Every second book in America, ballpark, is being sold via e-commerce…Amazon.com has 50 million books available. A bookstore, a good independent bookstore, has around 50,000 different books available… an algorithm decides what is being presented and made visible and discoverable for an end consumer online. It makes a huge difference.
— Markus Dohle, CEO, Penguin Random House
So, in essence Amazon holds a monopoly on book retail, which has been brought on by people like myself who originally were looking for the best deals on the books. Once a huge frequenter of Crown books, once they dies, Amazon beat all the other other on price. I remember for years Amazon fought just to stay alive, with loss after loss.
Now they are the last one standing. Recently to combat the inevitability of this,I have purchased books directly from small publishers ignoring the Amazon discount, only to have the publisher use Amazon for the order fulfillment…