Resisting Amazon

Last week, we drove the short distance to Loyalty Books on Upshur Street NW, there to hear Katya Cegel discuss her book, From Chernobyl with Love, an account of her work as a journalist in the former Soviet Union from 1998 through 2002. Having heard the discussion, it seemed only right to buy a copy. At the register, we noticed How to Resist Amazon and Why, which I'd have described as slim pamphlet, but which its publisher Raven Books calls a "zine". We bought two copies, though we haven't decided who shall get the second.

Danny Caine, the proprietor of Raven Books, opts for volume rather than focus in the pamphlet. His account of the economics of the book trade is compelling enough--Amazon uses its power to enforce discounts that publishers will extend to nobody else; therefore Amazon can sell a popular novel at a price that would turn every sale into a $5 loss for Raven Books. The power Amazon brings against publishers, and the way it uses that power, extracting "all the traffic will bear" as in The Octopus, has been in my view reason enough to avoid purchasing from Amazon. I hadn't thought much about the price pressure on local retailers.

Yet last winter I heard a young man ask the manager at Bridge Street Books whether he matched Amazon's prices. The manager said, No, I'm not subsidized by the government the way they are. Amazon does get favorable rates from the United States Postal Service, but in truth the book business is probably subsidized more by Amazon Web Services, a remarkably profitable undertaking, than by the USPS.

I had much rather buy books at a local bookstore, preferably for cash, than on-line. I am fortunate to live in a city with several independent general-interest bookstores. But some of them seem to have limited options with their distributors, so that a special order is impossible or impractical. Still, one can sometimes buy directly from the publisher. It might not arrive as quickly as it would from Amazon, but if the book is likely to take some weeks to read, the difference between one-day shipping and five-day shipping matters little.

(Ms. Cegel's book is quite readable. I should say that it tells more about the lives of young and nervy expatriates than it does about Latvia or Ukraine. Well, one can learn about the early days of Baltic independence or the lead-up to the Orange Revolution from other sources. This is the first book I have noticed that recounts the adventures of a journalist willing to go down an insufficiently secured coal mine in the Donbass region or drink home-distilled vodka in the Chernobyl exclusion zone.)