Hundreds of book dealers worldwide have pulled their wares from Amazon-owned AbeBooks in solidarity with overseas booksellers Amazon plans to cast out by the end of the month.
AbeBooks, the largest online marketplace for rare and second-hand books, told antiquarian booksellers in South Korea, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Russia last month that, come November 30, they would no longer host sellers from these countries.
The initial announcement arrived in individual sellers’ inboxes on October 18—and offered no explanation. The underlying reason, AbeBooks told the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) in a statement early last week, was that their new third-party credit card processor made handling payments from these countries too costly and complex.
By Thursday, British bookseller Simon Beattie emailed a list-serv of international antiquarian booksellers, encouraging them to join him in a temporary strike. His protest caught fire over the weekend—and come Monday morning, 427 booksellers from 25 countries had agreed to sign off, or “go on vacation,” from AbeBooks. (On the site’s backend, a seller can choose to “go on vacation,” temporarily ceasing sales without actually deleting his account.) Most recently, France’s national antiquarian book association, Le Syndicat national de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne (SLAM), told all of its members to join the boycott.
The community’s rapid online mobilization should come as no surprise, according to Scott Brown of Northern California’s Eureka Books, who’s been maintaining a spreadsheet of booksellers who join the boycott. “Antiquarian booksellers, while we have a reputation for keeping dusty old shops, were really early adopters of the Internet,” he reminds me.
AbeBooks, which Amazon acquired in 2008, was founded in the 1990s by booksellers who, as their business grew, acquired its European competitors. Little changed when Amazon took over.
Still, “Over time, management has become more distant from the small businesses that were its origins,” Brown says. And that’s precisely the point of the protest. If it can happen in Prague, these booksellers have come to realize, it can happen anywhere.
“We are deeply concerned about this step, not only because of our own financial losses to come,” wrote Jan and Ondrej Schick, owners of the bookstore Antikvariát Valentinská in the heart of old town Prague, in an open letter published online last week. They’ll probably have to fire a handful of employees, they add. But their removal from the market carries an historically potent political undertone, too. “In light of the monopoly position of AbeBooks, closing all seller accounts in the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary […] will basically mean nothing short of cutting these countries off from the worldwide trade.”
Being cut off from the wider world of intellectual exchange is, of course, not a new phenomenon for the three countries their letter names. Nor for the affected Russian booksellers, or those in South Korea—where a statutory ban on “anti-state” expression limits dissent. Antiquarian booksellers do tend to traffic widely in ideas they themselves disagree with, Brown notes. What unites them, he tells me, is “a profound and deep belief that the availability of ideas is more important than any individual idea.” And whenever that availability comes under threat, they all feel it.
The booksellers are aware of their mouse-that-roared status in boycotting a Bezos property. “We know that we’re all fly specks on a fly speck,” as Brown puts it. “We just want to remind them that, even though they’re a tech company, they’re booksellers.” It’s hard to imagine that hundreds of booksellers pulling their wares from AbeBooks in protest will motivate much of a response from Amazon HQ. But AbeBooks cutting off entire countries was unimaginable until recently, too.
When the two companies were founded in the 90s, they both just sold books. While AbeBooks cornered the antiquarian market, Amazon bought books from big distributors and wholesalers—new titles and hard to find old favorites alike—and sold them internationally. “1.5 million books in print, and 1 million out of print,” boasted the homepage banner in 1997, the year the company went public: They were “the World’s Biggest Bookstore.”
A week-long strike won’t make a meaningful dent in Amazon’s business, which hasn’t been primarily devoted to books for decades. But a painless protest packs a punch, too. In this case it’s another reminder that no tech company, however much a part of our lives it’s become, is actually making the world a better place. Their business wasn’t delivering treasured books all around the world, but doing so at a profit.
