If you go to buy a new car you expect to find, around the back, a discreet selection of pre-owned models of the utmost distinction. So why should the book trade be different? The question has been brought into sharp focus by Amazon.com, the online retailer, which has been attacked by the American Authors' Guild for selling secondhand books off the same page as new ones.
Now the practice has spread to Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.de, the German site. If you go there looking for a paperback of Naomi Klein's No Logo, you will be offered a new copy at 20% off retail, and - just as prominently - the chance to buy a secondhand copy from the Paperback Exchange, for 50p less than that. The purchase can be made with a credit card through Amazon's own payment system, just as easily as you can buy books from Amazon itself. Amazon takes a flat fee of 75p and 15% of the value as well from the seller. But, as Rachel Silk, a spokeswoman for the company says, the seller gets to display in one of the world's biggest shop windows. Five million people have bought books from Amazon in Europe so far.
The authors' guild is upset because the secondhand copies so easy to buy make no money for either author or publisher. Amazon is marketing the service aggressively. In response to criticism, Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, sent out a letter saying "We've found that our used book business does not take business away from the sale of new books. In fact, offering customers a lower-priced option causes them to visit our site more frequently, which in turn leads to higher sales of new books while encouraging customers to try authors and genres they might not have otherwise tried. In addition, when a customer sells used books, it gives them a budget to buy new books."
The service has certainly been a success for Amazon, which has lost millions of dollars in its quest to dominate the online market for almost everything. The company claims there are half a million items - not all of them books - being sold like this and that in the last quarter of last year these secondhand deals accounted for 15% of American sales.
The Society of Authors in this country is fairly worried. Mark LeFanu, its secretary, says: "I expect authors will be concerned because of the potential loss of sales and the blurring of the distinction between new and secondhand books. But most of them are hardly aware that it's going on yet." In fact, the new marketing can add another layer to the humiliations that Amazon can heap upon an author's head, because not all authors can sustain a secondhand market. Many derive pleasure from their public lending right statements, just because these show that someone has borrowed and enjoyed a book, no matter how small the profit to the author. And some, even in the US, are furious with the authors' guild for complaining that more people read. Georgina Capel, the London literary agent, says that Amazon is far better for authors and for publishers than WH Smith or Waterstone's, and that selling secondhand books can only be good for the trade in the long run. None the less, the authors' guild suggests that its authors link to the site of Barnes & Noble, Amazon's greatest rival. B&N; also sells secondhand books, but from a separate area of its website, so they are not hawked directly to customers who have come to buy a new book.
American authors, or some of them, are obviously jealous of the ways in which the digital industries, like music and software, have been able to control the rights of their users. Bezos wrote in his email that "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or even to give it away if they want. Everyone understands this." Except, apparently, American authors jealous of the kind of rights that Disney and Microsoft can exert over their goods. You cannot buy a copy of Microsoft Windows to dispose of as you will. If you look at the small print, you are buying the right to use it on one machine only, and you are not supposed to sell the software when you sell on the machine.
The most important thing that no one is saying in all this indignation is that Amazon or B&N; are actually one of the most expensive places on the net to buy secondhand books. Amazon has for years been offering secondhand books bought from networks of secondhand booksellers which formed very early on the web. But the company, quite reasonably, took its own mark-up, often 50%. Canny buyers could go direct to such sites as Alibris or abebooks.com, through which independent or local booksellers from all over the world can advertise their stock in a sort of giant virtual Hay-on-Wye. Amazon offers one secondhand copy of Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad, for £7.29. Abe books offers 53 copies from as nearly as many booksellers, with the cheapest starting at £3. It is often the case that what you save on Amazon's cover price, you pay in their postage charges. But it turns out this applies to even secondhand books. Looking at the offer on No Logo, it turns out that the Paperback Exchange charges £2.75 in postage. Add that to the secondhand price and you could get a new copy from a local bookshop for less. This isn't even good news for the anti-capitalist movement, which ought to be in favour of secondhand books. It looks as if the sale of secondhand books at Amazon is no more of a threat to civilisation than the local Oxfam shop.
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