Can Bookshop.org Save Independent Bookstores? (yahoo.com) 90
The Los Angeles Times recently checked in on Bookshop.org, an online bookseller, as it pulled in its first $1 million to help local bookstores across America (thanks partly to a partnership with Simon & Schuster).
"(This milestone) means that we're accomplishing our mission of being a real meaningful support for independent bookstores," said Andy Hunter, Bookshop's founder and CEO. "We're exceedingly pleased with how much we've been able to earn for the stores and many stores are also grateful."
Bookshop, a Certified B corporation, was launched in January with a mission to help indie bookstores, which for years fought to compete with chains like Barnes & Noble and then the online retail giant Amazon. "Our goal is to take the conscious consumers away from Amazon and put them in a channel that supports local independent businesses and keeps bookstores in their communities," said Hunter, which "are really essential to our cultural fabric when it comes to books." Customers can choose to purchase from a specific indie bookstore affiliated with Bookshop or buy directly from the site.
But Hunter doesn't expect to beat the e-commerce behemoth -- only to help its competitors survive: "I expect Amazon will continue to sell more books than us for all eternity. We're not trying to sell more books than them, but we are trying to get customers who care about their downtowns, their quality of life and the world that they want to live in to make a switch."
The article notes that as lockdowns forced nonessential businesses to temporarily close, some bookstores "have turned to Bookshop to keep their businesses running." The Harvard Bookstore even created a special page touting its "Weird History" books.
"Indie stores that sell through Bookshop.org get 30% of every sale," reports the Los Angeles Times. "Affiliate stores that send in referrals also get a 10% commission, compared with Amazon's 4.5%. And for every sale made directly on Bookshop or through a referral, 10% is added to an earnings pool that is then distributed to indie bookstores every six months."
Bookshop, a Certified B corporation, was launched in January with a mission to help indie bookstores, which for years fought to compete with chains like Barnes & Noble and then the online retail giant Amazon. "Our goal is to take the conscious consumers away from Amazon and put them in a channel that supports local independent businesses and keeps bookstores in their communities," said Hunter, which "are really essential to our cultural fabric when it comes to books." Customers can choose to purchase from a specific indie bookstore affiliated with Bookshop or buy directly from the site.
But Hunter doesn't expect to beat the e-commerce behemoth -- only to help its competitors survive: "I expect Amazon will continue to sell more books than us for all eternity. We're not trying to sell more books than them, but we are trying to get customers who care about their downtowns, their quality of life and the world that they want to live in to make a switch."
The article notes that as lockdowns forced nonessential businesses to temporarily close, some bookstores "have turned to Bookshop to keep their businesses running." The Harvard Bookstore even created a special page touting its "Weird History" books.
"Indie stores that sell through Bookshop.org get 30% of every sale," reports the Los Angeles Times. "Affiliate stores that send in referrals also get a 10% commission, compared with Amazon's 4.5%. And for every sale made directly on Bookshop or through a referral, 10% is added to an earnings pool that is then distributed to indie bookstores every six months."
70%??? (Score:1, Informative)
Bookstore takes 70% of every sale. Amazon takes 15%. You can sell books on Amazon. I get don't get it.
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I get don't get it.
Exactly
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Bookstore takes 70% of every sale. Amazon takes 15%. You can sell books on Amazon. I get don't get it.
You don't seem to know much about the book business. I think you're confusing self-published e-books with major publishers here. This story is talking about consumers books sold from the major publishers, not a half-dozen sales via self publishing. Self publishing is a different business.
Yes, authors can get 85% of the sale price if they want to sell stuff themselves via the Amazon marketplace. But when a major publisher-- Macmillan, say-- sells books via Amazon, no, Amazon takes a heck of a lot more th
No, that's not how it works (Score:3)
Alternative Headline (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone and everything is going to die due to Coronavirus. Nothing will survive and it will all be brought down through a combination of Betteridge's law of headlines and the media posing stupid questions as headlines on every single industry in the world.
