Australia: Bookseller Offers Readers Vouchers to Dump Kindles
From The Guardian:
An Australian bookseller has announced that he will no longer stand “passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices”, and is urging readers to throw their Kindles in a specially provided bin.
Pages and Pages, one of Australia’s leading independent booksellers, made the announcement on Friday that it would be holding a “Kindle Amnesty” on the third Saturday of every month, when customers would be able to get rid of their old Kindles in a bin in the Mosman Village, Sydney store in exchange for a A$50 (£34) gift voucher if they also buy the ereader the store sells.
“Pages & Pages is no longer sitting passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices. Through this campaign we want people to understand what Amazon is doing and make an informed choice to have choice,” said manager and Australian Booksellers Association president Jon Page.
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From a Blog Post by Jon Page:
The eBook is not a threat to physical bookshops. This new format presents bookshops and readers with many wonderful opportunities to sell and read more books. What does threaten bookshops is a company who engages in uncompetitive behaviour, pays no tax in Australia and misleads readers with restrictive devices and fake book reviews.
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About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.