Amazon to Acquire the Book Depository

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Amazon-to-Acquire-The-Book-prnews-4104318836.html?...

I'm kind of bummed about this. I love TBD for being a place to purchase books that meant I could avoid Amazon. And now... they're going to be another branch of Amazon, if the deal goes through.

I can't really complain too much, I suppose, since LT has Amazon as a minor owner, and my own personal boycott of Amazon failed a few months ago, when I realized I could save a lot of money through them, and at the time was needing to save every penny I could (but this is only valid as long as I have student Prime), but this acquisition is still disappointing.

ETA: Another link: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/04/amazon-acquires-uk-based-online-book-retailer-t...

And so you needn't click it, the article:

Amazon is acquiring one of its competitors today, announcing that the e-commerce giant has bought The Book Depository International. The Book Depository is a UK-based online bookseller offering over six million books for delivery worldwide. Financial terms of the deal are not disclosed.

So why buy this company? The Book Depository, is one of the fastest growing booksellers in Europe. The retailer has over a million customers and also comes with a Dodo Press imprint and a fulfillment centre in Gloucester, UK. The company ships its books free of charge, worldwide, to over 100 countries.

Amazon currently offers international sites in Germany, Japan, Austria, Canada, China, France, the UK and also has a Spanish-site for Spanish-speaking countries. But the company no doubt wants to expand beyond these countries and The Book Depository expands its reach with an established customer base in Europe and a fulfillment center.

It’s unclear from the release if The Book Depository will become an Amazon-owned but independent site or if will be folded into the Amazon platform.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see Amazon making similar moves in other countries. We know that the company is looking to expand to India, and an acquisition of Flipkart, the current Amazon of India, would make sense.

I was disappointed when Amazon bought Woot! last year, too. So far, it seems okay, but I'd like to see these companies not be swallowed up. Let's hope that TBD stays as you like it, Amazon acquisition or not.

That news has spoiled my day :(

v

This is not good news.

but not surprising and definitely not good news.

I wonder if it somehow explains the recent problems people have had finding books not available through them.

Robert

This is very bad news. Capitalism allegedly works through competition in the marketplace, though in practice moderated via anti-monopoly legislation. It seems that with an international net based marketplace, we tend to see juggernauts rolling over all competition, to the detriment all (bar Mr. Bezos and chums).

Agree with all of you. I used to love BD.

Oh, cripes.

Well, I've started to move some of my purchases to smaller dealers in the UK because the problems recently with the BD.

Doesn't Amazon own a piece of ABE also?

>8 avaland: Doesn't Amazon own a piece of ABE also?

"AbeBooks Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. AbeBooks, an online bookselling pioneer, was acquired in December 2008 and remains a stand-alone operation with headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany."

8> Yes, Amazon's ownership of ABE is how it happened that Amazon has a minority share in LT.

I hadn't really heard of recent problems with TBD, not since the shipping problems last winter with the snow and shut down post in England (and the increased restrictions on shipping into the US). But these last six months, I've mostly been getting books from the library, so hadn't really paid attention to online sellers. (Except to note that TBD continues to be best for certain types of books that aren't brand new, and Amazon is still best for pre-orders of those same books, by at least $1 in either direction, which does add up...)

:/

Had moved over to TBD for all of my purchases of new books in English to be sent to France, but now I bet they'll rig the prices to be non-competitive *and* it'll be Amazon again unless I can find another outlet.

And there are things I really don't like about Amazon. Their union-squashing. Their pandering to the Book LLC / Livres Groupe junk that chokes search results for some authors and topics full of... crap... which they're content to let run wild and pocket their share when some hapless soul gets suckered into buying an overpriced POD copy of Wikipedia articles...

Oh well, it's back to local dealers then. They may be more expensive but when books are too cheap you end up buying more than you can handle.

>12 defaults: "when books are too cheap you end up buying more than you can handle."

The glass is definitely half-FULL. Great perspective!

Darn! This is not good news at all!!!!
I buy from Amazon, but the BD is (and I hope we shall not have to say "was") something special, above all for books printed in Britain, which are far too expensive when bought here.
My only hope is that, even if it belongs to Amazon, the BD will still keep its individuality.

I started with the Book Depository in order to get the paperback of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest and liked them enough to put them in my searches except for very routine orders. I'm afraid from what I hear that they will betray that affection.

Robert

This all comes as a bit of a revelation to me.

I've frequently bought second-hand books from the BD through Amazon and had assumed I was dealing with some local, second-hand bookshop down some side-street somewhere. I'd fondly imagined it being run by a couple of aging punks or similar, based on my assumption that the name was a black-humour reference to JFK and Dallas.

Naivety, I suppose. Oh well.

>16 alaudacorax:

You must be confusing with a similarly named business, The Book Deposit is only new books though they did have listings available through Amazon for those who wouldn't order directly from their own website for some reason.

For anywhere in Europe, bookdepository is the cheapest option... by a lot sometimes. I hope that does not change - the only reason I switched from Amazon back in the days were the delivery prices...