We're all doomed.
Bookshop.org won't save independent bookshops. Here's why.
Better?
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Bookshop.org won't save independent bookshops. Here's why.
Better?
Marginally, but I want to know if I will believe what happens next or not.
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Independent book shops need to offer DRM-free EPUB books.
Nobody buys e-books from bookstores; they buy them over the internet. This story is about books-- have you heard of them? Physical objects with print on paper-- not electronic text.
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Nobody buys e-books from bookstores; they buy them over the internet
Yes, people buy things from "the internet", that wondrous place where products magically materialise without shops or merchants. Yep, no such things as shops on the internet!
This story is about books-- have you heard of them?
I can't tell if you are really stupid or really tenuously trying to fabricate anything to whine about.
Physical objects with print on paper-- not electronic text.
Are you honestly trying to suggest that electronic documents can't be books? You *are* stupid, aren't you?
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Electronic books are "books", in the sense of conveyors of information.
And they aren't books, in the sense of a book being a paper item with printed text.
Its like a pencil in a graphics program both is and isn't a pencil.
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E-books are crap. Your e-book reader dies? You read nothing. Your e-book file gets corrupted? You can't read any part of it anymore. My printed books get damaged at all, anything short of being burned to ashes? I can repair it and still read it. Even if it's missing a page I can still read it. Taken proper care of, they last decades, may outlive *me*. Fuck e-books.
Obviously you don't read e-books. If my e-book reader dies, I can still read the book on my phone, my tablet, my laptop, or my desktop. My e-book purchase is tied to my account, not my device. If my e-book gets corrupted, I just download it again and keep reading.
Paper books? If they find errors, do they automatically send an updated version to you? Can you make bookmarks that are searchable later, across multiple books? If you find a typo or error in the book, can you easily send correction informa
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I don't get it. (Score:2)
I really don't get the love for independent book stores. They generally don't have the best pricing, selection, hours, or any other thing that would make me want to choose them over going to a larger book store or just shopping online.
Re:I don't get it. (Score:5, Interesting)
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What? Amazon has more "local authors, independent authors, small press circulations, and books of regional interest" than any local bookstore. In fact, Amazon is the largest PUBLISHER of offbeat materials on the planet. Anyone can publish on Amazon.
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You maybe ought to think about the fact that your constant trolling causes you to be consistently modded down to -1 even when you have something of value to say.
Re: I don't get it. (Score:2)
Troll confirmed.
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By "trolling", you mean I don't ascribe to the endless stream of SJW and AI-hype nonsense and "Orange Man bad" and Coronavirus "we are all going to die" hype here in Slashdot. I am proud to be called a "troll" then.
You can lead a horse's ass to knowledge, but you can't make him think.
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Sure it’s fun to throw a bit of gas on the fire from time to time, but usually when doing that it’s more fun to sit back and watch it burn. Anyone who keeps jumping back in probably just believes exactly what they say, eve
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In fact, Amazon is the largest PUBLISHER of offbeat materials on the planet. Anyone can publish on Amazon.
From the post you replied to (emphasis mine):
My love of independent bookstores (speaking as a guy who is considering buying one to run in my retirement) is their offbeat selection.
Amazon has so much choice (and so little selection) that sure, if you know what you want it might be useful; if you're bookshopping for discovery, a store where the books have been selected is often a better bet. The reality is that most indies will order up whatever you're looking for anyway.
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Re: I don't get it. (Score:3)
And those books that are published in house by Amazon are not checked for formatting or quality. They are just whatever .pdf some schmuck sends to Amazon. Buying classics off of Amazon is pointless because the ones from real publishers are the same price as elsewhere while the cheap ones are books that people self publish through Amazon and the formatting, fonts, and overall quality is such that you wonâ(TM)t want to read them.
