January 12, 1964

Jeff Bezos (January 12, 1964) founder of, and famous for, his Amazon online book company, has been blamed for the decline of bookstores. This article I excerpt provides a nuanced and more hopeful consideration of the issues.

Here is Alex Shepherd, in The New Republic (May 30, 2017):

'....[P]ublishers have been warning for years that Amazon’s business model was cratering small businesses and taking money from publishers, which would presumably spend some of it paying authors to write books. ...[Amazon's recent] push into retail, moreover, was evidence of ...[their] quasi-monopolistic behavior in both the literal marketplace and the cultural marketplace...Jeff Bezos did once proudly say that he would hunt publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.”...Finally, there is the notion that the store is a threat to the humanistic aspect of bookselling. “We are dedicated to a mission,” Book Culture owner Chris Doeblin told me, “because of the value of literature, because of the value of writing, because of the value of thinking.”...

'[However, says Shepherd]... it’s hard to spend an hour in ...[their] antiseptic and bewildering [New York] store, as I did last week, and see it as an existential threat to anything. At best, it ’s a bland attempt at brick-and-mortar retail. ....

'[The fact is] the point of the bookstore can be boiled down to one animating idea: discoverability. Discoverability has been the publishing buzzword of the internet era. It has also been Amazon’s Achilles’ heel. The store may be great at selling books at cutthroat prices, but it’s been famously not so great at getting people to buy things they weren’t already inclined to buy. Guiding audiences to a book is the key to successful bookselling. Word-of-mouth buzz can turn a book like The Girl On The Train into a cash cow, as can reviews and other media coverage (particularly television). And Amazon still hasn’t cracked the code....

'The most obvious way Amazon Books pushes discoverability is that every book is displayed face-out, as opposed to spine-out, as you would on your bookshelf at home. Every face-out has a small placard that features the book’s star review and a short customer review. These are both presented as innovations, but they’re really just very, very old bookstore conventions taken to an extreme. In my short career as a bookseller, I learned one thing: Face-outs and recommendations sell books. The only difference between Amazon Books and other [retail] stores is that Amazon can afford to carry a very limited stock. The store holds only about 3,000 books—a number far too low for most booksellers to carry if they want to stay in business for more than 30 days. But Amazon can afford the retail space to take this kind of risk.

'The problem with a limited stock, however, is that it’s a limited stock. It’s not entirely clear how these books have been selected. The fiction section is a hodgepodge of mostly commercial fare, ranging from the midlist to the beach-y... The store’s history section runs from basic-dad book to basic-dad-who’s-interested-in-terrorism book[s], with, again, a few exceptions. There’s been some hand-wringing that Amazon’s insistence on selling books with high Amazon ratings would automatically dumb down its stock, but I didn’t find that to be the case...

'At their best, bookstores are community hubs. Amazon Books is far too cramped—even if it wasn’t crowded, it would still be difficult to get around. It forces you to constantly interact with your fellow customers, but in an awkward way. The store is bright in that flourescent way that hospitals are. “It’s very sterile,” a customer named James told me. There’s a strong sense that you’re in a kind of retail lab—and that’s probably because you are. ...

'.... You’re told if books are put on lots of wish lists, or have 4.8 stars (as opposed to, say, 4.7), or are simply “hot on Amazon.” You read lots of reviews from people you don’t know, most of which are written in that weird variant of American English, online review-ese. I didn’t find the reviews or the stars persuasive in the slightest. As for its display of Kindles and Echoes, supposedly one of the few things that differentiates Amazon Books from other stores—I couldn’t see much difference from how Best Buy or even Barnes & Noble sell hardware.There’s a strong sense that you’re in a kind of retail lab—and that’s probably because you are.

'“If you like X, then you’ll like Y” is a mainstay of most bookstores, but Amazon Books shows an algorithm run amok. If you like Ron Chernow’s Hamilton, you’re pressed to buy a historical book by Fox & Friends host and dumbass Brian Kilmeade. More bizarrely, fans of Hillbilly Elegy, a book about how hillbillies are responsible for the fact that they are poor, are pushed toward three books that offer a broader and more incisive critique of poverty in America: Evicted, $2.00 A Day, and Strangers In Their Own Land. The generous part of me wants to describe this as a pretty good troll, but really it shows the danger of letting an algorithm curate your books.
...
'More than anything else, Amazon Books is representative of the company’s rapid and insidious takeover of the publishing supply chain and its steady erosion of the publishing industry itself. Few industries are as sentimental as book publishing, but the publishers and booksellers do have a point: Bookstores—the good ones, anyway—provide a valuable service for American culture and are motivated by values other than mere profit...

'But if Amazon Books’s raison d’etre is “discoverability” and the blending of online and offline commerce, than its utility breaks down—it doesn’t do either thing particularly well. They certainly don’t justify the high overhead expense the company is taking on. This is why I came away from Amazon Books with a sense that it existed for no other reason than that the company just has too much money. After years of unprofitability—Amazon would famously reinvest its profits to undercut its competitors—the company’s revenues finally skyrocketed to the point that it had no choice but to be profitable. There are seven more Amazon Books opening this year. Not because Amazon can do a better job of selling books—it clearly can’t—but because it has to spend that money somehow...'

Perhaps I quoted too much but the article was very interesting. And reassuring.