Amazon’s New Kindle Offer Rejected by Indie Bookstores

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Amazon is now letting indie bookstores sell its Kindle tablets, and as you might expect, the online giant paints this new program as the best of both worlds: Customers get Kindles, and the stores get a 10 percent cut when customers use the tablet to buy books.


“Now your customers don’t have to choose between e-books and their favorite bookstore,” Amazon says in its pitch to booksellers.


But to many booksellers, the offer is about as subtle as the Trojan rabbit in Monty Python and The Holy Grail, and they seem just as willing to fling it back in Amazon’s face. Jeremy Ellis, the manager at Brazos Bookstore in Houston, tells us he can see “how a store that feels a need to be in the e-book market could see a Kindle in their store as a benefit.” But ultimately, he calls this notion “a lie.”

Amazon's New Kindle Offer Rejected by Indie Bookstores | Wired Business | Wired.com

 

[jastius]

when you are dealing with the amazon you have to watch out for the endemic piranha... and there is that river in Brazil that is dangerous too.

 

[nightdreamer]

I saw this through some other avenue -- Twitter? -- and it surprised the bejeesus out of me. If nothing else at all, the people at Amazon are marketing geniuses. They started out as an online bookstore and conquered the world to sell everything from citric acid to rare porcelain dolls. They have to know that this proposal of theirs would be marketing suicide to any bookstore that took them up on it, which is, of course, what they are hoping for.

What puzzles me is how they can assume that the bookstores can't figure that out for themselves. Maybe they figure if they only kill 10% of the independents, that'll be so much competition gone. Maybe they assume everyone else is stupid. But I imagine they are smart enough to know that's not true.

Bottom line: this whole move has me baffled.

 

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Bottom line: this whole move has me baffled.

Don't be, because it's just like you said, it can be simply put down as greed. Just think about this line from Gordon Gekko: "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the U.S.A."