This Amazon-owned company is closing its doors on April 26, 2023 and the news of this closure comes as a very unpleasant shock to its regular customers. I was one of them. It was my source for relatively cheap books from the U.K. and Australia. Its greatest selling point was the free shipping, which sometimes can be as expensive as the book when ordering from other sources.

Apparently this is a cost-cutting move by Amazon — one among many. The Rap Sheet quotes another site Reference To Murder, “Amazon continues its cost-cutting measures apace,” observes In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson. “First it was laying off almost 30,000 staffers, then it was eliminating its newspaper/magazine subscription service, closing the textbook buy-back service, shuttering all of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, and cutting off the publishing house, Westland, which published works of several bestselling authors in India. Now, Amazon is also shutting down the Book Depository online shop that it bought in 2011 …” I’m sad to hear about Book Depository. I’ve ordered a variety of British crime novels from there over the last few years, though most of my UK-buying lately has been through Blackwell’s. Lawson goes on to speculate whether “other [Amazon-owned] book services are under the gun, including AbeBooks, et al.—especially since Kobo just announced it’s opening its Kobo Plus subscription service to the U.S. market, making it a viable alternative to Kindle Unlimited and Audible.”

So what sources do we go to now to get our U.K. and Australian crime fiction (not published in the U.S.)? I’ve noticed that the American Amazon site will often list some of the books that I’ve ordered off of Book Depository. I don’t know if that will continue or if those listings were a result of the supply chain built by Book Depository. I hope that the connection between amazon.com and its British sister amazon.co.uk will be enough to have such listings continue. The postage costs for ordering U.K books from amazon.co.uk are close to prohibitive for the cost-conscious consumer. Goldsboro Books seems to have better postage costs so I may go with them in the future.

If any of you have a good alternative source for replacing Book Depository, please send me an email at george@deadlypleasures.com and I will share the information with our readers.