Amazon (AMZN) -) could be facing one the biggest challenges in the company’s history, and it’s only getting deeper.
A group of booksellers and authors sent a letter to the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission asking them to address Amazon’s role in the monopoly of the market of selling books, according to a report by the New York Times.
This comes as Amazon is facing a possible antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission that would allege that the online retailer has violated anti-monopoly laws.
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The authors and booksellers are asking the Justice Department to investigate Amazon both for its monopoly as a bookseller but also for its influence over the market in that it has the ability to push certain books over others.
“What we have is a situation in which the power of a single dominant corporation is warping, in the aggregate, the type of books that we’re reading,” Barry Lynn, executive director of the Open Markets Institute, told the New York Times.
Amazon is one of the world’s largest companies, stretching beyond its online retailer division with other subsidiaries like the grocer Whole Foods and the online streaming platform Twitch. But when Amazon was founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, it started as an online seller of books.
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Nowadays, Amazon accounts for about 40% of the physical books in the United States, and accounts for 80% of e-books sold as well, according to the NYT report.
