Amazon's Adverse Impact on the Book Industry Global

[Troy]

Amazon's adverse impact on the book industry and the economy is global in scope.

The Booksellers’ Association (BA) is a trade association for booksellers in the UK, representing over 95% of all bookshops. When Amazon entered the market in 1995 the BA had 1,894 outlets in membership. Now it has 905.6 It argues that Amazon’s growth means that “high streets and communities no longer have booksellers who provide author events, go into schools, churches or libraries, or run book clubs and reading groups”.

In December 2015 Tim Godfray, chief executive of the BA, explained its recent approach to the CMA: 

“We sent a formal submission to the Competition and Markets Authority outlining our concerns. It was a substantial document of about 300 pages. We were particularly concerned about allegations received from publishers and booksellers that Amazon was seemingly engaged in predatory pricing: 93% of booksellers believed that Amazon had been selling books below cost and 51% of publishers thought the same. We supplied a lot of title information examples to the CMA and we hoped that the competition authority in London would investigate, but instead they ended up passing the file over to DG Competition in Brussels. We are still talking to Brussels and we do not have a quick resolution.”

Read the complete article at the Ethical Consumer.