Guardian UK: Amazon has eaten our beloved Book Depository

[marmar]

Amazon has eaten our beloved Book Depository
For those of us already concerned about Amazon's internal ethics, this anti-competitive takeover is worrying

Chally Kacelnik
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 July 2011


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. ...............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/09/amazon-book-depository-takeover

[xchrom]

1. FUCK!

:mad:

[slay]

2. Libraries are awesome - as are used book stores

i won't buy books from Amazon after their bullshit deletion of stuff from people's kindle readers. we have given these huge corporations WAY too much control over our lives.

[enlightenment]

3. A number of councils in England are closing their

libraries - they say they can't afford to keep them open. I've never seen (though I'm sure they exist) a used bookstore there of the type we have in the US; they may not be as common.

The point of the article, though, is precisely what you are talking about. The Depository was a great alternative to the mega-shark that is Amazon - and now Amazon has consumed it, too.

Very sad.

[TreasonousBastard]

4. I've refused to deal with Amazon for years. Say what you want about B&N and Borders...

they at least grew out of a literary culture and aren't out to destroy authors and publishers. Or run into rights issues because they don't understand them. You won't find books deleted from your Nook or Kobo.

Sex? Heh-- be a publisher who dares complain about their cut and you suddenly can't find your books on their site.

They are scumbags from the same school as the Wal-Mart scumbags, possibly worse, and should be hated with the fire of a thousand suns.