I bought a book on bookshop last week. It was $5 more than on Amazon, and bookstores got $1.80 from my purchase. I should have just bought the book on Amazon and mailed four dollar bills to my local bookstore—everyone would have come out ahead.
I'm not sure I see the point either. I want to shop at my local bookstore. The one that is a 10 minute walk from my place. Bookshop seems like an amazon clone but they donate to independent bookstores. Well, amazon has smile, so I don't see how this is better. Perhaps I missed something.
You get a warm fuzzy feeling. And maybe the Ruby Goldberg machine of human suffering you activate when buying with them is a bit less cruel than that of Amazon.
When you allow a company like Amazon to control that much of the publishing business, you end up with some real problems. Among them, these are some very important ones:
* Amazon can dictate with their recommendation engine and promoted shelf what books you'll read. They can bury authors and whole topics and since they control so much of the market, these other books don't get a fighting chance to actually be seen, let alone bought. I'm not saying all books are the same. All stores prepare their shelves and exposure tables with care, but when you have multiple stores with different curators, the net effect of this is a variety of exposure. You can go to two indie stores on the same street and get a complete different experience in terms of what they recommend. Even though their recommendation engine does its best to place you in front of books that people like you enjoyed, that just create filter bubbles and echo chambers. It is good to be exposed to something else even if just to browse and decide to buy something different later.
* With it's quasi-monopoly, Amazon can dictate terms to publishers and authors alike. Royalties are always bad unless your self-publishing but Amazon can also extend that bad aspect of the business towards not only authors but publishers themselves. Negotiating with a company that owns the market is not really negotiating, it is compromising to unfair contracts.
* Have you tried buying an eBook from Amazon and adding it to a non-kindle device legally? What about DRM? Amazon vertical control of their eBook platform where they are the shop, the hardware supplier, and the only way to consume that content is much like Apple vertical control of iOS. New eReader companies have a hard time trying to survive the market because they can't read the books offered by the company that controls most of the market. It is quite refreshing to pick a device that supports ePubs and buying a non-DRM ePub from a publisher and just reading it without walled gardens.
* A big part of the bookshop experience is curation and the relationships you establish there if you're fortunate enough to be in near a shop that has events and fosters a local community. Don't get me wrong, books are products as well and selling them just like you sell shoes is a legitimate way of doing business, but it can be more than that. I've discovered many good books completely outside of my usual taste by going to events in bookshops and having interaction with real humans. If local bookshops die, this kind of experience dies with them.
So in the end it is not about using "bookshop" to avoid "Amazon", it is about keeping local shops alive so that the experiences and features they offer and that can't be replicated with a cold robotic Amazon shop, cease to exist.
There are many other problems with Amazon that goes beyond the book part of their business. Amazon is too big and companies working on that scale tend to be uncaring and treat their workers bad as you can't grow that large and not be playing the ROI and spreadsheets game of how much value can my capitalist practices can extract from both my clients and my workers.
On the other hand, local shops tend to more caring towards their clients and their workers. That is not an absolute and I've seen my fair share of horrible local shops as well, but for each one of those, there a many more shops run by people who actually love books and you can't have a good publishing industry if people who love books are no longer in every part of the supply chain. If all those people are in just half of the supply chain as authors, publishers and readers, but the commerce part becomes dominated by a single company, your overall industry quality will suffer IMHO.
I definitely support the indie bookstores, and have been exclusively using them around my area for quite some time (only wish I was doing this sooner, how dumb was I before to be using amazon so much). They may not typically have books that I am interested in, technical books, but I do use the web to find those and all the stores support ordering books online that I then can pick up in the store. Though the price is typically more than amazon's, but it's worth it to me.
I do enjoy the curation that they have at the shops, and it is great to find a book that I probably would have not have found otherwise.
I also would like to support small businesses over larger corporations, because to your last paragraph, I also think it's important of part of that supply chain to reap the benefits of their labor (the store owner) and have more creativity and autonomy over what they do.
So, I wouldn't want to support Bookshop (and especially amazon when it comes to books), and would rather just support my local bookstore which can do everything that Bookshop or amazon can do. Not sure why we would want a middle layer that takes most of the money and then gives money out to stores like charity.
In Germany we have fixed book prices and people still shop books on Amazon. There is even online shops like Buch7 that distribute their profits to charities, but its even more difficult to support local book shops because they either become part of franchises or have no good online ordering. IMHO it is much a matter of affordance and UX and only secondarily price.
Bookstores get 30% of every sale. Yes, it's still not as much as the 40-45% they get normally, but unless the book you bought was only $6, the bookstore got more than $1.80.
I think the article says they get 30% of the profit not the sale/revenue.
