Amazon is elevating eyebrows with the timing of its huge e book sale for 2025, which runs from April 23 to twenty-eight — which implies it’s competing immediately with Impartial Bookstore Day.
As author Maris Kreisman defined in Lit Hub, Impartial Bookstore Day is an annual occasion organized by the American Booksellers Affiliation (ABA), with occasions, particular friends, and unique merchandise at 1,600 collaborating bookstores. And this yr, it’s happening on April 26 (as we speak).
“I implore you: in the event you dwell 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 should go,” Kreizman stated.
Indie bookstores do look like on the upswing in the US, at the least in response to final yr’s numbers from the ABA. However after all, Amazon stays dominant — in 2020, a Home committee estimated that the corporate managed greater than 50% of the whole on-line and offline print e book market, and it’s much more dominant in e-books.
So it’s not precisely a great search for the corporate to time its huge sale to compete with a nationwide, celebratory bookstore occasion.
In actual fact, Bookshop.org — an Amazon competitor that companions with indie bookstores — emailed clients with a be aware 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 liable for the timing of their ‘E-book Sale’ must be ashamed, however they’re shameless,” Hunter stated.
Amazon, nonetheless, launched a press release describing the timing overlap as “unintentional”: “The dates for our sale had been set this yr to accommodate further collaborating international locations.”
Given the corporate’s scale, it’s definitely attainable that Impartial Bookstore Day barely registered with the folks scheduling the sale. Even so, ABA CEO Allison Hill instructed Vulture, “At finest it’s insensitive and at worst it looks like a tactic to harm small companies.”
