Jeff Bezos Is Not Good for Books

A publisher's take on Amazon's price fixing, extraction, and the slow strangling of the publishing ecosystem—and how to resist

Things are bad. Like, really bad. If you’re like me, it’s difficult to find positive topics to talk about when you’re out with friends. I try, I do, but to be informed—and to care about what’s going on—means reckoning dark, difficult things.

So, I want to talk about Jeff Bezos. I could spend all of the words I have for this week’s Substack on The Washington Post and the devastation of what happened there last week, but I’ll let others more close to The Post speak to just how consequential this is. I recommend David Remnick of The New Yorker’s take. (If you don’t have a subscription, now’s a good time to get one.)

I saw a lot of social media posts this week speculating about whether to cancel Washington Post subscriptions. I’m keeping mine because I believe in the people at The Post, and because there’s a much bigger target out there—and its name is Amazon. What Bezos did this week was, for me, the final nail in the coffin. I’ve been thinking about it for too long, and finally I did it: I canceled my Prime and Audible accounts.

---

Two weeks ago, joining a growing chorus of people who believe that our biggest and worst billionaires are crashing our country into the ground, I posted on Facebook to Resist Amazon.

One of my authors emailed me to rebuke me. She told me my post felt uniquely crappy and that taking a stance against Amazon directly hurts my authors. She reminded me that Amazon is a place where authors are building an audience and selling books. (I do know this.) She didn’t tell me, nor did she need to remind me, that authors also spend gobsmacking amounts of money on Amazon ads, feeding more money into Bezos’s coffers, and allow Amazon to undermine them at every turn.

I’ve thought long and hard about her email and her rebuke because I hate to upset my authors. I am an author advocate above all else and my dedication to my authors runs deep. I felt defensive at the email, always a good sign to look inward. I’m the child of two therapists, so I come to introspection easily and wholeheartedly.

But the conclusion I reached is that Amazon has hurt the book industry more than it’s helped it. Furthermore, every single time we buy something on Amazon, we enrich Bezos and solidify Amazon’s stranglehold over small businesses, including publishers. We have other buying choices, and it’s essential to a thriving publishing ecosystem that we make a concerted effort to buy elsewhere and to educate our own readers about why buying elsewhere is good for books. In the long run, I believe breaking the Amazon trance will be good for the book industry.

Amazon’s history

Amazon, you’ll remember, started as a bookstore. I remember very well when it came on the scene in the late 1990s. I was a freshman in college and got my first email address the year Amazon launched in 1995, and by the time I started in book publishing in 2000, Amazon was a key retailer.

Amazon was benign for a long time, just a seller that seemed to be making books more accessible and offering fair terms. It’s hard to know the heart of a man, or the tipping point of when greed turns a soul black, but for Bezos I would target around 2017-18 when Amazon gained enough market share (and data) to become monopolistic in its strategies, and started to undermine the very people who built the platform to begin with: its sellers. Read on.

The price fixing

Our distributor is Simon & Schuster. When we first onboarded with them in 2024, they looked at our program and said: raise all your ebook prices from $9.99 to $12.99. One of the reasons we were locked into the $9.99 price point before that is because we have all been brainwashed by Amazon not to charge above $9.99 for ebooks. My authors primarily drive this charge, even though our previous distributor had made the same plea to me, noting that consumers will absolutely pay more for ebooks.

The mindset problem stems from the fact that Amazon has made self-published authors submit to its same, unyielding terms for YEARS. As a self-published author, you get 70% of the net profits on your sales if you price your book between $2.99 and $9.99. If you price under that or above that, you get 30%. How is this not price fixing? How does Amazon get away with this?

Hybrid and traditionally published authors are not subject to these punitive guidelines, but so many authors have drunk the Amazon Kool-Aid that they’re absolutely convinced that to price their ebooks above $9.99 is to lose all their customers. Amazon makes you believe this is true even though evidence points to the contrary. Plus, this range has been in place since 2010!! The price of everything is going up, but when you publish with Amazon you are forced to stay in their range. This is what we call being hostage to terms.