Edit: although I don’t understand that because why would they only get 45% if they do it themselves? Seems like they would get 100% of the profit if they do it themselves. If they have to pay some cost out of the profit then it was not by definition profit.
Edit 2: From https://bookshop.org/pages/about, it looks like it is a 30% commission, which is more like 30% of the sale than of the profit.
Brazilians have been enjoying the exact same setup for more than a decade. The estante virtual (virtual shelf) site is exactly that, a single store front where you can search and buy books which are fulfilled from indie bookstores throughout the country. In our case, since books are often rare and expensive, the website is mostly focused towards the second-hand books market (which is huge in Brazil, specially academic and specialized books) but it also sells new books.
I'm sure other countries have similar setups. I've heard that in Germany, Amazon never really got that much of a foothold as there is a system of fulfilment between the various bookshops where you can order on your local shop and have the book arrive there in couple days from a different unrelated shop using the same system.
It always surprise me how American tech ecosystem reinvents the wheel from other countries and then proceed to make huge deal out of it as if they invented sliced bread all over again. If people looked away from the U.S. and into home grown, grassroots, little tech startups from different countries, they'd find a plethora of new ideas and solutions.
Amazon is absolutely dominating in Germany. Although what you otherwise said is true, we could also always order via ISBN Numbers from any small bookstore, there just wasn't a good way to search before the internet became mainstream.
I moved to Germany about two years ago from the US. I have used Amazon a lot to help me get settled here. I’d like to move away from them but English books seem like the hardest thing to find off their platform. Do you know of an alternative?
Use amazon search/reviews and then use the ISBN to shop anywhere (I would promote Buch7 as a social book shop knowing its not the best for English books). Your local book shopde will also order most things for you. (Call them, they call you back when the book arrived). The big problem is that English books are not fixed price in Germany ...
What studies discuss how money flows internally and permanently out of an economy? This seems tangential here.
I recall an article/conversation long ago about how open source consulting projects keep money local. IIRC, the argument was that paying someone to develop open source software for a government project leads to that money being cycled around six times inside the local economy, as opposed to money leaving the local economy.
For example, if you buy Oracle's database (and associated consulting) for that municipal government accounting project for the city government of Smalltown, USA, then all that money leaves that economy permanently.
If instead the city council of Smalltown, USA can be convinved to hire a few weird local Perl programmers to build it that money will go into their bank account at the local credit union. That credit union will then loan out that money, and multiply it inside the local economy there. That Perl programmer will go down to the pub, and spend money there, and on groceries (and not Amazon), etc.
There are complications to doing it local (Perl programmers aren't great salespeople), but in Oregon we were bitten by Oracle and it turned out to not be cost effective at least: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html. Oregon tax payers paid $240M to Oracle. Oracle settled for $100M, but let's be straight: $75M of that is Oracle software. You cannot find Oracle software being exchanged for pizza at any brew pubs here.
It seems like buying local is keeping money local. But, I never hear people talking about it that way, other than in that random open source advocacy discussion.
I cannot find that link, and perhaps it was only a dream I had, but this makes sense to me logically.
This is one a the points of Strongtowns. Local independant shops hire local accountants, local attorneys to setup shop, are more likely to hire local businesses for marketing etc. Big retail chains funnel all the money to HQ. Same thing with automobile dependency, all that car and gas money leaves the local economy.
Don't have a link to a study, but would also appreciate a good one of anyone is into this.
From my understanding of economics, the idea is that, optimizing for local money is suboptimal.
Compare that to Smalltown finding their own niches/specialization and earning more money from that to purchase Oracle software. Smalltowns will end up having more value by exporting what they are good at, and importing what they need from the area/company that is best at what they are good at.
When theory does not match experience, do we throw away theory or experience?
That is, when we see the local economy drying up again and again, and towns in permanent recession, disappearing, do we just keep doing what the theory says.
Besides, the theory does not say "open economy is good for everyone". It says, at most, with its caveats and conditions, "open economy is good to maximize global wealth", the sum of the wealth of all the participants.
Maybe that benefits smalltown (good), or maybe a chinese smalltown more than it hurts smalltown (still good, but a though time convincing smalltown to go along against their interests).
Maybe that benefit Jeff Besos more than it harms smalltown (in dollar terms, that are the issue the theory is about).
Saying that the economy produces good results is like saying evolution produces good results: true, as far as it goes, but your blind god optimize for things you care only incidentally, and often not at all (see also: covid-19 :P)
That's if the market is optimal. The market is not optimal as the big players buy the smaller ones and centralise where taxes are low, rather than stay where they came from.
