Many of you might be familiar with George Packer's excellent New Yorker article earlier this year about Amazon.com and its not-always-salutary (to put it mildly) effect on books and book culture, not to mention other consumer goods. (If you haven't read it yet, please do.) The conflict between Amazon and Hachette is old and on-going news, of course. In a wonderful write-up originally published in the Chicago Tribune, but available via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch here, Christopher Borelli states forthrightly:
"More than a month ago I quit Amazon cold turkey, and I feel great."
3CM the loser has not done the same, although his relationship to Amazon is a bit more complicated than Borrelli's. More below the flip.....
Borelli continues just after the start:
"I have bought nothing from Amazon since May 16. Not a book, not a DVD, not an MP3. After years of purchasing pop culture from the mega e-retailer at an embarrassing pace - even as I was unable to walk out of a physical bookstore without buying something - the gnawing guilt grew too loud.
First came George Packer’s story in The New Yorker last winter about the bullying, contradictory relationship that publishers have with the online store ('Amazon continues to expend considerable effort both to dominate this small, fragile market and to win the hearts and minds of readers').
Then came the now 2-month-old spat between Amazon and the Hachette Book Group, the specifics of which are quite unspecific (neither will go into detail nor comment) but reportedly involve a disagreement on e-book pricing terms and distribution of profits."
My focus here is on Borelli's first sentence, about buying from Amazon, and my contrasting general history there. Unlike Borelli, I have bought very little, relatively speaking, from Amazon over the years. Over 10+ years, the number of items that I've purchased from Amazon reaches into the low double digits. In addition, most of those purchases have been for used items, not new. In other words, I've mostly bought items on Amazon not from Amazon directly, but from 3rd parties who use Amazon basically as a big electronic flea market.
In turn, I do the same thing, namely that I sell items on Amazon. Amazon gets a cut (sometimes a fairly substantial cut, depending on the price at which I choose to sell it) and provides funds for postage (usually not more than the cut, unless it's for international shipment). Likewise, I write reviews on Amazon. If you've followed SNLC for any length of time, you can guess the kind of items that 3CM would review. In short, I generally don't review already 'popular' or well-populated with reviews items. If anything, 3CM is loser enough to try to be the first reviewer on the items that he reviews, or to write the first "real" review if the review before him is badly done or uninformative.
The catch with reviewing and selling relatively obscure items is that it's correspondingly difficult to sell the items, and unlikely that people will find them. But ultimately, the reason that I put items for sale on Amazon is that if I try to trade them at a local used store, those items will probably sit there forever and no one else will buy them. I have actually taken used CDs to this establishment, in the hope (not always successful) that they will take them for store credit, because the potential audience for those items is better there than here. But I don't get a huge amount of store credit per CD, even though I'm quite relieved if the store takes the items off my hands. In turn, of course, I purchase more CDs with that store credit, so that the cycle keeps going, foolishly, perhaps.
So perhaps I'm tainted by using Amazon this way, in the way that Borelli alludes to, meta-fashion, when he says:
"Paranoid or not, I simply stopped giving money to Amazon. Frankly I wish I hadn’t given any."
Bit late for that now, though. At the start, as he noted, it didn't seem so bad:
"I retained memories of a benevolent Seattle bookseller long after it was suitable: Once I wrote a story about summer reading for another newspaper. Amazon was young then. I called its book buyer and asked what she was reading. She told me to check out a new book about a young wizard. She said it would be lost on kids but adults would love it. Her prediction was both shortsighted and prescient: Without Amazon, I wouldn't own a first edition of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”
How things have changed. In principle, I should feel uneasy myself about continuing to use Amazon, even if it's more as a seller than a buyer, and as a reviewer of off-the-beaten-path items. In other words, I rationalize that I'm standing up for the "little guys and gals" in terms of available items, the truly independent under-the-radar items. True, I have given money to Amazon, in terms of the cut that they get when I buy someone else's used items. Likewise, as mentioned, they get a cut of my sale when I'm fortunate enough to sell something on Amazon. It's far from "pure", but I again rationalize that at least when I sell something, it's going to a good new home and to someone who's truly interested in the item. Better that than have it sit in a local store for years, if not forever.
BTW, if you want to do some "little folks" some good on Amazon, to reiterate a request from last week's SNLC, if you are so inclined, please update the user reviews here and here. I want to get those reviews to >50% positive votes, for the reasons outlined in last week's SNLC. 2 kind SNLC'ers helped last week; thanks to you guys, and I hope that more help out.
With that, time for the usual SNLC protocol, namely your loser stories of the week……