Friday, April 26, 2013

Bookselling zombies

Zombies are known for their one track mind, their only purpose being to try and eat anything with a pulse, in as bloody a comic book way as possible.

To many small German booksellers, Amazon Inc. seems to be the corporate version of a stereotypical zombie. In our post about Amazon's rotten Easter Egg, we made fun of the giant, but we really had no idea how terrified German booksellers are.

Bestselling German children's book series "Conni" illustrates this more vividly than the story about Amazon jacking up fees.

The book series started in 1992 with the volume "Conni goes to kindergarten" and quickly became a fixture in German households. Conni is growing up, and in the latest book, the heroine receives an Amazon coupon for her birthday, and German booksellers go crazy.

The anger of the distributors and booksellers was such that the publisher Carlsen of Hamburg, Germany, decided to remove the offending birthday present in the next print run.

The K-landnews folks have a soft spot for "the little guy", an adolescent reflex we consciously cultivate against corporate sausage factories and evil empires. The pain of small shops is real and the fact that people get up in the morning, pack a stack of books and visit kindergartens for face time is admirable.

Knowing that the kids will grow up to become Amazon customers and eBook aficionados may weigh on you when you barely eek out a living hauling colorful paper around.

But, honestly, how has censorship for a good cause worked out so far in human history?

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