In the five years since its launch, Bookshop.org has amassed quite the loyal following. The online retailer shares its sales revenue with bookstores around the US, and has become a popular destination for online customers who would rather help keep their local bookstore in business than send money to big retailers like Amazon. Until now, Bookshop has found success through the sale of physical books. Today, Bookshop is expanding its efforts into the digital realm.
Bookshop.org officially sells ebooks now. Or, as the company would put it, Bookshop now enables local bookstores to sell those ebooks themselves through its marketplace. The company launched its official ebook platform today, complete with an app (on Android and iOS) for shopping and reading digital books.
Bookstores can use the platform to sell ebooks directly to customers, and when they make a sale, the store gets all of the money. Customers can also browse all of the ebooks for sale on the website, then choose which bookstore to support with their purchase. In that case as well, the chosen bookstore gets all the money. (If the customer doesn’t pick a store to support, Bookshop puts a chunk of the profits into a sharing pool that’s distributed among independent stores, but keeps the rest to fund its operation.)
Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter sees a burning need for a better way to buy ebooks.
“It’s crazy that bookstores can’t sell ebooks to their customers right now,” Hunter says. He says he wants this program to continue his company’s mission of propping up local bookstores, but he also hopes this move will help take Amazon down a peg as well.
“I know tons of people who love their local bookstore, support them in every other way, but when they need an ebook, they have to go to Amazon to buy that ebook even if they love and support their local bookstore and have ethical concerns about Amazon. We want to change that.”
Bookshop launched in January 2020, mere weeks before the world shut down due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Physical book stores, like many IRL retailers, faced an existential threat when great masses of people shuttered themselves indoors. Many stores had already been struggling against the Goliaths of Amazon, Walmart, and Target well before pandemic restrictions drove more purchases online. Bookshop landed at just the right time to provide something of a crutch for struggling bookstores and offer an alternative to funneling more money into Amazon’s maw.
It may not have saved every bookstore or toppled any ecommerce empires, but Bookshop has done quite well—and proven popular among readers eager to support independent stores. At the time of this writing, Bookshop says it has raised more than $35 million for local bookstores.
“Everybody wants diversity in the landscape,” Hunter says. “Whether you like Amazon or not, everybody understands it’s a healthier market for books when you have a whole bunch of players selling and in competition with each other.”
