How Amazon surrendered in its war on bookshops - New Statesman

Let's set the scene: it's the year 2010, the Viggo Mortensen-fronted film The Road has just been released in cinemas, and you want to read the Cormac McCarthy novel the movie is based on. You could buy it from Waterstones for the recommended retail price (RRP) of £7.99 - or you could go to Amazon and buy it for half the price, just £4.

Twelve years later, if you want to read the same novel, the balance has changed: while the novel's RRP has only risen to £8.99, on Amazon the price has gone up to £7.35. That 50 per cent saving Amazon customers made in 2010 has narrowed to less than 20 per cent.

Amazon is now so ubiquitous that it can be easy to forget it began as a bookseller - but Mike Shatzkin, the publishing industry veteran and the author of The Book Business: What Everyone Needs to Know, says that when he first heard about it in 1995 he knew it was "f***ing brilliant". "Books are the very best thing to buy online, because you don't have to smell it, you don't have to try it on," Shatzkin says. "It's exactly what it says it is."