Bookshop.org enters the e-book arena, giving indie stores a new way to compete with Amazon

Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter joked that the e-books question has been the bane of his business’ social media manager’s existence for a while now. “Every day she has people ask her, ‘When are e-books coming? When are e-books coming?’”

Now Bookshop has an answer. On Tuesday, it launched a new digital platform enabling your favorite independently owned bookstores to sell digital books, granting them a foothold in a marketplace long dominated by Amazon.

At launch, Bookshop’s platform offers a catalog of more than three million e-books available online via any web browser and through its apps on Apple and Android. It is not yet available for Kindle users, but Hunter says that’s the company’s next step – a necessary one given that Amazon’s e-reader is the preferred device of three-quarters of digital bibliophiles.

For the time being, indie bookstore customers still have a compelling reason to switch to buying their e-books through Bookshop’s platform. One hundred percent of the profits generated by sales through those brick-and-mortar stores funnel directly back to them.

Customers who don’t specify a store to support when purchasing e-books on Bookshop.org support indie shops anyway, since a third of the profit from those sales goes into a profit-sharing pool benefiting all of Bookshop’s partners. (Salon.com is a Bookshop.org affiliate.)

“I think around 15 years ago, when e-books first came into the scene, many bookstores were anti-e-book. They were threatened by it, and didn't want e-books to take over the publishing industry,” Hunter told Salon in a recent interview. “But now e-books have stayed at about 20% of book sales for 15 years. They're not going to undermine physical books, so there's no reason for independent local bookstore customers not to be able to buy them from their local bookstore. We're just making that possible.”

The goal is to unlock new income streams for authors and booksellers that partner with Bookshop along with its central mission of providing an alternative to corporations that have long-threatened local bookstores’ existence — primarily Amazon.

This was especially crucial when the COVID-19 pandemic forced many businesses to limit customer traffic or close their doors shortly after Bookshop launched in January 2020. Large-scale delivery-based corporations like Amazon saw their sales balloon while independently owned and operated businesses struggled. Bookshop gave indie bookstores a fighting chance, and has since generated nearly $35.8 million to support the literary businesses that have signed up as partners.

With its new e-book platform, Bookshop positions itself as a champion of what Hunter calls “book culture” at a time when, if Donald Trump’s administration follows through on his campaign promises, funding for public libraries and public education is under extreme threat.

Since Amazon controls most of the e-book market, and with its founder Jeff Bezos joining other tech billionaires in cozying up to the administration, this should raise important questions among information consumers. Hunter offers a few to consider: How do you hear about certain books? When you awaken your Kindle lock screen, which ones are being served to you, and who controls that selection?

”I think as you go into this phase of American history where there's a true danger of an oligarchy. . . you don't want to have those people control our culture,” he offered in our wide-ranging conversation on the importance of Bookshop.org as one alternative to Amazon's literary marketplace dominance. “It is all part of the same resistance that we're trying to accomplish right now, and we're just really in the nascent period of setting these systems up . . . Hopefully they'll find ways for us to preserve freedom of thought and speech and discourse.”

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

We are unfortunately living in a time when books are being banned at the state level. If the current administration follows the policy suggestions spelled out in Project 2025, there will be a decrease in funding for libraries that will adversely impact literacy programs. And I'm wondering, as part of this expansion into e-books, whether any of that has been accounted for in your plans to make Bookshop an alternative to Amazon.

Absolutely. I'm a big fan of the idea of the mechanisms behind book culture being decentralized and controlled by writers, readers and publishers — and not one giant mega-retailer. So the more we diversify how people get books and how people hear about books, the better chance we have of not having some kind of authoritarian control over what people read.

That means strengthening independent bookstores in general. Independent local bookstores are really advocates and activists for the importance of reading and diverse reading in their communities. They have an enormous impact on the literacy and embrace of books and reading by young people, organizations, and businesses in those communities. So strengthen them, and then you have a decentralized environment for reading that can hold up, I hope, against more kinds of authoritarian control.

And so far, the cases that seemed to put independent booksellers at risk — like in Texas, where laws stated that if they sold a book, or if they sold a book to a library and it was considered inappropriate for young people, the bookstore could be punished — have not held up in the courts.

So I think the chances of reading truly being restricted and people not being able to read the books that they would want to read, or not even hear about the books that could change the way they thought about something, it's much less of a risk if we support independent local bookstores.

Woman takes an e-reader from a shelf with books and a small potted plant (Getty Images/Veni vidi...shoot)

Can you explain how e-book sales help independent bookstores? And is what you're doing with this launch different from what you've been doing with Bookshop as its own sales and publishing platform?

Well, in general, no matter how much you love your local bookstore, if you read e-books, you had no way to buy them from them. One out of every six books sold in the United States is an e-book. So [independently-owned] bookstores were completely shut out of this incredibly important part of the publishing industry, and they didn't get the revenue from it. And their customers, even their most loyal customers, would then have to go to Amazon when they had to read an e-book.

If an independent bookstore sells an e-book to a customer, they get the full profit from the sale. Bookshop does not take a cut at all.

