February 8, 2016

Why booksellers are more alarmed than ever about Amazon

by Bradley Graham & Lissa Muscatine

Perhaps the most striking thing Melville House attendees noted at the recent Winter Institute conference held by the American Booksellers Association was that—both in formal panel discussions and in hallway chatter—booksellers were regularly saying something they haven’t said in a long, long time: Business is great. Yet there also seemed to be a consensus that there was more reason to be alarmed about Amazon than ever before. How could those two beliefs co-exist? In a guest column that first appeared on the Politics and Prose Bookmark blog, two of the country’s most respected booksellers explain …

These are good days to be an independent bookseller in the United States. Sales are up for many stores, and in the past few years, indies have reclaimed a greater share of the market for physical books.

But these trends don’t tell the whole story. Many of the gains for the independents have come at the expense of big box or chain stores. Meanwhile, online sales of physical books have continued to soar, and the vast majority of this business has gone to a single retailer—Amazon.

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Continua qui: http://www.mhpbooks.com/why-booksellers-are-more-alarmed-than-ever-about-amazon/