Peep Show star David Mitchell blasted “the monopolistic, cynical and frankly life-crushing way” that Amazon operates to a roomful of booksellers.
The comedian was giving the keynote speech at the Booksellers Association conference in Warwick yesterday, 22 September, and book trade magazine The Bookseller has reported that he laid into Amazon for its business model: “They already have an enormous technological edge but apparently that isn’t enough. They also have to have a rapacious near-monopoly.” He also criticised the retailer for its tax payments, pointing to the fact that Amazon paid just £2.4m in corporation tax in 2012, on £4.2bn of UK sales.
“Amazon is a company that has profited massively from this natural disaster of technological change that has befallen us in the last decade and a half, but they make it much worse than it needs to be because of the monopolistic, cynical and frankly life-crushing way that they operate,” said Mitchell to more than 300 assembled book trade experts. “I think we tell ourselves, British people, that opposing things like Amazon is in some way cheating. Making books that will sell more in the way that most people would like to buy them (in bookshops) is somehow cheating and not behaving properly and denying reality. It isn’t cheating, we are free to do that. What is cheating is Amazon’s business model.”
Mitchell’s comments follow a call from the Publishers Association at the end of last week for the UK government to “initiate an inquiry into the digital book retail market to ensure it is working to the benefit of booksellers, publishers, authors and consumers”.
“The book retail market in the UK suffers from a chronic and debilitating imbalance for authors, publishers and booksellers. The routes to market for ebooks are too narrow and too few, and the online market for print books is similarly restricted, creating a potential for adverse effect on competition within both markets, and ultimately restricting consumers’ choice of retail opportunities,” said the publishers’ trade body in a new manifesto, Publishing for Britain, adding that “publishers ensure that works are disseminated as widely and fully as possible, and that print and digital versions are available to consumers. We can only continue to achieve this if markets are fair and balanced.”
Yesterday, after reading an extract from his forthcoming book, a collection of his Observer columns in which he calls Amazon “a benefits scrounger”, Mitchell was greeted with “rapturous applause”, reported the Bookseller.
“One bookseller asked Mitchell if he sold his books through Amazon,” the magazine added, “to which he replied: ‘Yes. But I would be crazy not to. And I am a prostitute in that way.’”
Booksellers Association president and bookseller Tim Walker celebrated bookshops as “the cultural bedrock of so many of our communities”, telling delegates that “the world has not ended for bookshops as many predicted … Yes it is tough, but print book sales through bookshops are still strong”, and that “we should reiterate our belief that booksellers believe in freedom, diversity, partnership and a profitable book industry for all”.
But Mitchell also sounded a note of positivity. “For all that there is hope,” said the comedian. “Theatre and radio still survive, after lots of people were predicting their death, and people are wrong in their depressing predictions. Sometimes bad things don’t happen just because most people don’t want them to.”
• Read David Mitchell’s Observer columns here
