Celebrated author Dave Eggers has banned his book from US Amazon

Dave Eggers is hoping to prevent big tech killing off the high street bookshop by preventing his latest work from being sold by Amazon.

US novelist Dave Eggers.

Dave Eggers warned about the coming horrors of big tech in The Circle, his prophetic melodrama in which camera drones pursue a protagonist to his death while transmitting video of his every word and gesture to an appreciative audience of millions.

The celebrated novelist is hoping to prevent big tech killing off the high street bookshop by preventing his latest work from being sold by Amazon.

In The Every, a dystopian sequel to his 2013 bestseller, the social media giant The Circle merges with an Amazon-esque platform to develop apps that calculate the month and year of a person’s death, while analysts hope to improve novels such as Jane Eyre by quantifying user-generated data.

This month Eggers is risking a slump in sales by ensuring the hardback edition of The Every will not be available to purchase in the US on Amazon. Americans will need to order directly from McSweeney’s, his non-profit publishing house, or visit their local independent bookshop. Others can wait a few weeks for Vintage, a division of Random House, to publish an e-book and a paperback version that can be bought on Amazon. In Britain and Australia the publication of the book will be like any other, but small-scale retailers are calling out for a similar champion to stop the decline on the British high street.

Eggers has circumvented Amazon once before with his debut novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity, in 2002, but he says the process is much harder now.

 

“Every distributor has a relationship with them, such that if they distribute a book at all, it has to be distributed through Amazon,” he told Vanity Fair.

“They have the opposite of an exclusive, I guess, which is to say nothing will go out without their participation. It took us weeks to figure out how our distributor, Baker & Taylor, would make it possible.

“And then you have to have the participation of all the independent bookstores, who have been really great with the whole arrangement so far.

“If you are taking away a big chunk of the way a lot of people buy books, you’re saying that to get this one you might have to make a tiny bit more effort outside of the ‘buy now’ button online.”

Eggers says he hopes it will drive more people to look at their high streets and find a bookshop that will benefit from a few sales.

“It’s a small gesture but more than anything it’s a way to partner with the bookstores that made McSweeney’s possible because without them, we wouldn’t exist,” he says.

The Times

The Every by Dave Eggers will be published by Penguin’s Hamish Hamilton imprint. It will be available as an audiobook ($26) this month and as a paperback ($29.99) next month. From all good bookstores.