A couple of more people have weighed in on the controversy over Amazon’s price-check app that I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo has been ruffling some feathers with a column in which he first berated Amazon for its callousness in stealing business from brick-and-mortar competitors—then took Russo to task for focusing on the harm to bookstores rather than brick-and-mortar retail in general.

Rather than focus on the ways that Amazon’s promotion would harm businesses whose demise might actually be a cause for alarm (like a big-box electronics store that hires hundreds of local residents), Russo hangs his tirade on some of the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologized local establishments you can find: independent bookstores. Russo and his novelist friends take for granted that sustaining these cultish, moldering institutions is the only way to foster a “real-life literary culture,” as writer Tom Perrotta puts it. Russo claims that Amazon, unlike the bookstore down the street, “doesn’t care about the larger bookselling universe” and has no interest in fostering “literary culture.”

Manjoo suggests, perhaps hyperbolically, that even though bookstores were a small part of the businesses threatened by the price-checking app, we should nonetheless “thank [Amazon] for crushing that precious indie on the corner.” He points out all the amenities Amazon offers, such as reviews, recommendations, huge selection, and an ability to read books’ first chapters from your computer that mimics the way you can do the same in a bookstore. He calls out the inefficiencies of local stores that mean they have to charge considerably more for books than Amazon can.

Further, he suggests that “buying local” to support the community is a spurious argument when it applies to bookstores, because they’re selling exactly the same published-elsewhere commodity that Amazon is and charging more for it, leaving you with less money to spend on genuinely locally-made commodities.

With the money you saved by buying books at Amazon, you could have gone to see a few productions at your local theater company, visited your city’s museum, purchased some locally crafted furniture, or spent more money at your farmers’ market. Each of these is a cultural experience that’s created in your community. BuyingSteve Jobs at a store down the street isn’t.

He concludes that by lowering the price of books so people buy more, and making it so easy to buy e-books that people who buy Kindles buy twice as many e-books as they bought print books, Amazon helps authors and publishers, including self-publishing authors, to sell more books so they can write more books. Amazon, he concludes, may be “the only thing saving [literary culture].”

The article has received 1,452 comments at the time I’m writing this, many disagreeing with its points (though of course I don’t have time to read them all). NicoleC points out the value of making a personal connection with the people inside the store, which is something that computers can’t replace.

I think my main objection to this article is that its larger point about inefficiency points to a problem I see in our economy at large, favoring efficiency to the point of sacrificing quality, whether that quality is a product or a service (especially if it’s a service). I also think the article is kind of stupid in the sense that I believe there is surely plenty of room in the marketplace for both big box stores and online retailers (of which I do make use sometimes!) and the indies (which I try to support as much as I can).

Author Stever Robbins complains about seeing his book “in the discount bin before it even launched” with Amazon’s 30% discount, and notes that Amazon isn’t really interested in doing much to help him individually stand out from the other 80,000 books published this year. His independent bookstore, on the other hand, helps him with promotions, readings, and local community connections.

The Kindle doesn’t help. The fact that people buy twice the books they normally would with a Kindle does not necessarily translate into increased sales for any given author. It may simply be creating an even more skewed winner-take-all market. I’m sure that Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, and John Grisham get far more sales, but thanks to the Kindle, passers by can’t even see the title of a book someones reading. Perhaps you’ve never discovered a book by seeing someone else reading it, but I assure you, it happens. In the world of pure online books, if someone doesn’t know to ask for a new book, they’ll never be exposed to it. I suspect many of the increased sales are going to the recognizable names and people whose books are already on the best-seller lists.

(Found via Galleycat, which also notes a couple of other worthwhile comments.)

Meanwhile, Timothy Geigner writes on Techdirt about a Huffington Post article on retail bookstores calling on customers to boycott Amazon over the release of this app. There’s plenty of hyperbole on both sides here, what with a senator asking Amazon to cancel its (one-day) $5 price promotion to protect jobs, and Geigner pointing out that Amazon employs a lot of people, mostly in the US, too.

I think my favorite part from the HuffPo article is something that went unremarked by Geigner:

Some bookstores are fighting back. For the last few weeks, John Stich, the store manager at Diesel, A Bookstore in Oakland, Calif., has been handing patrons free "Occupy Amazon" buttons. Regarding Saturday’s offer, he told The Huffington Post, "When we see shoppers taking pictures with their phones or using the app, we won’t go so far as to be rude or ask them to leave, but sometimes we’ll be sarcastic about it, and ask them, ‘Hey, what’s that app? How cool!’ I think the only thing you can do is make people aware."

Because we all know that passive-aggressively making customers feel uncomfortable is the best way to get them to buy more products from you.

As I said last time, smartphone pricematch apps have been around for several years, and there have been a few complaints in years past but nothing this big. I guess it’s kind of like the Kindle itself writ small—nobody really pays attention to something until Amazon does it.

2 COMMENTS

  1. The author is wrong, at least on my account. I almost never purchase books by the top authors, my purchases are almost all by indie authors or small publishers. Most of the books I purchase will never be seen in those little indie bookstores.

    If someone is interested enough to step foot into your store, you should offer them a reason for buying something. Driving them off by making them uncomfortable is a really lousy way to treat them.

    I use my Amazon Wishlist for everything, and have always added books I’ve found in bookstores so I don’t forget about them. I used to just text myself. I don’t need an app to tell me the price is lower at Amazon, it almost always is. These stores need to offer something more, a gift with purchase, extra service, something. If they can’t compete by being creative and customer oriented, then they deserve to go under.

  2. Such a priceless diatribe!
    Amazon is eeee-vile!
    But only because they’re competing with the businesses *HE* favors. Everything else is fair game, especially those businesses *HE* doesn’t care for. If only they crushed the businesses he dislikes they would stop being villains and be heroes.
    Heh!
    Right.
    Rude words come to mind.
    I’ll simply say that NIMBY hypocrisys expresses itself in many ways.

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