Why Amazon Books Is a Terrible Bookstore
A few months ago, I noticed quite a number of people on my Twitter feed posting about Amazon Books — the new physical bookstores the company is trialling in a few major US cities — because a new one had opened in Manhattan. As a writer and a voracious reader, I was curious to see Amazon’s vision for the future of book retail for myself, so on a recent trip to New York City, I headed down to Columbus Circle to see what all the fuss was about. And I was not impressed.
According to Author Earnings, Amazon is now responsible for 83 percent of US e-book sales and 42 percent of traditionally published print sales. Without even having typed the word “monopoly” — or the more appropriate “monopsony” — I already feel I’m about to get bombarded by some dedicated Amazon customers who will forever defend the company’s massive (and growing) market share. My desire to visit Amazon Books was, in part, because as goes Amazon, so goes the future of book retail in America, if not the world.
The stacks are an essential part of the bookstore experience, yet someone seems to have forgotten to tell that to Jeff Bezos.
Algorithms Replace the Stacks
Bookstores are some of my absolute favorite places. I could spend hours in them. I love grabbing a London Fog (with almond milk!) and checking out the featured sections, then heading for the stacks to be surrounded by all manner of books in the hope that some cover or title will catch my eye and I’ll discover something new. As far as I’m concerned, the stacks are an essential part of the bookstore experience, yet someone seems to have forgotten to tell that to Jeff Bezos.
The Amazon Books in Manhattan was pretty busy on the day when I visited, presumably because more people wanted to see what it was all about. Similar to a regular bookstore, it contains sections that are divided by category, but they’re all quite small, and there aren’t many books on display. Each of the chosen titles faces out to the customer — no stacks, so no spines — with an Amazon.com customer review printed on a card below them. While clearly meant to emulate handwritten bookseller recommendations, the reviews just don’t feel as authentic, especially when you know that each of the titles has been chosen by some algorithm to maximize sales.
The elimination of stacks and the stocking of only a small number of algorithmically curated titles reduces the chance of discovery — an essential part of the bookstore experience — but it also amplifies the increasingly unequal distribution of sales—and thus of revenue—that has come to define the technology and entertainment sectors in the 21st century.
The Superstar Bookstore
The market-share figures are just one example of how Amazon is reaching a monopolistic position in a growing number of the industries in which it operates. It’s certainly not the only tech company to have dominance as a goal, but as it grows larger, it becomes more immune to competition, and a growing body of research shows that these mega-corporations are reducing economic growth, dampening innovation and increasing inequality.
The Internet and the globalization of the entertainment industry are also having similar negative effects, causing a small number of “superstars” to dominate different sectors and take a larger piece of revenue with them. To stick with publishing, data from the United Kingdom shows that the percentage of sales generated by the 50 best-selling authors — 0.1 percent of those in the profession — increased by 21 percent from 2014 to 2016, while the top 1 percent generate 32.8 percent of sales, and the top 10 percent are responsible for 57 percent. I couldn’t find similar data for the United States, but I see little reason why it should be much different.
The responsibility that Amazon is placing on algorithms to determine the limited titles it stocks in its bookstores will be yet another factor compounding this “superstar effect” because they will naturally identify the books that are already selling well or were written by authors with a proven sales track record. When humans are involved, they can find those hidden gems, but sales-focusing algorithms have no incentive to take a chance on unproven titles.
Furthermore, without the stacks, there’s a better chance of discovering something new through Amazon.com than through Amazon Books because only by going online can anything other than the algorithmically curated titles be accessed —which seems completely backward.
Amazon’s ongoing experiments with physical locations provide a guide to where the future of retail is headed: toward less floor space, greater automation of tasks and increased integration with e-commerce. However, when it comes to books, Amazon’s insistence that they’re a product like any other has never quite felt right, and the company’s seeming ignorance of the factors that make bookstores such pleasant spaces leaves Amazon Books feeling cold and as though it’s missed the mark.
