The protest by antiquarian booksellers against Amazon subsidiary AbeBooks has ended after two days with a victory: the site has backed down from plans no longer to allow rare and used booksellers in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia and South Korea to sell books on AbeBooks, the New York Times reported.
Called Banned Booksellers Week, the protest started on Monday and ultimately involved nearly 600 booksellers around the world who stopped selling nearly 3.8 million titles via AbeBooks. As the Times noted, "It was a rare concerted uprising against any part of Amazon by any of its millions of suppliers, leading to an even rarer capitulation. Even the book dealers said they were surprised at the sudden reversal by AbeBooks, the company's secondhand and rare bookselling network." The paper also observed that the antiquarian book world is a close-knit community, which helped the protest.
The move by AbeBooks was especially mystifying because AbeBooks seemed to have no solid reason for the change. It variously said it wanted to stop selling in the countries because "it is no longer viable for us to operate in these countries due to increasing costs and complexities" and because "our third-party payment service provider is closing at the end of the year." Yet the company continues to sell merchandise, including books, from the banned countries.
"AbeBooks was saying entire countries were expendable to its plans," Scott Brown, owner of Eureka Books, Eureka, Calif., and an organizer of the protest, told the Times. "Booksellers everywhere felt they might be next." He added, "We are entirely subject to their whims. We need to spend more time focusing our energies on our own business outside of the Amazon ecosphere."