Ciarán Howley pens a goodbye letter to online bookseller Book Depository which is set to shutter its doors from April 26th.
On April 5th, book lovers around the world awoke to a shock. Online bookseller Book Depository would that day announce that it was to close permanently. After two decades in the business, the company made the following announcement:
“We are sorry to let you know that Book Depository will be closing from April 26th 2023.”
The news comes as part of the job shakeup happening across the tech industry globally. Book Depository is owned by the conglomerate Amazon, who bought the bookseller from founder, and former employee, Andrew Crawford in 2011. Crawford founded the company in 2004 in Gloucester before it grew to open offices in London, Madrid, Chennai and Cape Town.
The announcement came without warning, seemingly as if it had been decided upon overnight. There were some red flags within a blog post published by chief executive Andy Jassy in January who announced that eighteen-thousand roles across the company were to be cut. Now, it seems the whole ship is going down.
For many, this marks the end of an era. Book Depository offered ridiculously competitive prices across its titles and offered free shipping to countries around the world. While in Ireland, the U.K. and U.S. there are a number of cheaper alternatives, many international readers will be forced to pay for higher shipping prices in order to acquire books in English not sold in their home country.
Book Depository’s untimely assassination by Amazon is by far one of the sadder publishing news stories to emerge this year. It’s just another reason in a long list to hate Amazon and everything the company stands for.
One Twitter user @relenita1 worked out the price of buying an English language book from a local bookstore in Chile. For them to get the book in less than eight days, they would be forced to cough up one hundred and seventy five dollars, plus an extra thirty if they were to buy an extra title. If they were willing to wait between twenty-one and thirty-days, the shipping fee comes to one-hundred and twenty dollars.
While yes, supporting your local bookshop is very well and good, the number of people who regularly can is getting slimmer and slimmer while the cost of living crisis rages on. If you’re looking to buy a new paperback from a local bookshop, or even a chain, prepare to shell out the guts of twenty euro. For students and those on low-income, those kinds of prices just aren’t doable.
For those of us in Ireland and seeking an affordable alternative before April 26th’s doomsday clock strikes midnight, Kenny’s.ie and Blackwells.co.uk offer competitive prices, and the former does in fact offer free domestic shipping.
As I write this, I’ve wasted no time ordering about ten books from Book Depository that have been dwindling on my to-be-read list.
Book Depository’s untimely assassination by Amazon is by far one of the sadder publishing news stories to emerge this year. It’s just another reason in a long list to hate Amazon and everything the company stands for.
BD, you’ve been a loyal friend to all and many and you were genuinely too good for this world. Fly high.