Mark Haddon joins John Le Carré and Ian Rankin in the fight against Amazon

If you would like to see the illustrated version of Mark Haddon’s collection of short stories, The Pier Falls, step away from the Add-to-Basket button and head to your local bookshop. If you still have one, that is. Talking at the Cheltenham Literary festival about his book, which came out in May, Haddon said: “Much as we love Amazon, we like bookshops much more, don’t we? So we did an edition that is only available in physical, bricks-and-mortar bookshops. It was a way of saying: go and buy from a bookshop. Go into a real bookshop and buy it off some real people.” Amazon, he added, is “a merciless commercial engine. Also because of the way it treats its staff. The way it treats its competitors.”

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Haddon isn’t the only author to push back against Amazon. Waterstones, with its power as a chain, often has exclusive deals that give readers extra content. It sold an exclusive hardback edition of John Le Carré’s The Night Manager, with an afterword by the author; Helen Macdonald and Joanne Harris both wrote extra chapters for their respective books H is for Hawk and Peaches for Monsieur le Curé; and Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel gave Waterstones buyers an extra character study. On a more Haddon-esque crusade is the children’s writer and illustrator Allan Ahlberg, who refused a Book Trust lifetime achievement award because it was sponsored by Amazon. He called the company “immoral”, particularly its history of tax avoidance, writing in a letter to The Bookseller magazine: “Tax, fairly applied to us all, is a good thing. It pays for schools, hospitals – libraries!”

The dilemma for most authors, says Marie Moser, who runs The Edinburgh Bookshop, “is that so many consumers click to order, without thinking about the implications of taxation and, if an author said they were never dealing with Amazon again, they’d be in big trouble.” Haddon’s stance, says Moser, “is a very generous gesture”. Can exclusive content offered by well-known authors help physical bookshops survive? “I would like to think it would. It makes people think: ‘I should go to my bookshop and get it.’ We cannot compete on price [with Amazon] and nor do I want to play that silly game, therefore I think it has got to be a good idea. Even the fact he is talking very publicly about the importance of local bookshops is a great thing.”