The fact that anyone can publish on Amazon sounds like a feature, but in rea
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But if you're not particularly picky about what you read, and are fine with Amazon driving everyone who isn't Stephen King out of writing, shop wherever you please.
I love bookstores and I'd like to see independent bookstores thrive, but the above statement is just plain wrong. Amazon is driving an enormous self-publishing trend, and makes a much deeper back catalog available than any brick and mortar store possibly could. The great thing about bookstores isn't the books, it's the experience. Wandering through the stacks, grabbing a half-dozen interesting titles and settling into a worn and comfy chair to look through them... that's what bookstores are about, and wha
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I buy a lot of books on Amazon (mostly fiction) from self-published authors who don't sell through any other channel. Their stuff is good enough that they could sell through a traditional publisher but they don't need to (and, with at least one, I almost wish he would because a publisher would make him use an editor -- great worldbuilder and storyteller and decent prose writer, but so many little grammatical and word choice errors...).
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No, everybody else wants you to hire an editor, too.
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You'll find a staff actually interested in the books they sell and for regular customers have recommendations based on books they've read far better than Amazon's algorithm can do
Exactly this. Especially if you have kids. They can help your bookworm child find a new favorite series that you will likely not know even exists. Just setting your older kids free to wander and find something that interests them is better than an algorithm.
Re: I don't get it. (Score:2)
Isn't that a service best offered by websites dedicated to recommendation, though? Or a free forum? Does there really need to be a physical space designated for receiving literary recommendations? Does it really need to be limited to the two people working the counter at your local bookstore? Wouldn't you get better recommendations with a broader group of more highly paid curators? Isn't this exactly the sort of thing the Internet is really good at?
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it may be that "5 star reviews" are not considered as any reason to read the book.
People who buy based on reviews are not buying based on having a certain number of stars. You have to have both 5 star reviews that gives reasons that resonate with readers, or else 4 star reviews that say good things a reader agrees are good, but then makes a complaint that sounds legit but that they don't care about.
The don't merely look at your review "score," they actually read the reviews and they weigh the content carefu
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It's the kind of thing the internet thinks it's good at, but is actually terrible at.
I have found most of my favorite books previously by being in a bookstore, asking staff, or seeing local recommendations and trying it out onsite. If I like it, I buy it. If I don't , I move on.
The internet is like a giant robot, with four billion competing opinions, telling me what to do, along with vague people gaming the rating system, unscrupulous sellers selling cheap copies, you name it.
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I like supporting my local small businesses which include independent book stores because I like walking (and driving) through my part of town and not seeing a bunch of empty buildings. That's what we'll get if everyone shops on Amazon.
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This is exactly right.
Even more frightening, there are large groups of society now who like this.
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because I like walking (and driving) through my part of town and not seeing a bunch of empty buildings
Unlikely. Right now new buildings of all types are built. If there is less demand for retail on major streets and at malls, less new retail units will be included in new construction. If the surplus is really bad, many of the former retail units will become offices. There are a number offices like that in my city at the edge of downtown that, once upon a time, were strip-malls on the edge of town!
These are not specialized buildings, they can be used for anything, and they customarily are repurposed.
And People Complain About Apple's Cut (Score:4, Insightful)
"Indie stores that sell through Bookshop.org get 30% of every sale,"
That's the reverse of what the App stores make and the book stores still have a physical product to acquire and ship out with the 30% that they receive. The 10% of every sale split between every seller isn't going to add up to much when there's a lot of bookstores as part of the ecosystem.
In the article there's a quote from a store owner/operator that says they are a small store and don't have the knowledge/time to build a site. But if this site is taking 70% of your income then it's time to learn or find something else. Either than or their prices are so high that nobody is going to buy them except for a few people very dedicated to the local stores. They would be much better off going with someplace like Square Space or Shopify which allows them to build a site quickly and has the payment processing already built in. Sure they rip people off with the processing fees but not 70% off.
