Posted in: Comics | Tagged: amazon

Amazon Donates £250,000 to Help UK Bookstores and Comic Shops

Published Mon, 27 Apr 2020 03:00:58 -0500

The Book Trade Charity is a British organisation that cover booksellers in the UK, including comic shops. I only discovered they existed, or covered comic book stores, after getting the nod from the Book Industry Charitable Foundation (Binc). We learned that comic book stores in the UK and Ireland can download this claim form, and anyone interested raising money for British or Irish comic book stores get in touch with them. It may be a timely moment to do so as well. Bookstores and comic shops and businesses, amongst many, that are suffering in shutdown, during the current global situation. Because it transpires that Amazon UK has donated a quarter of a million pounds to the fund.

A fundraiser was launched a month ago by Gayle Lazda from the London Review Bookshop, Picador's Kishani Widyaratna and Daunt Books publisher Zeljka Marosevic to help them survive. With donations from authors including Candice Carty-Williams, Adam Kay and David Nicholls, as well as Penguin Random House and the Booksellers Association, the fund raised up to £130,000 before Amazon, initially as an anonymous donor almost tripled that with £250,000, totalling £380,000.

David Hicks, chief executive of the Book Trade Charity told the Bookseller magazine that "the donor just wants to say they are committed to independent bookshops as part of a mixed bookselling economy and they want to show some support" and eventually had been given Amazon's blessing to go public with its identity in order to quash speculation. He told the Bookseller that the donation had "put us in a very strong position to help even more booksellers suffering hardship from this crisis. We all recognise the value of bookshops to local communities, the trade, as well as the economy, and it is a privilege to represent such a broad cross-section of the industry".

While many bookstores blame Amazon for taking away much of their custom in the first place, many have found Amazon Marketplace as a way to sell books to other customers around the world. But Gayle Lazda who started the fund tweeted out that "I'm glad that this money is going to a good cause, but there is no greater threat to high-street bookselling than Amazon, and their labour practices are a well-documented disgrace. I know that there is a huge strength of feeling against Amazon among booksellers, and that the horrible irony of this donation will be lost on none of us, but I hope it won't stop any of us supporting the work of the Book Trade Charity, and applying to the fund if you need it." The Bookseller Association said that it was an "ill-judged attempt to mitigate a decades-long campaign to undermine the bookselling sector". Stll, any port in a storm.