Amazon has launched a new six-day shopping event, Amazon Book Sale, running from May 15–20 this year and feature deep discounts on thousands of books. The sale, touted by the company as "The Book Sale of Your Dreams," includes up to 50% off print bestsellers, up to 60% off overstock books, and up to 80% off Kindle Books.

In addition to books, the sale is being used to market such other book-related items as Kindle Scribe, Amazon's new e-book reader/notetaker. And unlike Amazon's hugely popular Prime Day, the Amazon Book Sale is open to all Amazon customers, not just Amazon Prime members. (The Amazon Book Sale site does, however, include a link for shoppers to learn more about Prime Day.)

To promote the event Amazon began offer early deals, including three months of Kindle Unlimited for free, on May 9. Those deals include:

  • Up to 80% off Kindle editions of titles recommended by the Amazon Books Editors
  • Up to 75% off select titles by such BookTok favorite authors as Alexis Hall, Sarah J. Maas, and Rebecca Serles
  • Up to 70% Kindle editions of select celebrity memoirs, such as Viola Davis's Finding Me and Molly Shannon's Hello Molly!
  • Up to 60% Kindle editions of "popular book club picks," such as The Christie Affair and Good Company
  • Up to 50% off popular book-to-screen titles, such as American Prometheus, The Lord of the Rings, and Red, White & Royal Blue
  • Up to 40% off select classics, such as Pride and Prejudice and The Republic
  • Up to 40% on children's graphic novels, such as Serena Blasco's Enola Holmes and Mariah Marsden's The Secret Garden
  • 29% off select Kindle Scribe devices

With the launch of the sale proper, the e-tailer has rolled out further deals, including:

  • 55% off the special collector’s edition of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us and 50% off Leia Stone’s House of Ash and Shadow, as part of sales on books trending on #BookTok and #Bookstagram
  • 60% off Lisa Jewell’s None of this is True and 50% off Stephanie Land’s Class: A Memoir of Motherhood, Hunger, and Higher Education as part of sales on Amazon Books Editors' Picks
  • 60% off Britney Spears’s The Woman in Me and 50% off Elliot Page’s Pageboy as part of sales on celebrity titles
  • Up to 55% off select nominees and winners from the most recent Goodreads Choice Awards

The sale is the latest books-related initiative from Amazon, the e-tail giant whose business focus has expanded well beyond the bookselling space in which it cut its teeth as a fledgling e-tailer. In December 2023, the retail giant launched its Your Books feature, which tracks all of customers' print, Kindle, and Audible book purchases; generates recommendations based on their reading activity; and provides "insights" into reading habits. Doubling down on algorithmic recommendations, earlier this month, the Amazon-owned Audible launched a new feature that recommends audiobook titles based on users' Prime Video viewing activity. A representative of Amazon told PW that it "will not speculate" on whether the e-tailer may make the new book sale an annual affair.

The launch of Amazon Book Sale is sure to draw the attention of all segments of the industry, and perhaps especially the bookselling side. The American Booksellers Association is seeking to add book retailers to the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust complaint against Amazon, which currently does not address what Amazon's practices have done to book retailing in general and to independent bookstores in particular. In announcing the ABA's motion to intervene with the FTC lawsuit, ABA CEO Allison Hill noted that, since Amazon's launch in 1994, the number of indie bookstores in the U.S. has declined by around 64%—from 7,000 to 2,500.

This story has been updated with further information.