Sherry Chandler » Jonathan Greene on Amazon
Jonathan Greene on Amazon
Jonathan Greene, a Kentucky poet of small fame* and great prestige and owner of Gnomon Press, voices some intriguing opinions about Amazon.com, small presses, and independent bookstores on the issue #99 of Meredith Sue Willis’s Books for Readers newsletter. As a matter of background, the newsletter has been hosting an ongoing conversation about shopping at Amazon.com, which is a non-union shop:
Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal devastation in the eastern coalfields.
But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over 40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.
But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but (unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific salaries.
Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry.
I highly recommend that anyone the least interested in the publishing biz read the rest of this intelligent comment.
The telephone number for Gnomon Press, located at Gnomon Press, 329 W Broadway in Frankfort, is 502-223-1858.
As for Amazon, my own experience is that one can order Finishing Line Press chapbooks through their site; bookstores don’t like chapbooks because they don’t have a spine and so tend to disappear on the shelves. But work for Amazon is very mechanized and quota driven.
*Fama was the Roman goddess of rumor, and so it might be said that there’s a certain down-side to fame.
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