I made the comment to a friend, when I found out about this, that I'm concerned/worried that Amazon may eventually own every big bookseller out there.

So many bookchains have closed in the past few years, Barnes and Nobel has downsized like crazy, etc etc....

In history class I remember reading about certain companies in the past, dealing with oil and the like, that had a huge monopoly. Eventually the monopoly was broken up (more or less) by the government. ..... I can't help comparing Amazon to that.

#18 - except they for some reason stopped shipping to Denmark a few years back - hugely annoying. Now I sometimes order from them through play.com or amazon marketplace when the price is cheap enough to compensate for the shipping cost.

As darsu said above, this is excellent news for our local bricks-and-mortar bookshops, and even better news for my overloaded TBR shelf...

#17 - Quite right, Jarandel - my mistake.

>20 amberwitch:

Wasn't there a change in the laws around then about importing books or something over there?

>21 thorold:

The problem will not be for countries where you have bricks-and-mortar ones.
Take Bulgaria. English books are hard to be found in a bookstore (except for the bestsellers) and Amazon charges $3.99 per package+$3.99 per book for delivery (~8 for 1 book, 12 for 2 and so on) -- and you cannot cram enough books in a package because there is a cap of the price a package coming from outside of EU can cost before you need to pay import taxes (and paying 20% on top of everything else is not really fun -- even when the application of this law is spotty at best, it does get applied occasionally). Switching to amazon.co.uk makes the things even worse - you do not have the cap (yey!) but the delivery price is in £(4.99 per package + 2.99 per item). I won't even go into how much second-hand books shipping is if they ship to you at all. Bookdepository actually makes buying books possible...

So I am waiting to see how this will change the way BD operates... because before they showed up on the market, all we had was Amazon... or any seller that was willing to ship and let you pay the brutal shipping costs.

It's possible that nothing about how the BD operates will change. There's been no changes to Zappos or Woot, so far.

Will see :) BD is a direct competitor in the out-of-the-usual-countries market -- but if Amazon let it stay like it is (or at least keep an option with low or no shipping costs), then I really do not care that they own them.

>23 AnnieMod:

Have you tried Amazon.de? They charge 6€ per package for almost all EU countries, without an added per book charge (if you order from Germany there are no delivery costs for books at all). The prices for English books are virtually the same as on Amazon.com and .co.uk, I don't know if you would have to pay taxes though (and of course the site is in German which might be a problem). I usually compare prices between Amazon.de and BD and order from whichever is cheaper, except if I need something as fast as possible, then it's usually Amazon.

ETA: There is some information in english available, here is the list of delivery charges
http://www.amazon.de/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=505554

>26 Octane:

Yeah - when I was still in Bulgaria, I was always comparing the three (.com, .co.uk and .de). But 6€ is technically another book just thrown in - no taxes because it is EU and I read German so that was never a concern. They used to have a per book price as well until a couple of years ago -- and the choice of English book was not... that good. Once BD showed up though, nothing could beat their prices -- not having a local Amazon will do that to people.

PS: And I keep forgetting the VAT - both in the co.uk and in the .de - both of which add to the cost.

The Booksellers Association and the Publishers Association in the UK have taken action to oppose the proposed Amazon-Book Depository merger:

BA and PA set to oppose Amazon-Book Depository merger

And, perhaps, an example for why it's so disastrous if Amazon does take over TBD completely...

http://www.marklynas.org/2011/07/the-god-species-withdrawn-from-amazon-censorshi...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/the-lay-scientist/2011/jul/09/1

Mark Lynas's book about ecology and environmentalism (if I understand the description properly) has been removed from the Amazon.co.uk store with the notice "This product is not currently offered by Amazon.co.uk because a customer recently told us that the item he or she received was not as described."

Inquiries regarding the notice/book result in an automated response that basically repeats the above. Is it because of a faulty print run? is it because of someone who doesn't want Lynas's book to be available for others to read? It can't be known yet...

Christine Burns has left several comments on the Guardian page that point out how this is very typical of Amazon's history, and why it is so problematic that Amazon seems to be taking control of the publishing industry in so many different ways. (I'm sure many of us, especially those who remember the LGBT thing a few years ago, agree with her.)

(ETA: I want to add that whether or not you agree with Lynas or think that this is just a publicity stunt, the fact that Amazon can have such influence in whether books are available or not is the disastrous part I was trying to show. There are other sites that have this book available at the moment, and even via Kindle on Amazon, but people who weren't actively seeking the book or who don't wish to use other sites probably wouldn't go elsewhere to buy it.)

29: Exactly. Exacccctly.

It's no big huge think if one book-seller censors or bans or takes down specific books, you can always go to any of the bajillion other booksellers. But once those start shutting down (which they have) and the censoring bookseller starts taking over (which they have)..... Yikes.

>29 keristars:

In my experience this is an automatic system that kicks in after a percentage of complaints from the total number of customers... which gets reviewed manually and most of those books are available again a bit later.

It happens a lot with items that are not sold in big quantities... and it is just Amazon's way to deal with the huge number of items.

That is truely disappointing. I've bought from TBD many times and have always been satisfied. That is sad news.