Book Depository

» see bookdepository.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i have spent my adult life reading technical books in english in a country that does not stock them. That is the entire context for this one. Before Book Depository the options were an import shelf in a big-city bookstore with a markup sitting on top of the exchange rate, or an international order where the postage cost more than the book. Book Depository deleted the second problem with one line of copy: free delivery worldwide, no minimum order. That line was the product. Everything else was a catalog.

It was started in 2004 in gloucester by Andrew Crawford, who had worked at Amazon, with Stuart Felton. The stated goal was "All Books Available to All", which is marketing, but the mechanics under it were real enough. The company chased the long tail rather than the bestseller pile and priced shipping into the book, so the number on the page was the number you paid. By the end it advertised more than twenty million titles and free delivery to over a hundred and seventy countries.

It won Direct Bookselling Company of the Year twice and a Queen's Award for Enterprise. In 2013 it placed fifth in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100. Amazon bought it on 4 july 2011. The uk book trade said at the time that this handed Amazon a strangle hold on the market. Amazon then left the brand running for twelve years, which looked like proof the trade had been dramatic, right up until it wasn't.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the free delivery line ~

Free worldwide shipping is not a feature, it is a subsidy, and the question was always who absorbed it. Book Depository absorbed it out of margin, negotiated postal rates and the fact that a book is flat and cheap to move. Inside the uk this looked like a pricing quirk. Outside it, the effect was enormous. A reader in ankara or manila paid the same sterling price as a reader in london and waited two weeks for it. That is the whole reason a warehouse in gloucester is remembered with feeling in places that never had one of its employees.

~ what amazon bought ~

Amazon did not buy Book Depository for the technology. It bought a brand that reached customers its own storefronts did not serve, in countries with no local amazon domain and no local logistics. For twelve years it ran as a quiet international arm with its own site and its own following, and a fair share of that following either did not know who owned it or preferred not to.

~ the actual end ~

The closure was announced on 4 april 2023. The site would take orders until midday uk time on 26 april and then stop. This was not a story about Book Depository failing at anything. It was a line item in the round where Amazon cut eighteen thousand jobs, and Devices and Books was one of the divisions where the cuts landed. The note to suppliers thanked them "for your supportive partnership over the years in helping us to make printed books more accessible to readers around the world", which was accurate and was also the closing statement.

What went with it was the shipping line. Amazon does ship internationally and it charges for it, and the places that had built a reading habit on the free version went back to paying postage or to not buying the book. Nineteen years after it launched, the answer to how an english book gets to somebody who does not live in an english-speaking country got worse.

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