At the annual conference for Irish booksellers in Galway this February, a spectre haunted the hotel halls. In between typical conference activities – updates on developments in the Irish book trade, presentations from bookshop owners, some light relief in which Paul Howard and Gordon D’Arcy promoted their new children’s book by inviting delegates onstage to catch rugby balls – one word recurred ominously: Amazon.ie.
The corporate behemoth was preparing to launch its Irish store, and the members of Bookselling Ireland, many of them small businesses dotted around the country, were thinking about how to prepare for the arrival of the biggest bookseller of all.
“Bookseller” is of course a wholly inadequate word to describe the vast entity that is Amazon in 2025. When Jeff Bezos started his “everything store” in a suburban Seattle garage 30 years ago, his choice of books as preferred commodity had less to do with a love of the Gutenbergian codex and more to do with hard-nosed business considerations. Books could be bought in bulk from a handful of wholesalers; they were portable and easily shipped; and, importantly, the millions of titles in print far exceeded the number that any brick-and-mortar bookshop can feasibly stock.
Books were Amazon’s way to establish dominance in the growing online marketplace and to launch its project – a vast and, for many competitors, cataclysmic project – of relentlessly pursuing efficiencies of scale and distribution that few could hope to match.
By now, the company has expanded to the point at which books represent only a fraction of its commercial focus. Irish customers now purchase doorbells, alarm systems, audio speakers and other assorted consumer electronics from the company, and stream films and TV series on its platform.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched in 2006 and is now the largest cloud computing platform in the world, providing hosting for all manner of major companies, organisations and government agencies around the world; it has established multiple data centres in Ireland, whose huge energy usage is the subject of ongoing concerns.
Although Amazon is no longer primarily concerned with books, its effect on literary culture is still sizeable. These days, readers might use the company’s services to buy ebooks and ereaders, listen to audiobooks (through Audible), or post reviews of books on Goodreads; writers, meanwhile, might publish their books through one of Amazon’s multiple imprints, including its Kindle Direct Publishing tool.
It is this cultural reach that has led literary scholar Mark McGurl to claim that the company “has insinuated itself into every dimension of the collective experience of literature in the United States and increasingly of the wider world”. In book retail, its scale and market position allows it to price and deliver books at levels that would guarantee a loss for bookshops paying rental, staff and postage costs.
In this context, the opening of a new Irish store is a concern. At the conference, visiting bookseller Patrick Jaffe (who runs the independent bookshop Jaffe & Neale in Oxfordshire) painted a grim picture of Amazon’s effect on UK retail, describing a decimated high street and a large-scale loss of independent shops.
Most striking was his account of what he described as “the indignity of dealing with Amazon”, such as the psychological toll of seeing customers in his shop taking pictures of books that they would later buy online at artificially low prices. The biggest problem, he claimed, was finding a way to talk to customers about Amazon: the last thing any bookseller wants is to plead for charity (and scolding customers for buying online is a strategy guaranteed to fail), but bricks-and-mortar bookshops need to find ways to articulate the effect of large-scale online retail upon their business.
A bookshop’s ability to sell hundreds of Sally Rooney hardbacks on publication day, for example, helps them to bring customers into the shop, where they might pick up some less recognisable titles – a debut novel by an unproven author, a book of translated fiction, a literary journal – along with their Intermezzo. Amazon’s arrival threatens to disturb this balance between high-selling titles and commercially marginal ones, and to tear through the ecosystem that supports the latter.
At the conference, delegates heard about the growing popularity of Irish-language book clubs and reading clubs for children. Ireland’s bookshops (particularly the more than 100 independent bookshops) support local writers, host readings and events, and often showcase books with limited commercial appeal. Mary Ruddy, who manages Books at One in Letterfrack – a community bookshop linked to the One foundation – mentions the pleasure she finds in recommending books to customers. A discussion of a recent bestseller or prize winner, she says, will often lead to an “impromptu book club” among browsing customers: “You’re not going to get that experience from Amazon.”
