Randall White

Ask Randall White, the 72-year-old CEO of the Educational Development Corp., an Oklahoma-based book distributor, why he decided pull his company's 2,000 titles - including the acclaimed potty bestiary "Everyone Poops" - from Amazon.com, and the longtime publishing executive makes reference not to a book but to a movie.

"Remember 'Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,' when they're on the cliff and getting ready to jump and one guy says, 'I can't swim?'" asks the folksy 72-year-old, referring to the classic Robert Redford-Paul Newman film

Publishers Weekly just shared an article entitled “Life After Amazon,” by Randall White, chairman, CEO, and president of Educational Development Corp. (EDC), on why he has elected to “to stop selling our Kane Miller and Usborne books on Amazon.” His casus belli was that “I had long felt that the rapid growth of Amazon was [...]

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The Educational Development Corp., which announced today that it is pulling all of its titles from Amazon, plans to increase its sales by abandoning the major online retailer, according to the company’s CEO.

Amazon accounted for about 13% of EDC’s sales in 2011, estimated Randall White, CEO of the publicly traded Tulsa, Okla.-based children’s book publisher. The exact number is uncertain because EDC sells to Amazon through distributors who also sell through other channels and do not provide EDC an exact breakdown of sales.

Tulsa, OK-based children’s book publisher Educational Development Corporation will no longer sell any of its titles on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), in a move EDC president Randall White calls “critical” to his company’s growth. However, the company is uniquely positioned to make such a move. EDC, which had revenues of $27.2 million in 2011, owns two lines of books: Kane/Miller, which publishes children’s books in translation from around the world (yup, including Everyone Poops) and the U.S. branch of educational illustrated Usborne Books (the company is run separately in the UK).