book I found and thought to be really interesting, and I almost never regret those purchases. Online, I only tend to buy books I already have heard about and which already are supposed to be "good," because I often can't adequately evaluate them otherwise.
Used bookstores are even more critical, because they carry all sorts of out-of-print stuff that's even more difficult to sort through on Amazon (if it's there at all).
You still get the same 'about the author' and plot taglines on the back...
I don't give a crap about the author bio or what some random other people say about how this is the "coolest book ever." I suppose if that's the way you evaluate the books you want to buy, I guess there's no benefit to a physical bookstore. I, personally, prefer to actually examine the merchandise... like the people you mention who might actually like to look at the TV or listen to the stereo before purchasing.