Carmella Borchers

Amazon Purchases UK Online Bookseller

E-Commerce giant Amazon has recently purchased the UK bookseller The Book Depository. Find out what this means to consumers and how this could affect the rest of the industry.

Once again, there have recently been changes to the world of online book selling and distribution, when Amazon announced in July that they have completed an agreement to buy online book seller The Book Depository, which is based in the United Kingdom. The Book Depository is a popular site in the UK, allowing consumers to purchase various types of books like Romance Novels which would be hard to find anywhere else.

However, Amazon has carefully planned the move and as they recognize that the brand is important in the UK, they have agreed not to eliminate it. After some customers showed concern, it has been revealed that the brand will continue operating independently, though now owned by Amazon. Therefore, those who love to purchase romance Books Online or thrillers online from the site will not see too many changes in the near future.

However, what changes are expected to come to the site within the next year are not yet known. Due to the fact that Amazon sells books at very low rates, their profit margins are already quite thin. The Book Depository has been known to offer some very interesting services to customers, such as free shipping in over 100 countries of the world, as well as selling some books that were previously out of print. It is possible that Amazon may seek to make some cutbacks to some of the aspects of The Book Depository that it deems to be too generous towards customers, which could lead to some dissatisfaction.

While there are many independent sites which sell mostly niche books like erotic eBooks, Amazon and The Book Depository were the only noteworthy online booksellers in certain countries like Australia. This has led many to believe that Amazon is seeking to establish a monopoly on book sales in many parts of the world. Such a monopoly could cause problems for local retailers, who are already facing very difficult times and are having trouble competing with online book selling businesses such as Amazon.

Some analysts predict that there is still room in the market, however smaller retailers that wish to branch out in the online world might have a difficult time competing at a national or international scale. It is expected that some retailers will rather seek to compete at a more local level, or instead specialize in the sale of specific types of books like romance novels. At least then, they will have a fair chance of competing against a giant company such as Amazon. However, we still cannot guess what will happen in the future, just like few people could have predicted that Facebook would one day dominate the online social networking market, effectively ending the reign of other social media sites like Myspace. There might very well be another big player, some are even thinking that companies like Google and Microsoft might seek to enter the book market, but for now these claims are little more than speculation.

 Read more: Do eBooks Cheapen the Value of Reading?

Article Tags: Book Depository

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