Amazon is elevating eyebrows with the timing of its massive ebook sale for 2025, which runs from April 23 to twenty-eight — which implies it’s competing straight with Unbiased Bookstore Day.
As author Maris Kreisman defined in Lit Hub, Unbiased Bookstore Day is an annual occasion organized by the American Booksellers Affiliation (ABA), with occasions, particular visitors, and unique merchandise at 1,600 taking part bookstores. And this 12 months, it’s going down on April 26 (in the present day).
“I implore you: should you reside close to an indie bookstore (and I do know that many people nonetheless don’t and I hope at some point all of us do), you need to go,” Kreizman stated.
Indie bookstores do seem like on the upswing in the US, at the least in line with final 12 months’s numbers from the ABA. However in fact, Amazon stays dominant — in 2020, a Home committee estimated that the corporate managed greater than 50% of the full on-line and offline print ebook market, and it’s much more dominant in e-books.
So it’s not precisely a very good search for the corporate to time its massive sale to compete with a nationwide, celebratory bookstore occasion.
Actually, Bookshop.org — an Amazon competitor that companions with indie bookstores — emailed clients with a observe from CEO Andy Hunter describing Amazon’s sale as “a calculated transfer by an organization that has already put half the bookstores within the nation out of enterprise, controls over 60% of the market and sells much more books than all indie bookstores mixed.”
“The folks at Amazon chargeable for the timing of their ‘Ebook Sale’ needs to be ashamed, however they’re shameless,” Hunter stated.
Amazon, nevertheless, launched a press release describing the timing overlap as “unintentional”: “The dates for our sale had been set this 12 months to accommodate further taking part nations.”
Given the corporate’s scale, it’s actually potential that Unbiased Bookstore Day barely registered with the folks scheduling the sale. Even so, ABA CEO Allison Hill informed Vulture, “At greatest it’s insensitive and at worst it looks like a tactic to harm small companies.”
