The American Booksellers Association has recently dispatched an email to all of their members, which includes thousands of bookstores. The organization is starting to beat the war drum about the Amazon Bookstore. Their main concern is how Amazon is maintaining the same pricing as their website and how this can be a violation of antitrust laws.
American Booksellers Association CEO Oren Teicher said in a statement “I did want to make one thing clear: ABA member bookstores can rest assured that your trade association will continue to remind publishers and other vendors about their obligations under antitrust laws, especially regarding their need to ensure that inventory purchased under one set of terms is not commingled and transferred to another class of business. That remains a bedrock principle that everyone must abide by, and ABA will not be shy in raising this matter with all suppliers.”
The ABA has made subtly allusions that Amazon Books might be commingling inventory purchased at wholesale with retail inventory. This is because Amazon Books is pricing its titles as aggressively as Amazon.com and this has led many bricks-and-mortar booksellers to question whether it is benefiting from an unfair advantage, its wholesale discount.
Michael Kozlowski is the editor-in-chief at Good e-Reader and has written about audiobooks and e-readers for the past fifteen years. Newspapers and websites such as the CBC, CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and the New York Times have picked up his articles. He Lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
