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Now that's just funny - even though I suspect you might be right... We don't rally around our own when it comes to securing a financial foundation. This goes on my list of "what the black community can do better"

I may be more provocative.

With all of these websites there is very little transparency. If you sell a book through me, you can use Google tag manager to traffic and click and fulfilled order, because it would be physically impossible for anyone else to sell your book through this site. The drop shipping option works best for me. I send you the order and money you handle the shipping. Alternatively, I could drop ship through Ingram. This would be the strategy I would use, in general, to fulfill book orders directly to readers, by passing Amazon. You'll make more money per book if I drop ship to you, but again their is the lack of willingness for reader to by from their won versus Amazon. I'm actually going to set up my website to fulfill orders orders directly. I will consider removing Amazon as an option if the direct sales justify it. If I practiced what I preached I would be like you Mel and boot them altogether, but the problem is too many of our author's books are only available through Amazon.

@Troy , Why I’m devoting a year to helping black newspapers survive by Regina H. Boone Columbia Journalism Review article Mentions AALBC... "The African American Literature Book Club, which tracks independent, black-owned newspapers, counts more than 100 such papers, including the Richmond Free Press. "

@Mel Hopkins to be clearer, I'm not saying Amazon is reproducing books and reselling them. I'm saying that their platform is used by others who do. For example, it is trivial and apparently legal for anyone to take a book in the public domain and sell it on Amazon. The problem is books, like music are easy to copy, so any book, including new ones, are bootlegged and sold on Amazon. Keep in mind you don't have to make you book available in digital format for it to be copied. You can just scan the book and published scanned copies. More sophisticated folks will run the scans through OCR software and republished a newly formatted version. Amazon makes the money off the transaction and the bootlegger incurres all the risk. In the old days, a company that did this sort of thing was put of of business. Remember Napster? A company like Amazon (with Kodi over Fire), and Google (download any song from Youtube), is Napster on steroids and covered in teflon. Because of Amazon and Google dominance, it is virtually impossible to run a book website as a business. I commend you for refusing to publish your books on Amazon Mel. If every author/publisher chose to do this, I can't image all the wealth that would be hared more evenly among the people that create the value. It floors me that any writer would post a thing on Facebook, for free, when Mark Z is making billions off your content. Bezos is on track to become the first person to be worth $100B-100 Billion dollars! Mel I recently added a book I saw on your website to your AALBC.com site: https://aalbc.com/books/bookinfo.php?isbn13=9light_attend I changed the way the site is designed to highlight went book are available for purchase directly from the author.

The following is a reaction I received via email. I actually met this respondent, Deborah Day, during the Sacramento Black Book Festival last month. She is a bookseller, publisher, and author. Hi Troy, This is a great article and I will post it on Facebook. You are so right. We as Independent Booksellers can compete against Amazon, when we really look at all the benefits we have to offer our customers. Knowing our market and community needs, can help us greatly provide the best offer, whether it's product, price, selection or delivery to "get the business". And our market footprint should be local, national and international. And since, there are only 80 owned black books stores in the U.S., there is no threatening competition among each other. My belief is that we need to do all we can to build and protect our markets. If it is our creativity that birthed the book and the business, then we should profit the most from that effort. Yes we can write, illustrate and produce our own books and tell our own stories, but the other important factor is that we must also control the distribution. This is why our Independent Bookstores are so important online and in our communities. We need to keep our eyes on the ball and not loose our grip on this market. It's not just Amazon's dominating presence and practices eroding our market share, but there are other undercurrents online that threaten our businesses that include hate cyber attacks and corruption. Now I am not totally against Amazon, because I buy books from them too, but only if I can't get a book from the publisher or a distributer, and I need a book quickly to complete an order. But, I didn't like it when Amazon started allowing resellers to undersell publishers with the same new or used book. Because, my book, "Mindful Messages", got stolen and bootlegged on Amazon and I lost money. Now I am seeing many black authors, bypassing Amazon and selling their books direct from their own websites. Which can be successfully done with lots of social media. Like someone said, "We are who we have been waiting for." And when we have the right conscious mind, we will seek each other out to do business with one another. And we will go out of our way if need be, to support one another in sustaining black businesses. And we will recognize the importance of the full circle of exponential economics and it's impact on empowering our communities. And then and only then will it be an ever continuing reality. Deborah Day Ashay by the Bay I'd heard about bootlegging up books for year, but Amazon has really created a major platform for selling knock off products, including books. Debirah said she wanted to sue, but Amazon was not helpful at all.

The attorney Margrethe Vestager is my new hero. While 3 Billion dollars is chump change to Google. It is a step in the right direct and U.S. regulators really should be ashamed of themselves. They have been pathetically inadequate for failing to act on this at all. I guess that is because Google owns American politicians. The video below sums up the problem quite succinctly. Y'all know I've been complaining about for years.