Amazon to close its Book Depository online shop due to ‘uncertain economy’

The Amazon-owned Book Depository is to close at the end of this month, with the company citing an “uncertain economy” and extensive hiring over recent years for the streamlining of its operations.

According to British trade magazine the Bookseller, the company sent an email to vendors and publishing partners alerting them to the closure of the website, with the last date for customers to place orders set for April 26th.

“Over the coming weeks we will complete a winding-down of the business, including discontinuing our listings as a marketplace seller and closing our website,” said Andy Chart, the company’s head of vendor management.

He stressed that the shutdown would be conducted in “a structured way” in order to give vendors and consumers “a business-as-usual experience” during the winding-down period.

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“I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you, from everyone at Book Depository and our book-loving customers, for your supportive partnership over the years in helping us to make printed books more accessible to readers around the world,” he concluded.

When contacted by The Irish Times, an Amazon spokesman confirmed that the online bookshop would cease trading and pointed towards a letter the company’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, sent to staff earlier this year.

In it, Mr Jassy said the company had carried out a review of its operations with a view to “prioritising what matters most to customers and the long-term health of our businesses”. He said the review had been “more difficult given the uncertain economy and that we’ve hired rapidly over the last several years”.

He noted that Amazon had “weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so”, and said the axing of almost 20,000 positions globally would help the company “pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure”.

The online bookseller was set up in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the stated aim of challenging its larger rival by “selling ‘less of more’ rather than ‘more of less’”.

While it proved to be popular among book lovers and book publishers offering an alternative avenue for the buying and selling of books to Amazon, it was ultimately acquired by the online retail giant in 2011.

[ Fears for Irish jobs as Amazon confirms it will cut another 9,000 jobs ]

For more than a decade it has been run as a separate entity and many people who bought books on the platform were unaware they were shopping on an Amazon-owned site.

While it was a large purchaser of books from Irish publishers and would have attracted a large volume of trade from Irish consumers with its promise of free delivery, the impact of its closure is likely to be less pronounced now than it might have been even four years ago, according to Tomas Kenny of online bookseller kennys.ie.

The Galway-based firm was one of the earliest adopters to online book sales, having started doing so even before Amazon came into being in the mid-1990s.

Mr Kenny said that while the closure of the Book Depository has taken the industry by surprise, he believed its impact on Irish consumers would be minimal. “In one way it means nothing because people who were shopping on the site were actually buying off Amazon and they can still do that at very similar prices.”

He suggested the shutting down of the site at the end of April might be “a positive development for Irish buisneses because many people who bought books on the platform did not realise they were buying off Amazon and now that that will be clearer, it might drive people towards Irish businesses”.

The pace at which booksellers all over the country moved online at the start of the pandemic in 2020 had created multiple alternatives to the Book Depository, he added.

“The move of Irish bookselling online saw 20 years’ worth of work done in two years. Everyone is online and there is an awful lot of good value out there, so this move doesn’t mean as much as it might have even four years ago.”