I appreciate that idea. But, the example I cited should at least warrant further discussion. If you know anything about the way Oracle does business (and this is the case for many other businesses in other industries) is that they sell you on a project with a small initial cost. Then, BIG SURPRISE! Cost overruns! Can't be helped, but here is the bill. Hence the lawsuit. If you look at this example, I really feel like a local solutions consultant (my magical Perl programmer) could have done it for less money and a better outcome. And, I really think that is a model we should consider much more often.
Of course this requires everyone to be good purchasers and sales people (Oregon, perl programmers and Oracle alike). Individual cases can be outliers but in general we are rational (to a certain degree)
Did someone really call their bookshop 'Bookshop'?
And I really don't get it - printed books are commodities. They're the same wherever you get them. Anyone except the author is a middleman. Independent bookshops can't value-add anything except in-person, and even then it's limited to creating a nice environment.
I love my local bookshop, and we're buying from them during the crisis to be delivered, but being honest with myself it's because of the toast they do rather than anything to do with books.
Yes, a big part of what local bookshops offer is the physical environment. Mine (near the University of Chicago) does book events, which is why I keep supporting them.
Good bookstores also provide a free service: curation. Really good bookstores are usually small, located near a good university and are run by book-loving alumni who never left the area. Small is important -- limited space means having to be super selective with inventory. A good bookstore display can give you a sense of the zeitgeist, a feeling for what thinking people are interested in at the moment. There's nothing more pleasant than spending a Saturday afternoon stumbling across new ideas in the stacks.
Unfortunately, you're right -- all these things can now be had online. Curation and bibliophile owners? Follow interesting people like Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) and you'll get some of the best book recommendations around. Book event? Can be done via video conference.
All that's left is the physical environment, and now that's gone too.
The first big chunk of value added for independent bookshops is that they are not Amazon. That is enough for me. I avoid Amazon. But there are a few possible other pieces of value to add that the other sellers might add, but they are not doing it.
How about, if a bookseller does absolutely no business with Amazon or any of its affiliates, ever, they advertise that so that I can favor them with mine. That would be a value-added.
Now, I have bought many used books from Alibris, since I stopped buying from Abebooks when I learned that Amazon owns Abebooks, but now I find that Alibris has a deal with Amazon to ship the books that I buy from independent booksellers who list on Alibris through Amazon's shipping system. And part of the deal seems to be that any bookseller who lists both on Amazon (or abebooks) and on Alibris always lists the book a little higher on Alibris, and shipping always costs a little more if I buy through Alibris, too. So the independents, who present themselves as wanting to compete with Amazon, are being lured into supporting both the giant and the giant's ability to manage prices throughout the market. If an independent bookseller wants to offer any value beyond what Amazon offers, they should stay out of Amazon's network and sell used books that Amazon's network does not offer.
When I want to buy a used book that I find on-line that was published with one or more CD's included, I have often contacted the bookseller and asked if their copy of the book has the CD included. If the bookseller is one that lists through abebooks, Amazon, or Alibris, either my inquiry is ignored or the response is that they cannot access their inventory to answer my question, and that their terms of sale are that the CD might not be included, no matter how essential it may be to the value of the book. This uniformity of poor service across supposedly-competing sellers is suspicious at best, and an independent bookseller could certainly offer value added by not doing what everyone else is doing.
Bottom line is that it is possible for bookshop to be better than Amazon for some buyers, but I'll wait to see it before I believe it.
But they just buy exactly the same books, from exactly the same publishers, as every other bookshop in the world. Where are they adding any kind of protection against anything?
My local bookshop sells the same as I could get in a chain bookshop. The books aren't any different! What's the point?
And anyway you don't need bookshops to disseminate free thought, if that's what you mean. You can do that with a website.
Most independent bookshops don't solve the problem you're describing. They just buy the same books from the same publishers as everyone else. They don't create any variety. It's the same books!
Most of the time, I don't go to the bookstore with a particular book in mind. Instead, it's a Saturday morning and the weather is nice, so I want to go for a walk somewhere. The bookstore is a good choice, and maybe I'll find an interesting title there. If my bookstore shuts down, I lose one more important walking destination.
Unfortunately I can't buy that experience on Amazon, even with same-day shipping.
This might be a condition particular to walkable cities, though. I wouldn't drive to a bookstore.
Of course Bookshop doesn't help here either, but if it can keep their doors open then I'll be able to keep walking through them...
The value-add of bookstores is discovery. You can browse a bookstore. I don't go to a physical bookstore if I know I want to buy <current bestseller>. I go to a bookstore because I want to find something interesting on a certain topic.
You can browse Amazon of course, but for some reason it's still an awful user experience.
Yes, this. There's very little serendipity in browsing amazon. I often discover just the book I never knew I always wanted when browsing a physical bookstore's shelves.
At least in my country, publishers get a bigger cut when you buy your books in indie/local than amazon. They demand bigger discounts, are relentless with penalties, accounting maneuvers and all sorts of schemes to undermine payments, and authors get the same royalties whether the book is sold by amazon or other channels. So, yes, it makes a difference.
