By Audrey Elwood, Arts and Entertainment Editor

With the resurgence of the coolness of books, we have been seeing a rise in well, bad books and book selling practices. One of the biggest sources of unethical book dealings is Amazon.com. When Amazon first started, it was dubbed the “online bookstore,” and it exclusively sold books. Now, 67% of readers in the US have purchased a book from Amazon in the last 12 months according to Statista, and it’s estimated that Amazon has control of up to 80% of the total market according to that same study. 

One bookselling technique that makes Amazon so popular is undercutting prices. For instance, if you wanted to walk into a bookstore and buy Michelle Zauner’s best-selling book, Crying in H-Mart in hardcover, you would have to pay $26.95. That is the price on the back right above the barcode. For brick and mortar bookstores this is the set price they have to sell it at. There are thin margins on books, and it gives a standard price between businesses to prevent monopolistic competition. Amazon is currently selling the hardcover of Crying at H-Mart at $10.19, 62% less than the standard price. 

Amazon has the power to undercut these prices because of two reasons. One, it has enough power to “call the shots” when it comes to publishers. If Amazon stops selling a publishing house’s books, it could very well put the house out of business, even the big ones because of Amazon’s massive market share. Two, because it has so much purchasing power, they often lose money on these sales. Yes, Amazon purposefully loses money on these sales. This technique is used by monopolies to price out the competition. They know that they can take a loss of money for a long term gain of less competition. 

Amazon cuts out the middleman, which in theory is a good idea because no middleman should lead to lower prices. In traditional book publishing, profits get split between the author, the bookseller and the publisher. For Amazon, they become the publisher and the seller, leading them to dominating all avenues of the supply chain. This eats away from small bookstores and the publishing industry until they are left with nothing but crumbs. 

Often when popular books are published, soon an AI generated knockoff will appear, near the top search result, sometimes these knockoffs will be the first search result. In How to Resist Amazon and Why by Danny Caine, a local bookseller in the Kansas City area, he ran a search test on what shows up for The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones. When The 1619 Project is searched, the first result (as of May 2022), is a knockoff The 1619 Project Book: A Brief History of the 1619 Project. 

This misleads readers into purchasing the wrong copy of the book. Oftentimes, these self-published knockoffs will be priced at a lower cost. That steal of a book on Amazon is actually stealing the author’s credibility and work and stealing your hard earned cash.