As a writer and small publisher, I have supplied books to Amazon (for sale to their customers) ever since it moved into the UK with a single warehouse. I used to deliver batches of two or three dozen books on a regular basis. How times have changed! I still have my supplier account but they now order no books at all; that's a blessing really, since in recent years they have insisted on a 60% discount on the cover price, with me having to cover all delivery costs, meaning I was losing money on every transaction.
So instead of being a bookseller (except maybe for newly published books) Amazon has evolved into a gigantic hub, facilitating commercial activity among a vast range of small booksellers and merchandising businesses and carrying only the most profitable lines itself. If you look for one of your titles on the Amazon web site, you see all editions listed (hardback, paperback, Kindle, audiobook etc) with the usual nonsense about "only two left in stock", but Amazon itself is not doing any of the selling.
For a particular title you may find a dozen different suppliers, all competing on price (to hell with the cover price -- that doesn't matter any longer) and with different postage and delivery costs, with used copies competing with new ones. Where do these small suppliers get their new copies? They sure of eggs don't get them from me, since I house the stock, and I know where all the books go....... It may be that there is a market for batches of new books to, from shop clearances etc. On several occasions a bookshop holding a stock of my books on a sale or return basis has gone into liquidation, without telling me, with the liquidators simply taking possession of all the shop stock as rapidly as possible and then shifting it on for next to nothing to whoever happens to be in the right place at the right time. They do this without checking who the real owner of the stock actually is.
I surmise that nowadays people do not buy paperback fiction as new, unless they have to; paperbacks are disposable items, and so you might as well buy used copies of the things you want to read.
I would be very cautious indeed about publishing hard copies of anything nowadays; and I suppose I should be grateful for the fact that my books have sold pretty well over twenty years or more, which means that there is a plentiful supply of all editions out there in the market place. The 8 books of the Angel Mountain series are still available, in many different formats and editions. It's just a pity that with all these Amazon-led transactions going on, I as the author and publisher do not earn a single extra penny.
(I have published a version of this post on Linkedin)