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It's not as easy as just building a website though. You have to get people to come to it as well.
That's why Amazon and eBay are doing so well. Everyone goes there to look for stuff. They don't even bother checking other sites, especially if they have Amazon Prime. They probably couldn't name five other bookstore sites, and even if they could and actually looked for the book there unless the price differential is large they aren't going to bother making an account and dealing with yet another password and re
Re: And People Complain About Apple's Cut (Score:2)
We're not talking about women's shelters or clinics in poorer neighborhoods or some other critical resources that we should support outside the laws of supply and demand.
If Nordstrom's was having trouble competing with Amazon would we "try
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No local bookstores, the monopoly that a few big retail sites have on the internet.
Re: And People Complain About Apple's Cut (Score:2)
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To stop there being a monopoly.
Well I didn't necessarily mean they had to be local to you, a bunch of independent online ones would be fine too. I just don't want Amazon to be the only place selling books.
Re: And People Complain About Apple's Cut (Score:2)
So it'll look like what? One employee sitting in a bookstore all day getting paid to not serve the zero customers and restock all the books not being sold?
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I was thinking some kind of technical solution. It's basically two problems, discoverability and having a shared checkout system.
Re: And People Complain About Apple's Cut (Score:2)
Distribution is a solved problem if you can get someone to find and buy.
Either way, I don't see how it is the tax payers' responsibility or role to support people with inefficient business models. The same businesses they will not directly support with their post-tax take home income.
If you make buggy whips in an era of automobiles you're not
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Why do you keep bringing up tax? I'm talking about a technical solution on the internet.
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Seems like false dillema. If we look at other sectors, it is not that one big online monopoly vs. local physical shops, it is more like there are few big eshops and many small eshops (often specialised for some domain). I do not see a reason why similar development would not be with book shops (i.e., physical shops replaced with both big and small e-shops).
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Seems like false dillema. If we look at other sectors, it is not that one big online monopoly vs. local physical shops, it is more like there are few big eshops and many small eshops (often specialised for some domain). I do not see a reason why similar development would not be with book shops (i.e., physical shops replaced with both big and small e-shops).
This is what I'm looking for. The NewEgg of books. Amazon leaves one great gaping hole in all of commerce: competent curation. They have utterly abrogated the curation role, leaving it to shitty algorithms that can be gamed, and even profiting off of their shitty curation by selling search terms to the highest bidder. NewEgg earns my repeat business year after year by making sure their search results are clean and by making their categories relevant and correct. Amazon doesn't care what trash shows up
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So physical needs are necessary, but mental needs are not-unless they come from one monolithic business
You may wish to consider changing your username, and I'm not really that smart to realize this.
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They can sell books directly through Amazon as a 'product' and Amazon keeps only a small commission. They will even get you discount shipping. 70% is usury.
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They can sell books directly through Amazon as a 'product' and Amazon keeps only a small commission. They will even get you discount shipping. 70% is usury.
Except that's not it. bookshop.org is offering bookstores a 30% commission to send customers to their site. Basically, they are using Bookstores as advertisers to get customers to order from them, instead of from Amazon.
It's not a site that bookstores use as a front-end to sell stuff from their stores; it's a site bookstores send people to for books they don't have in stock. Not sure if this is going to "save" bookstores, though. https://lithub.com/bookshop-or... [lithub.com]
The books are sold by bookshop.org (Score:2)
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Indie bookshops need to be the anti-Amazon (Score:2)
If they survive -- and some will -- it will be because, like all other surviving retailers, they provide something besides the "race to the bottom" pricing that Amazon and other eTailers do. It will be a combination of what products they stock and what they can get, the experience and knowledge of the staff, and perhaps too the shopping experience itself. E.g., Best Buy is a rare example of a big box store which figured out a way to reinvent itself to stay relevant as a retailer by strongly focus on #2 ab
Re: Indie bookshops need to be the anti-Amazon (Score:2)
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No, what drew people into bookstores was walking around and finding new books or authors.
