Why You Shouldn’t Buy a “new” Book From Amazon
Amazon, a company that Jeff Bezos invented to piss off everyone in the book industry at the same time, loves to make books as cheap as possible. To that end, they’ve moved third-party options to the top of the page this spring, sometimes even listing third-party sellers as their default purchase option . You can see the “new” option which is cheaper than the actual new Amazon option. If you choose this option, here is who will miss the chance.
author
Authors usually receive royalties from the sale of new books. If you buy a regular used book, you at least know that the author received royalties when it was first sold.
But with a third-party “new” book, the author often gets nothing or very little. Under most contracts, most or all of the royalties are a percentage of the sale price, not a flat rate per copy. Thus, the cheaper the book, the lower the fee.
For many reasons, publishers receive copies that never sold as new books. As writer and Writers Guild member Douglas Preston explains in the New York Times , this can happen when books are damaged in transit or when sellers return their unsold books for refunds (more on this strange publishing practice below). After that, publishers cannot sell them as new books . You can get rid of them only with a big discount. This is what they do, and they give the author a tiny fee or don’t give it at all. And the author never sees money from this book again.
Publisher
Publishing is weird. It is an information industry that until recently behaved like an industry for physical things, with a few exceptions. One such exception is “leftovers”.
Typically, if a bookstore cannot sell all of the books purchased from a publisher, they can send back unsold copies and receive a refund. This is an odd practice, but the publishers continue it because it reduces the risk for the bookstore, which encourages him to take the risk and buy more copies of the future book. And nobody wants to be the first publisher to say, “In fact, you have to keep what you buy.”
(Crazier still, those dense, cheap editions of books you see at airports and pharmacies are called mass market editions. The bookstore doesn’t even have to send them back to get a refund – it just needs to rip open the covers and send The publisher must eat the damages. The bookstore is not allowed to go out and sell the “stripped book.” This is why mass market books have a warning on the copyright page warning people not to buy them without a case.)
As we said, a publisher cannot sell a leftover book as a new one. They should draw a mark at the bottom of the book , for example:
But sometimes these leftover books are not tagged. And while Amazon claims it does not allow third-party sellers to sell used books as new (only as “like new” in the used section), Preston, along with the Authors Guild, says there are too many “new” copies. for sale on Amazon to keep everything legal. Many of them should be marked “used” according to Amazon’s rules, he said. And they definitely shouldn’t be used as the default way to buy a book.
Not you … yet
Let’s be honest: you will never notice the difference between most new books and “new” books. Even the remainder mark will not affect your experience. So in the short term, buying a third-party vendor can save you money without any compromise.
But in the long run, you mostly support book piracy. Publishing is a low-margin industry in which the vast majority of authors, editors, and other workers make very little money. Book piracy makes it harder to make a living by making books.
And when money leaves the book industry, shortsighted publishers usually rely only on guaranteed bestsellers like self-help books and celebrity memoirs. They risk less for interesting niche books or anything that takes a long time to catch on. This is a stupid and bad answer, but it affects you as a reader.
If you want to save on a book, buy a used one or borrow it from the library. Most of the time, you share or inherit a book that once made money for the publisher and author. Nobody can envy you.
But if you have already acquired such a fresh new quality, consider buying a new one. Make sure Amazon lists the seller as Amazon. Or – and we know this is inconvenient – try buying books from a company that is n’t trying to suck money out of publication.