While we naturally focus here on Amazon for its books-related impact, a couple of news items regarding the company’s burgeoning retail success are worth noting, as well.
It was announced this week that Amazon will create 5,000 new jobs in the UK this year. That’s more than 25 percent of its current level of employment there, and the increases will raise the entire staffing level to 24,000 people. While the company has been severely criticized in the UK for past tax practices of diverting sales reporting to Luxembourg (its European headquarters), it changed over to reporting its UK sales through the UK in May 2015. There are still questions about how much tax Amazon is paying to UK authorities, but a Bookseller report says that some see the job announcements as a commitment to the country in the aftermath of Brexit.
In the States, we already had reports last month of a 100,000-job boost planned in American Amazon hiring this year, an even bigger percentage increase than in the UK, at 56 percent. (Amazon had 180,000 full-time employees in the US at the end of 2016; worldwide, the company comprises more than 300,000 full- and part-time personnel.) Those new US positions aren’t just fulfillment-center positions; they include developers and engineers, according to a New York Times report. Furthermore, Amazon contends that its vendor-marketplace operation sustains another 300,000 jobs in the US.
The Times goes on to point out that jobs are being lost in brick-and-mortar retail faster than online retail can replace them—and this goes far beyond bookstores: Macy’s reportedly has lost 10,000 jobs, while all 250 Limited stores have closed, taking 4,000 jobs with them. The Wall Street Journal (paywall) reported this week that even Walmart’s online sales growth has slowed in the last quarter, growing only 16 percent (after rising 21 percent the previous quarter).
Bottom line: Back in the UK, Amazon is testing actual drone delivery just outside Cambridge. (This video—well worth watching if you haven’t seen it—is a capture of the first full trial flight to a customer.) That’s the kind of automation that, like Amazon’s leadership in online retail, is predicted by analysts to cut even more deeply into workforce stability and threaten further destabilization. For publishing, the point may be that, as wrenching as Amazon’s reconfiguration of the marketplace has been (and will be), the book industry at least has been riding these rails for some time now. Books are where Amazon started, and publishing got an early chance to wrestle with what it means to business. The sharpest authors are those who, like Joanna Penn, have been in the vanguard with publishing itself: scouts who may be ahead of more industries than their own.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.
