Melville House Books

There has been a lot of talk this week about the Target/Walmart/Amazon price wars, as there should be, and I agree with the ABA complaint that the loss-leader pricing of these books is predatory at best, and extremely harmful to our industry. However, I do think that in all of the discussion surrounding how to react to what’s going on, some of us have lost perspective.

I’ve been reading daily in Shelf Awareness notes from the independent booksellers that are, for now, the ones most-directly affected by these price wars. And some of the things that they’re saying disturb me. Some of them have admitted that they’ve canceled their book orders with the publishers of the ultra-discounted titles and are instead ordering from Amazon, treating the web-giant as some sort of wholesaler.

This is the wrong way to go about things. The bookseller defense of their actions is two fold.  One, that they are in some way hurting Amazon since Amazon is selling the books at a loss, and two, that they have no other options, because they can’t compete price-wise. But the booksellers (and I know, and appreciate, that it is far from a majority) that have taken this approach haven’t considered that they are actually empowering Amazon (for now) by doing so, and are directly hurting the publishers, the people that cultivate and produce the books they sell in the first place.

People shop at independent bookstores for different reasons than they shop online. Indies support their local communities, create a gathering place for those communities, curate for their customers the millions of books that exist. Indies have never been able to compete with Amazon, and why start to try now?

It feels almost like a betrayal. Granted, for now we are only dealing with the discounting of major bestsellers, leaving small independent presses like Melville House nearly unaffected, for the moment. But this business has never been (and can never be) an industry where every company only looks out for itself. That’s the problem that we have with Amazon. Without working together, the industry would collapse. Look how much Amazon has affected us thus far.

So we support you, indies. We shop there, we gather there, we send our authors there, and much much more. I don’t know what I would do without my local bookstore around!

And we expect you to support us, too. Please don’t cancel your orders with the publishers and swap us out for Amazon. There are better ways to handle this situation. And trust me, we’ll handle it.