Since I left the House of Commons Bookshop in 2009, I have become increasingly mesmerised by the rise of online bookselling and the hegemony of Amazon in particular to the extent that I’ve been temporarily blinded to the joys of real bookselling which was always my lifeblood and soul. Like Denethor in The Lord of the Rings who gazed into his palantir and was awed by the vast armies of Sauron, so too I became too easily convinced of the inevitable dominance of Amazon and the world of e-books and felt the only way to survive was to join with it.

Amazon offer us a compelling vision; their site is addictive and simple to use. Once you join they never leave you alone with their recommendations, offers and invitations. Titles that once tooks months and years to locate, that you had to travel to obscure bookshops halfway across the country, are one-click away, next-day delivered and often reasonably priced. Who could demur? Amazon offer us a tanatalising range of services, streaming films and music, Audible, Abe Books, Goodreads, Kindle Unlimited, next day delivery—one hour delivery in London. They tell us repeatedly there are the most customer-centric company in the world.

The birth of Amazon, charmingly recounted in James Marcus’ Amazonia, began with crates of books in a garage with literature graduates employed to post book reviews and descriptions on the internet. It was all passion and enthusiasm and the drive to break boundaries and do something new. Twenty years down the line it’s a global behemoth with a $261 billion turnover with sales in the UK alone estimated at £53billion. And still it makes a loss on paper with capital channelled back into investment.

There is something scary about a corporation this size and unnerving stories began to escape from behind the scenes, of the draconian work schedules and encroachment of civil liberties in offices and warehouses. The biggest scandal until recently was the company’s avoidance of any significant UK corporation tax, which at least has been partially remedied this year. But as Abbott and Achbar’s The Corporation showed us, once companies get to this size there is really no stopping them from behaving like raging, destructive psychopaths.

The biggest shock I received was when I actually started working with Amazon as a marketplace seller. I had surplus copies of book which had a specialist audience and once I posted it on marketplace and gained an international customer based, sales increased by 1000%. This spurred me to load more and more of my inventory until after a year sales via Amazon constituted 60% of my turnover. But due to having to deal with intense competition from other sellers on the site, being at the mercy of a few unscrupulous customers who knew how to exploit Amazon’s chargeback and A-Z guarantees, also Amazon’s own crippling fees and commissions, their stranglehold on postal charges, It became virtually impossible to make any money with them and the main beneficiary of the arrangement was Amazon themselves. They began to exert a stranglehold on my operation and to determine its direction—until the day I decided to stop.

My lesson has been learned the hard way and I return much chastened to
back to the bookshop counter, where there is soul and spirit, human warmth and connection, where you need to work hard to connect and engage and not rely on mere technology, but where the benefits are something that can never be quantified by a statistic or predicted by an algorithm. Profit is obviously key but not king. This year has been a good one for bookshops; Waterstones and Foyles have shown a resurgence; customers are returning to print; and the enthusiasm for bookshops like Go Set A Watchmen, show that bookshops are far from dead. I think it’s time for me to climb down from the pyre of Denethor and return to high street bookselling where my heart has always belonged.