Stop Buying Books From Amazon
If you’re reading this, you’ve purchased a book from Amazon. Maybe it was for school; maybe it was a gift; maybe it was actually for yourself because yes, teens do read for fun. It’s inevitable; Amazon’s prices are so low and their website is so accessible that it’s the logically best market for a consumer to buy from.
But you’ve probably guessed from the title that there are reasons why you shouldn’t buy books on Amazon. Here’s the tea: Amazon’s method of selling books is damaging to authors, publishers, and booksellers. I won’t even get into other problems Amazon has, like its treatment of workers or its control of web servers, because these few problems are enough as it is.
Now, the biggest and main issue here is Amazon’s third-party sellers. Because of Amazon’s unique marketing structure, just about anyone can list books to sell through Amazon; when you look for other “new or used” books not sold by Amazon, you’re looking at third party sellers. Some of these sellers are perfectly legitimate(1). Other sellers, however, can be more nefarious. They sometimes obtain these books through sketchy means like obtaining free promotional copies of books typically sent out for reviews and publicity, and they sometimes do this by getting books with minor cosmetic damage that have been tossed out by book printers(2). Normally, books like this wouldn’t be sold in stores because warehouses would’ve removed them from their stock.
If you see nothing wrong with this way of obtaining books(3), you should know that publishers and authors make no money from these purchases. Amazon, however, does. It charges sellers to list products on their website, and it also takes a portion of the money earned from selling the book. I don’t think I need to explain to you why this isn’t fair. This is like somebody making money off of piracy, which itself is detrimental to book publishing(4).
