Irish Booksellers and Amazon (Irish Times article)
A belated update here to mention a piece that I wrote for The Irish Times recently. The piece focuses on the threat posed to Irish booksellers by Amazon.ie, which recently opened its dedicated Irish website.
Amazon has been established in the Irish market for a long time, but customers here have always had to order from the UK site; since Brexit, this has presumably necessitated more paperwork and costs on Amazon’s side, and perhaps more hesitation on the part of the Irish consumer. The Irish website promises faster delivery times, “local pricing” and reductions in taxes and charges.
What does this mean for Irish booksellers? For the piece, I reported on the annual Bookselling Ireland conference earlier this year, at which a bookseller from the UK described Amazon’s disastrous impact on the bookseller landscape there. I also spoke to several booksellers, some of whom had stark warnings: Tomás Kenny pointed out the vulnerability of rural bookshops, and Louisa Earls of Books Upstairs pointed to the risk of Amazon.ie siphoning off sales by offering free shipping. As I point out in the piece, the loss of sales of higher-selling titles has the potential to have a dramatic effect on the larger ecosystem, and to cause real damage to small and independent bookshops:
A bookshop’s ability to sell hundreds of Sally Rooney hardbacks on publication day, for example, helps them to bring customers into the shop, where they might pick up some less recognisable titles – a debut novel by an unproven author, a book of translated fiction, a literary journal – along with their Intermezzo. Amazon’s arrival threatens to disturb this balance between high-selling titles and commercially marginal ones, and to tear through the ecosystem that supports the latter.
Books at One, a community bookshop in Letterfrack, Connemara (I recommend a visit!)
Read the piece here.