Amazon is elevating eyebrows with the timing of its big book sale for 2025, which runs from April 23 to twenty-eight — which implies it’s competing straight with Independent Bookstore Day.
As author Maris Kreisman explained in Lit Hub, Impartial 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 (at this time).
“I implore you: if you happen to reside close to an indie bookstore (and I do know that many people nonetheless don’t and I hope sooner or later all of us do), you need to go,” Kreizman stated.
Indie bookstores do seem like on the upswing in the USA, at the least according to last year’s numbers from the ABA. However in fact, Amazon stays dominant — in 2020, a House committee estimated that the corporate managed greater than 50% of the overall 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.
Actually, Bookshop.org — an Amazon competitor that companions with indie bookstores — emailed clients with a notice 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 way more books than all indie bookstores mixed.”
“The folks at Amazon chargeable for the timing of their ‘E-book Sale’ must be ashamed, however they’re shameless,” Hunter stated.
Amazon, nonetheless, released a statement describing the timing overlap as “unintentional”: “The dates for our sale have been set this 12 months to accommodate further taking part nations.”
Given the corporate’s scale, it’s definitely doable that Impartial Bookstore Day barely registered with the folks scheduling the sale. Even so, ABA CEO Allison Hill told Vulture, “At greatest it’s insensitive and at worst it looks as if a tactic to harm small companies.”