This week, with my newfound commitment to buy elsewhere, I made my first ebook purchase on Kobo: The Hollow Half, by Sarah Aziza. I paid $15.99. Consumers will pay more for books, all formats. Trust that your work is worth more than $9.99 and break the spell.

The third-party marketplace

I wrote a post that went viral in 2017 because I was one of the first industry people to write an in-depth piece about the Amazon’s then new policy to be turning the Buy Box over to third-party sellers. Overnight, we were losing the buy box to our own books across countless titles. Amazon didn’t bother to announce this policy. It was just something that happened, and that royally fucked publishers, and continues to do so.

I’m not saying I object to Amazon as a marketplace for used products, but I absolutely object, and condemn, that Amazon explicitly gives the buy button to other vendors of She Writes Press books when we have plenty of inventory. And this happens now ALL THE TIME. It’s so detrimental, and it’s so grossly capitalistic, because these third-party vendors pay for that privilege—to “win” (Amazon’s term) the buy box.

This was the beginning, I believe, of Bezos beginning to amass the kind of wealth that distances people from their own humanity. Bezos has professed that Amazon is all about the consumer, but his customers are also the people who sell on his platform. And guess what? We all hate their policies with such a passion and feel so taken advantage of that it’s impossible to see the professed “good” they’re doing out there.

The manipulation

And it gets worse. This week on The Ezra Klein Show (“We Didn’t Ask for This Internet”), you can listen to the wonderful Corey Doctorow, who I know and love and who’s been on my podcast, talking about Enshittifcation (the concept that’s also the title of his book) and to Tim Wu, who helps us understand Amazon’s distinctly “extractive” policies.

Companies who practice extraction basically follow a blueprint that Amazon has perfected. Start as a basically good company. In Amazon’s case, when they started their marketplace, stuff was just for sale, and Amazon took a 20% cut. However, its dominance allowed it to begin to force terms on its vendors. Amazon now takes well over 50% for the privilege of selling our books, and there is zero negotiation. You accept their terms of you just don’t sell.

Worse, at Amazon, when you type in the name of whatever product you’re looking for, it’s not the best products that rise to the top. Not the products consumers actually love the best. No. Placement and rankings cost money, and last year Amazon made $70 billion from vendors competing for better search results. $70 billion, folks, for the privilege of bidding against your competition for more eyes on your product. It makes me sick.

Let me explain this from an author’s point of view because this is the gist of how Amazon ads work, too. My authors love Amazon ads, and I get it. They do in fact work. You sell more books when you promote. But because of Amazon’s terms and the cost of ads, authors break even when they advertise. So, yes, they’re getting bragging rights that they’ve sold X number of books, but at zero profit. This is what it means to be an author on today’s Amazon platform, and Bezos has designed it this way.

The Audible problem

On paper, Audible presents itself as an incredible opportunity—access to the largest audiobook audience in the world. In practice, the terms are so lopsided that many publishers refuse to participate at all. Audible controls pricing through its credit and subscription systems, meaning publishers don’t actually control what their audiobooks are worth. Even worse, Audible historically allowed listeners to return audiobooks long after they’d been listened to—sometimes in full—with the cost clawed back from the author or publisher, not Amazon. Imagine manufacturing a product, paying to produce it, distributing it, and then being forced to refund it months later after it’s already been consumed. Add to that exclusivity clauses that lock publishers into Amazon’s ecosystem and prevent them from selling elsewhere, Amazon’s favorite monopolistic tactic.

Self-publishing

I’ll end on self-publishing because the most loyal of the Amazon author community is undoubtedly the self-publishing community that will argue that without Amazon, there wouldn’t be a marketplace for self-published authors to sell their books.

This is the place where I have the most amount of grace in my heart for Amazon. It is true that Amazon created an easy way for authors to get their work into the world—first through CreateSpace, now KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). That said, if you think it’s benevolent or without strings, think again. Self-published authors are the ones who propagate the notion that $9.99 for an ebook is the absolute highest possible price anyone can pay—and that’s because that’s the absolute highest price they’re allowed to charge on Amazon without being penalized.