[ The 100 best Irish books of the 21st century: No 25 to No 1Opens in new window ]
Readers and writers around the country can be heard speaking about many other bookshops – Vibes and Scribes in Cork, Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway, Woodbine Books in Kildare – in similar terms.
Amazon.ie launched in March, promising faster delivery times, “local pricing” and reductions in taxes and charges (the removal of Brexit-era delays and paperwork is presumably a key motivating factor). Many Irish consumers already have accounts, of course, and its delivery vans are a familiar sight on our streets.
Amazon has less novelty value than it once did, and it’s possible that familiarity with its presence (as well as, perhaps, sentiments of resistance to tech giants and their effects on culture) will blunt its sales. It’s also likely that many Irish readers would prefer to support a local business rather than one whose executive chairman is an increasingly public participant in the fast-developing alliance between Silicon Valley bosses and far-right political figures (if you’ve noticed Bezos recently, it may have been in the parade of tech oligarchs at Donald Trump’s inauguration, or through his announcement that he was reneging on his promise to maintain editorial freedom at the Washington Post).
Price and convenience, though, are powerful incentives, and there are good reasons for booksellers to worry. Tomás Kenny, who runs Kenny’s bookshop in Galway (one of the small number of bookshops in the world to have been selling online before Amazon entered the market, having opened online operations in 1994), describes the frustration at what he sees as warnings not heeded.
On Amazon’s arrival into national markets around Europe, he notes: “the impact – the retraction of bookshops since Amazon opened – is the same everywhere. As Amazon sales go up, the bookshops are decreasing.” Bookshops in rural areas, according to Kenny, are particularly vulnerable: many are “hanging by a thread” in the wake of the loss of schoolbook sales (a side effect of the laudable free schoolbooks scheme, which has centralised the sales of schoolbooks in the hands of fewer suppliers and already contributed to the closure of specialist bookshops), and it may not take a major financial hit to cause that thread to snap.
Publishers here may find themselves with mixed incentives, particularly if the new storefront speeds up distribution and makes their books more visible to Irish consumers. Ivan O’Brien, managing director of O’Brien Press, points out that all publishers want their books to be as visible as possible on an enormous retailer’s platform, and that the number of customers who go to Amazon “by default” makes it an essential part of the retail environment.
Could An Post offer Irish bookshops further reductions, or even free rates?
At the same time, he notes that “physical book retail in Ireland is hugely important for Irish publishers and Irish authors and Irish culture” in a way that might not be as true of publishers elsewhere; “our relationship with our retailers is very, very strong and really important, and we don’t want to kill that”.
O’Brien Press sponsors the annual Bookseller of the Year prize, which at this year’s conference was awarded to Louisa Earls of Books Upstairs. Earls, who joined the family business 10 years ago when the shop moved into its current premises in Dublin’s D’Olier Street, was praised for her knowledge, experience and “quiet authority driven by a real passion for books and reading”. About Amazon.ie, Earls has stark warnings: “if it siphons customers off from face-to-face sales in physical bookshops by offering low or no carriage charges, bookshops will close in huge numbers as we’ve seen in other countries”.
She sees “a huge and very real danger to the book industry in Ireland, the same book industry that supports the country’s reputation as a centre of literary excellence internationally. This is an opportunity for the State to get behind bookshops in a meaningful way and seriously protect them.” In practice, she mentions the cost of shipping as a key issue: could An Post offer Irish bookshops further reductions, or even free rates? Could commercial rates for independent bookshops be reduced to protect local shops?
There is no public indication that the Government is considering these kinds of measures, although its programme for government contains glimmers of hope for booksellers. The programme promises supports for small businesses (not to mention hundreds of thousands of new jobs) and backing for Ireland’s’ “rich, diverse and vibrant arts sector”. Elsewhere, though – in what might be happier news for Bezos – the programme commits to recognising “the central role data centres play in contributing to economic growth and the enterprise economy”. There are hints here of tensions in the Government’s support for small Irish businesses on the one hand, and its powerful affinity for foreign direct investment on the other. The arrival of Amazon.ie might present an important test case for how these tensions play out in the coming years.
