Independent Bookstore Day, a national sales event with more than 1,600 non-chain stores participating, has taken place on the last Saturday of April for 12 years, but this year’s, which was held on April 26, really opened a can of bookworms.
On April 15, less than two weeks before Independent Bookstore Day, Amazon announced that it was scheduling its second annual Amazon Book Sale from April 23–28. If the intention was to kick the indies in the teeth, the timing seemed great, tempting consumers not just to purchase books at a deep discount a full three days before the indies’ sale, but coinciding with and potentially eclipsing Independent Bookstore Day itself.
It will come as no surprise that independent bookstore owners, windmill-tilters in a constant struggle against Amazon’s buying power (and alleged predatory book pricing), were not thrilled with Amazon’s move.
“Scheduling a sale on the biggest day of the year for independent bookstores seems to be a predatory tactic to hurt small businesses,” Ray T. Daniels, chief communications officer of the American Booksellers Association (ABA), which coordinates Independent Bookstore Day, told Retail Brew via email. “Trying to dim their light isn’t just bad for indie bookstores, but it’s bad for readers and communities.”
In statements shared with media outlets including Vulture and Fast Company, Amazon claimed that “the overlap was unintentional” when it scheduled its book sale at the same time as the indies’ book sale which, again, has fallen on the last Saturday of April for 12 years.
What none of those publications apparently asked, however, was whether Amazon would refrain from scheduling its annual book sale to coincide with Independent Bookstore Day again in the future.
So that’s what we asked.
“We unintentionally overlapped”: Retail Brew put its questions in writing to Amazon. Along with asking if it would refrain from scheduling its sale against the independent bookstores’ sale in the future, we asked Amazon what might arguably be even worse for the indies, since it could eat up shoppers’ book-buying budgets before their end-of-April book sale: “Would Amazon agree to not have its book sale week happen any time within the month prior to Independent Bookstore Day?” we asked. “If not a month before, would Amazon commit to not having it anytime within three weeks before? Two weeks before? One week before?”
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“We are always listening to feedback,” Amazon PR Manager Ale Iraheta responded in a statement emailed to Retail Brew. “This is the second year we’ve hosted the Amazon Book Sale which was only in the US last year. In expanding the event to additional locales, dates were selected to accommodate all 10 countries and we unintentionally overlapped with Independent Bookstore Day.”
That was the entirety of Amazon’s statement to us, so we reiterated that the thrust of our inquiry—our email subject line was “Will Amazon steer clear of Independent Bookstore Day in the future?”—was that if the timing was indeed unintentional this year, whether Amazon would go on the record that it wouldn’t schedule its book sale at the same time as Independent Bookstore Day in the future.
Iraheta thanked us for following up—and added nothing to her statement.
Page-turner: A Retail Brew poll asked readers if they thought Amazon should schedule its biggest annual book sale to coincide with Independent Bookstore Day in the future. More than 9 out of 10 (93.4%) were against Amazon scheduling its sale at the same time, while just 6.6% thought they should.
Ironically enough, the umbrage that many booksellers and readers took at Amazon’s party-crashing seemed to both focus their minds and loosen their pursestrings for the latest Independent Bookstore Day, according to the ABA:
- Among the 560 bookstores that use ABA’s ecommerce platform, there was a 77.41% increase in online sales over Independent Bookstore Day 2024.
- Bookshop.org, an online platform for independents, saw a 170% sales increase over last year.
Asked if, paradoxically, Amazon’s move helped independent booksellers this year, the ABA’s Daniels was unequivocal.
“Amazon doesn’t help independent bookstores. Period,” Daniels told us. “It has a chokehold on the book industry.”
“We can never compete with Amazon on the price of books and speed of shipping because we don’t employ a private army, and we know that,” Leah Koch, who with her sister co-owns The Ripped Bodice, a romance bookshop in Culver City, California, told Vulture. “Fuck Jeff Bezos. May he be very miserable living alone on the moon.”