Online store Book Depository to close on April 26
Popular online store Book Depository is set to close at the end of April, amid layoffs announced in recent months by parent company Amazon.
The United Kingdom-based bookstore announced on Tuesday that it will put up the shutters on April 26 and customers have until noon British summertime (7pm Singapore time) to place orders. It will continue to deliver and provide support for orders until June 23.
Founded in 2004 by Mr Stuart Felton and former Amazon employee Andrew Crawford, the store with the vision of providing “all books available to all” by improving access, affordability and selection, was acquired by the tech giant in 2011.
This announcement comes after a slew of cutbacks by Amazon, with two rounds of layoffs impacting at least 27,000 people across various divisions, including its devices and books businesses.
Amazon has not shared how many jobs will be lost at Book Depository.
The company announced on March 21 that it was shutting camera review website DPReview, which it acquired in 2007.
The company is also closing down its cloud storage service Amazon Drive by the end of 2023.
In 2022, it revealed that dozens of physical retail stores in the United States and UK, including some of its bricks-and-mortar bookstores and cashierless Amazon Go convenience stores, will close down.
According to trade magazine The Bookseller, vendors and publishing partners received an e-mail about the closure of Book Depository.
Head of vendor management Andy Chart wrote: “Over the coming weeks, we will complete a winding down of the business, including discontinuing our listings as a marketplace seller and closing our website.
“I would like to take this opportunity to say a big thank you, from everyone at Book Depository and our book-loving customers, for your supportive partnership over the years in helping us to make printed books more accessible to readers around the world.”
For some consumers, the closure of Book Depository could mean the loss of a source to buy cheaper books.
Human resource executive Rachel Koh, who studied literature in secondary school and junior college, needed two copies of every book on the reading list – one to annotate and a clean copy for exams.
The 24-year-old said: “Back then, I had a smaller budget for books and Book Depository was the cheapest place to get them.”
Since she graduated, she reads mostly for leisure and prefers to borrow books from the library as she usually reads them only once.
“I also have more disposable income now, so I just buy locally because Book Depository takes quite a long time to ship,” she added.
Poet and translator Daryl Lim said he was devastated to hear about the online store’s impending closure because of the affordability and vast selection of books available.
He said that, for instance, some poetry books are not easily found in Singapore bookshops.
The 32-year-old added: “I’ve probably bought hundreds and hundreds of books from Book Depository, over perhaps a decade.
“I hear Blackwell’s has comparable prices and also ships internationally, so I’ll try that out. But of course, I’ll continue to patronise local bookstores, especially for SingLit (Singapore literature).”
The vacuum left by Book Depository’s departure could bring new opportunities for smaller publishers and distributors by decentralising the ecosystem.
Mr Nicholas Yeo, project manager at Pagesetters, which owns Singapore-based independent publisher Ethos Books, said: “If we expect books to be really cheap, it may not be sustainable in the long run, which is what is happening now.”
People need to support local publishers, especially indie ones, because they give authors a platform and “surface voices from the margins”, he said. “It is important to give a platform to new voices and not just established authors, not just books on the Amazon bestsellers list.”
It is more sustainable ecologically to ship fewer books as well, he added.
Mr Yeo noted that people are reading less, which is inevitable due to shorter attention spans, so publishers have to print higher quality books and change the way they engage readers.
“Increasingly, we are seeing that people will pay for, not the product any more, but the whole package and experience of a reading with an author or a panel discussion. This is something that Amazon can’t give you and Book Depository didn’t either,” he added.
“They had something that worked, but it wasn’t the best thing, and maybe it’s all the better that it’s gone.”
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