Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN) Battling to Open Canadian Fulfillment Center

Booksellers in Canada are almost in hysterics over the plan of Amazon.com (Nasdaq:AMZN) to build a fulfilment center in the country. While basing their argument on the silly idea of the book industry being part of the "cultural industry," no honest person would contradict the fact that this is about competition, and Canadian publishers evidently are afraid of more of it.

Here's how the president of the Canadian Booksellers Association attempted to spin it recently: 

"Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture. These are values that no American dot.com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote."

Reading much of the buzz, the majority of Canadians responding are positive about Amazon building a fulfilment center in the country, noting it's the consumers who will benefit from it, and challenging the idea it would harm the book industry in any way, other than the so-called independent book stores, which struggle to survive anyway, meaning their product obviously isn't that valuable to consumers, or they wouldn't be so threatened by this idea.

This is the same old protectionism thing and nothing else.

Obviously there would be a significant number of jobs created by the opening of the center, and it would help reduce the costs of doing business there, saving consumers a lot of money.

What more needs to be said. It's a good idea and needs to be allowed to go forward.

Amazon made the application in Ottawa, and the Canadian government is expected to rule on it sometime in the next several months.

This is the new business world we live in, and no matter what resistance to it there is, doing business like Amazon does is a great service to authors, workers and consumers. There are no losers except those businesses run by purists who don't really run a business but a little hang out for local authors.