Bookstore: Hi, here's some books you may be interested in. We don't really know your interests, but you're not a moron, and can choose a subject. These are what we personally like, and here is some new stuff.
Amazon: Hi, here's four trillion books. Maybe you like this one? Some people like it. The book publisher certainly does, and they paid us to highlight it. Are the reviews real? who knows! We've noticed before you li
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Powells is an independent bookstore.
You just hate them because they're successful.
Hating the rich is nice and all, but you can't actually eat them.
If you thought "independent" meant "non-profit" you were merely illiterate, not insightful.
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So you're lying about them because you hate families? Or because you hate private ownership?
Convience and Price. (Score:2)
As much as I like the Idea of small specialty businesses, but outside large cities (which are often hard to start a small business because cities are expensive) it is difficult for specialty businesses to be competitive. While they may offer a wonderful shopping experience, that isn't enough. Convince and Price are the biggest sellers.
Convince is often the largest driver, I need a tool, and there is a big box hardware store close by. It is a quick drive, the chance what I am looking for is there, the stor
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I believe the word you are looking for is convenience.
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Japanese bookstores have been feeling the squeeze too but are surviving by providing reasons to keep going back to them.
They rotate stock a lot, especially used books. There are big markets where bookshops swap boxes of books regularly so that your local one has a constant supply of new stock. Gets people in and helps books find that one person who is interesting in an old edition of some textbook.
In the UK bookshops are boring. The used ones are largely static, only worth one visit. The chains just carry t
My local bookshop did this the other way round (Score:3)
instead of a 'marketplace/aggregator' type website, my bookstore belongs to a chain. The chain has a webstore with a massive selection, and you can order for (free) delivery via the local bookstore (in addition to the usual mail order options).
So I get the best of both worlds: a local, browsable selection of books and the entire 'long tail' available to order. Even specialized books can often be ordered.
abebooks (Score:2)
The last book i bought was from abes online store purely because the revision i could not determine on amazon's platform - buying the ten year version cheap was not my plan when a newer rev existed.
Most of my personal reading i use a public library and will continue to use.
Or abebooks.com (Score:2)
This is not new. Small sellers have been able to sell through AbeBooks for decades.
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Abe Books is a subsidiary of Amazon. (Alibris, however, is not.)
Who needs retail? (Score:1)
The Twilight Zone (Score:2)
You need it.
Go watch The Brain Center at Whipple's from 1964 ... Watch it twice. [wikipedia.org]
Closing narration
There are many bromides applicable here: 'too much of a good thing', 'tiger by the tail', 'as you sow so shall you reap'. The point is that, too often, Man becomes clever instead of becoming wise; he becomes inventive and not thoughtful; and sometimes, as in the case of Mr. Whipple, he can create himself right out of existence. As in tonight's tale of oddness and obsolescence, in the Twilight Zone.
(Emphasis mine)
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It is never too late to learn to read.
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How does a bookstore contribute to "the fabric of community".
The fact that you even need to ask this means your judgement is suspect.
Too expensive (Score:2)
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The last time I went to a local indie bookstore intending to buy a book, it was $50 vs $27 on Amazon. I want to support local stores and am willing to pay somewhat more, but come on! Almost double???
Yes, you're paying for the store; the ability to go to a physical place and browse the actual physical books. Amazon doesn't have that.
Unfortunately, what people do is to go to the physical store, do their shopping by browsing the books taking advantage of the physical bookstore, then pull out their phones and order on Amazon. So what they're doing is taking advantage of the benefits of a real bookstore, but not paying for it.
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We force brick and mortar bookstores to provide abundant, cheap parking at their own expense, and we heavily subsidize the roads to make shipping things to your door artificially cheap, and then we wonder why brick and mortar bookstore prices are so high compared to online booksellers.
We're just not very bright, are we?
There is another site (Score:1)