For publishers like me, we see how Amazon privileges self-published authors—and for selfish reasons. They want a loyal author community defending it, all the while undermining booksellers and bookstores and the broader book ecosystem. Amazon is single-handedly responsible for keeping the price of books low. Too low. And then once they have you, you better believe you’re in their clutches. They practice price fixing and exclusivity to try to lock authors into KDP Select so that your book then isn’t even available for sale on other platforms. This is not a benign practice; it’s a brazen monopolistic power move.

Please remember, self-published authors, IngramSpark, Draft2Digital, Bookshop.org. You can publish on Amazon, of course, but you don’t have to be a minion.

To the outside world, Amazon is synonymous with books. It got its start in books. Authors are obsessed with their Amazon pages, rankings, and sales. Most publishers rely heavily on Amazon because we, too, are subjects in their kingdom. Very few publishers have the courage or infrastructure to opt out. (Shout out to Joe Biel at Microcosm here not only for figuring it out but for thriving without Amazon.)

Bookstores despise Amazon so much that I encourage my authors not to ever say the “A-word” in the presence of a bookseller, nor to ever list Amazon on their public-facing materials, things that will touch booksellers, librarians, and other people who really care about books and this industry.

As a publisher, I am not encouraging an Amazon boycott, but rather a resistance.

As an author, you can:

1. Encourage your consumers to buy elsewhere, while still having Amazon links on your website (just don’t make Amazon the first listing).

2. Take it upon yourself to educate your consumers about why it matters to you (if it does) that they consider other buying options.

3. Make sure that you or your publishers upload your books, ebooks, and audiobooks to all platforms. I pivoted to Libro.fm for audiobooks just this week, and they let me designate my local bookstore, Book Passage, to be the recipient of the proceeds.

Perhaps if I weren’t in book publishing I’d consider canceling my Amazon membership altogether, but I’m not going that far. What I have been doing for the past month is buying elsewhere. Whole Foods is .2 miles away from house, and I’ve been making the deliberate effort to go the extra mile/s to other stores. I have not stepped foot in Whole Foods for weeks. I stopped Audible, full stop. I am not promising that I will never buy anything ever again on Amazon, but canceling Prime means that I stop to consider what I’m purchasing and where else I can get it. I’m foregoing convenience. I’m taking myself into physical stores. Downtown Berkeley, where I live, looks like an apocalypse in certain stretches. Empty, boarded-up storefronts on streets like Shattuck and San Pablo. If you think Amazon has nothing to do with this, think again. Retailers are failing because of our buying choices. My primary personal goal of 2026 is to be more conscientious about where I buy, even and especially if this means I buy less. I’ll save the money I’m losing in convenience by buying fewer things. This is a small way I can funnel my outrage into something positive for my community.

If you love Amazon, or just rely on it because of where you live, or because it gives you such good deals and such immediate gratification, I encourage you to read up more on its practices. Listen to the Ezra Klein episode. I’ve known for years and years how bad it is, but it took me this long—and largely due to my absolute fury over what happened at The Post this week—to take the step to actually make a change.

You do have other choices. It might mean longer wait times, paying slightly more for something you want, and/or going out of your way, but it matters. And it’s not bad for books. Believe me. It is not bad for books or your career as an author to send people elsewhere. In fact, you can motivate people with your message and your education about how they can participate in a more thriving book ecosystem by supporting the countless other retailers that sell books:

For print: Indie bookstores, including ones with the capacity to ship anywhere, like Book Passage, Powell’s, and Tattered Cover; Bookshop.org; B&N; Indiebound, Biblio; Better World Books, ThriftBooks. Books-a-Million; Target.com; Hudson bookstores in airports; museum bookstores; university bookstores; library book sales.

For ebooks: Kobo, Google Play, Draft2Digital, Bookshop.org (now in partnership with Draft2Digital for self-published authors); Everand; Sribd; eBooks.com; and also library lenders. We sell ebooks on 127 different platforms. It was not difficult to purchase on Kobo and download my new ebook, The Hollow Half.