Shopping local is good for your community, and shopping with bookshop.org is even better. When you buy a book through our site, commission is allocated among a number of participating booksellers, including Greedy Reads in Fells Point and Remington, Baltimore. This is the way we show our love of bookstores, books, and reading.
Bookstores
Bookshop’s user interface keeps the process of signing up simple. It meets bookstores where they are in their daily workflow by offering a quick overview and then a streamlined form to fill out. This is smart UX design that puts users first and gives booksellers time back to focus on their own work.
Aside from capturing people who would normally buy from Amazon, the service allows book stores to make more money without the overhead of shipping and handling orders. This enables stores to pay employees, cover utilities, buy inventory, and take care of taxes.
The service also offers a way for customers to support their local bookstore by donating funds to Binc, the industry’s charitable foundation that provides financial assistance to booksellers facing unforeseen challenges. Additionally, the platform encourages bookstores to create their own lists and recommend books by authors they love. This human curation is something that Bookshop hopes can sustain a more vibrant book ecosystem than recommendation algorithms.
Gift cards
The site offers a way for readers to buy books and support local bookstores at the same time. Unlike Amazon, Bookshop employs human recommendations instead of algorithms to choose what you read. The website also allows independent bookstores to create lists of recommended books for specific audiences, such as Black Lives Matter or anti-racist reading. These lists can drive a significant amount of traffic to their stores. For example, a small, black-owned bookstore in Seattle used the site to recommend books by James Baldwin and Ibram Kendi, authors who speak to the community’s interests.
Bookshop has already raised over $1 million from private investors and is looking to add a public offering in 2022. Its founder, Andy Hunter, is a literary publisher with Soft Skull Press and Counterpoint and has been involved in digital publishing since 2010. His background includes work at Electric Literature. In addition to Bookshop, he has started several other digital projects, including Crime Reads and Literary Hub.
Authors
The site, dreamed up by writer and co-founder of Literary Hub Andy Hunter, allows independent bookstores to create virtual shopfronts where they can showcase recommended lists (staff picks etc). All customer service and shipping is handled by Bookshop, and the company pays a small commission on each sale.
This commission is in addition to any profit that Bookshop might earn for sales through its distributors. This makes Bookshop a great choice for authors and other people with connections to local bookstores, as they can use their lists to promote their books while supporting local stores.
The idea behind the site is that it’s a socially conscious alternative to Amazon, and it’s already making a big impact. Local bookstores have been able to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales from the lists they’ve created, which are a lot more than they would get from a typical online store. And it’s helping readers find books they might not have otherwise found.
Reviews
Bookshop is a website dedicated to helping independent bookstores thrive in the face of Amazon’s near-monopolistic digital dominance. It offers a digital storefront for indie booksellers and a platform for authors and reviewers to sell their own titles. It also provides an alternative for readers to buy books they can’t find in local bookstores.
It also helps indie publishers, small presses, and authors by allowing them to upload their own inventory and manage orders directly. This eliminates the need for bookstores to hold stock on behalf of publisher partners. The site also allows bookshops to offer discount codes and free shipping on select products.
Bookshop’s approach to e-commerce is unique, as it is designed to be a community of booksellers. It aims to promote local bookstores by listing them on their receipts and by encouraging customers to shop at them. Their lighthearted FAQ page is also a welcome change from the usual dry, text-heavy information found on many websites.