You know, we're a benefit corporation. We're a mission-based company. Our mission is to keep independent bookstores alive and thriving in the age of E-commerce, and that includes selling digital products like e-books, so they get the full profit. We do not take a cut.

If Salon.com links to an e-book as an affiliate, in that case, we'll get a third of the profit. Salon.com will get a third of the profit, and independent bookstores will get a third of the profit. So in those cases of affiliate sales, we split up the sale, and that helps support the platform.

Also, if somebody goes directly to Bookshop.org, does not select an independent bookstore to support and has not come to us through an independent bookstore and just does a direct sale, then we'll keep two-thirds of the profit, and a third of the profit will go to a profit-sharing pool, which we share with all the bookstores.

So that means that if an independent bookstore sells a book directly to you, they get the whole profit. But we still have enough money to pay for the platform, and keeping the platform going is going to cost over a million dollars a year. We need to pay for that somehow. So direct sales is how we're going to pay for that.

Let me for a moment adopt the mercenary perspective that I think dominates a lot of discourse about capitalist profit: What makes this worthwhile for you?

First of all, our mission, and the only reason the customers are buying from Bookshop.org, is because you're supporting independent bookstores. If we were keeping the money or just giving a small fraction to independent bookstores, it would not be anywhere as meaningful. So in a way, we're in this because that's our pitch: you're going to support your independent bookstore when you buy a book from us. So that has to be true. If it wasn't true, the booksellers would be the first people to let people know that it wasn't true. The success of our business requires us to stay honest about that.

Second of all, in the beginning, we knew that it would be tempting and that people might want to buy the business. I knew that when companies like Grubhub showed up. They were so beneficial to local restaurants that they all embraced it, and then gradually, as the venture capitalists require higher returns, then they gradually make it worse and worse of a deal.

. . . In the beginning, we made the decision that we weren't going to take venture capital and we were going to try to grow through word of mouth. And it's been much harder, because for e-books, for example, Scribd has raised $200 million to do e-books. Fable raised $40 million to do e-books. We managed to raise $2 million to do e-books.

So we are literally working with 1/100 of the funding that some of our competitors are, because we're foregoing venture capital. But if we accepted venture capital, then we would suddenly be under this pressure to earn profits or flip the company and sell the company in a way that could be predatory.

We also, in the beginning, put in our shareholder agreement for any investors that we weren't allowed to sell to Amazon or any major retailer, because that's another thing that would have been a temptation. If Amazon offers you $100 million for the business, investors might want to take that. So we’ve built in protections.

Now, why is it worth it? Honestly, I just am a sentimental person who loves books, who feels like books have enriched my life and changed my understanding of the world, and kept me alive. And I care about them a lot, and I understand that independent bookstores are extremely important to a healthy culture around books. And after being in the publishing industry for 15 years and watching half of the bookstores in the country go out of business, as Amazon grew to over 50% of book sales, I kept waiting for somebody else to do something about it, and nobody would do anything about it.

. . . Honestly, there's something in that question, which is about critiquing, like, what do people get out of selling out their culture and selling out their lives? What do they get out of that? How much do we really need? Do we really need billionaires? What are they all doing it for? In the end, I feel like they're all doing it just to impress their narrow peer group and out of some kind of competitive instinct, etcetera.

And I think, what does everybody get out of living a balanced life, where they feel good about what they're doing every day and they have real community? That's what you really want to get out of life, and that's what I think everybody at Bookshop is getting at . . . So by staying away from venture capital, by saying we'll never sell the company, and by attracting a group of people who are in this for the right reasons, that's what keeps us going.

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I'm wondering what you've noticed, in terms of both what you might be hearing from independent bookstores but also from consumers, about how political headwinds might be changing the state of publishing and how you’re taking those into account in terms of moving Bookshop forward and expanding its reach.

We know that there are a lot of people who are like, “I don't want to buy from Amazon anymore, but I love reading e-books,” or, “I'm a self-published author, and I depend on Amazon's Kindle platform.” And so, we knew that we needed to counteract that. You can't ask a customer, “Stop buying books on Amazon,” with an asterisk: “Except when you need to buy an e-book, in which case, you're out of luck.”

We want to have feature parity with Amazon. Everything Amazon can do, we want to do as well or better. Eventually, we want Bookshop to be the best place to buy books on the internet. Any reader who cares about books should feel that shared love of books when they go to Bookshop — in a way that they don't feel when they go to Amazon.

Now, in terms of the overall vibe shift of the new administration, I can tell you that our sales went up 20% as soon as Trump won the election. I think a lot of people were suddenly feeling a little bit more motivated to stay off Amazon when they saw Jeff Bezos post this congratulatory tweet to Trump and shut down some political cartoonists and things like that at the Washington Post. That kind of fealty that the Amazon Empire seemed to be willing to pledge to the new administration turned people off.

And I think it makes them realize, “Oh, I really cannot, in good conscience, support this anymore.” So I hope that’s not just a ripple; I hope it’s the butterfly wings that start the tempest, leading more and more people to behave like socially conscious consumers. I hope they opt out of the things that are destructive to our society and start living and shopping in a way that’s ethical and sustainable — one that supports local businesses, like local bookstores.