Guy Weller has some pointed words for fellow book dealers who use online megavendors like Amazon.com or Abebooks.com to sell their inventory of used and rare books. Those big companies, Weller says in a letter reprinted on the Bookshop Blog, are “dictating far too much to us as to how we should fashion our listings, and how we should list on their sites,” and if the dealers don’t do something about it soon, “we are likely to find ourselves doomed as an industry segment.”
Weller’s solution? Dealers should invest more heavily in their own sites and form more commercial relationship with other vendor clearinghouses that will provide them with direct links without charging a commission on each sale. “We actually hold the power instruments in the game,” he asserts, claiming that the dealers, if united, would be more powerful than Amazon. “Let us make sure we exercise these instruments fairly aggressively, in our own interest.”