A Kansas Bookshop’s Fight with Amazon Is About More Than the Price of Books: The owner of the Raven bookstore, in Lawrence, wants to tell you about all the ways that the e-commerce giant is hurting American downtowns – The New Yorker
This is something that’s important to us too. Read the full article here!
A few points worth repeating:
“[Bookstores are] community engines. We create free programming. We donate gift certificates to charity silent auctions. We partner with libraries and art organizations. That stuff might seem small to someone aiming to colonize outer space, but to us and our community it’s huge.”
“[The] authors also revealed how consumer prices were not the only, or even the best, metrics of the harm that companies like Amazon inflict on smaller competitors, their own employees, and consumers. Other concerns are worth regulating, too, including the degraded quality of consumer goods, lax copyright and counterfeiting enforcement, decreased worker safety, depressed wages, and the treatment of third-party sellers. Additionally, when it comes to books, Amazon not only sells them but publishes them: the company markets thousands of exclusive e-books and audiobooks, including ones from high-profile authors like Dean Koontz and Trevor Noah, cutting out independent booksellers and refusing to license the books to public libraries.”