Please support your local bookstores and your indie publishing houses.
Not true. A publishing house is not meddling anything, is creating the “commodity“ along with the author. Creating a book is an art. It involves formation, sometimes translation, concept and design. It also fires a big productive chain that in some cases, for indie publishers at least, goes along with the ethos of the author. That’s why some very successful authors stick along with indies instead of penguin random.
People are putting a lot of heart into this industry.
English is not my native language. I think you understand what I meant.
Publishing houses are not a middleman in the same way walmart is a middle man. Before you get your book, it has been edited, formed and designed. Plus, and again, we’re talking indie here, it’s most likely part of a concept. Don’t you have a collection, a compilation or had ever bought a book by its cover?
I'm not all against digital seller, but at least when I was a kid, I read in the bookstore almost every day after school. I've only got the allowance of one book per week from my parents, so the bookstore was the only way for me to read though a few books a day. I'd like for bookstores like these to continue to exist.
For some reason libraries have very, very small scifi collections. I'd get my scifi from used bookstores (long before Amazon). My favorite was a hole-in-the-wall about a mile walk away. You could return the books after reading them for half price store credit. I read hundreds of books that way.
I few years ago I got into buying boxes of 50-100 random scifi books from ebay. In bulk they're about $.50 each.
The local library is networked in with all the other libraries in King County. You can order a book from anywhere in their system. It's still a thin supply of scifi, and wait times for single copies are often several months.
Ideally yes. However, the quality of the books, and the reading space provided by libraries are largely dependant on government budget. Those would be nice if you live in big cities. In a small ones? They really depends.
I think in most library systems you can demand literally any book you want that has ever been published in the modern age and have it delivered to your local library. They often don't advertise it - but ask for it.
Haven't read the article but like what you say, I tried to get a book from waterstones, a UK bookshop on my high street. I don't mind paying 20% or 25% extra as I don't like amazon and I do want to support local bookshops but when they cost that much more and they don't have it in stock and can't tell me when they will get it in, I say screw you and go with amazon.
I recently bought a book from waterstones online but only because amazon would have taken at least 3 weeks to get it to me. It was the same price as amazon but I did have to pay a couple of pounds for postage.
Though another reason to not buy amazon is to avoid fakes. I have bought a book from amazon that was clearly fake.
To me seems as though amazon pricing has gone up and I am happy to pay a little more and wait if it helps to establish a more competitive market and to reduce counterfeits, fraudulent selling, and over-fit ML recommendations that make it difficult to browse into new areas
Amazon typically sells books below MSRP, whereas it seems that Bookshop sells at MSRP (ie. the same price that you'd buy the book in a brick and mortar book store).
Is cost the only variable to optimize for? The commodity is the same in both places (barring some reports of counterfeits in Amazon's stock), but is the labor?
I'd argue that buying from Amazon has some externalities that aren't captured in the price (particularly in their treatment of labor). I pay more for some times of food that avoids things I consider negative externalities, I'd do the same for books and other commodities. That's just an opinion, though, feel free to disagree.
To be honest, Amazon shipping works because it's a monopoly. They don't care how much you buy, it's almost the same for the company, they have to hire the same amount of staff, and same paid hours, at least in urban area. But for any independent store, they have to negotiate a rate with a shipper, which would charge a flat base rate, and overweight if there are any. So it can be difficult for them to offer quality and fast shipping in terms of cost. In a way, they are less efficient than Amazon.
Bookshop fulfillment is handled by Ingram Content Group, a massive book distribution and logistics company, and itself the biggest distributor to independent bookstores.
I don't disagree in theory, but I don't understand how Bookshop protects indies from Amazon in a way that selling their books directly doesn't, especially if they don't offer an advantage on price or convenience.
This is an interesting concept. Fulfillment is handled through wholesaler Ingram, which works if the book is in Ingram's catalogue, but not for titles gathering dust on the shelves or in a back room.
Also, my experience with shipping via Ingram is it's slower.
Certainly not an Amazon (books) killer, but it certainly gives an option to indie bookstores which can't bother with their own website.
If you'd rather not enrich Amazon with your used book purchases, I recommend checking out Alibris. It's a marketplace just like Abebooks, and I've found that many of the same big name sellers are on both platforms.
There was a bookshop around the corner which had a lady sitting in the corner and tens of thousands of second hand books everywhere, on shelves, in piles, room after room of these books.
I wondered if there was a way to sell them online.
I thought maybe it would be possible to photograph a bookshelf, and some sort of program could identify each book from its spine and find its ISBN and automatically list it for sale online.
Then if it sold, it would be referenced back to the photo so it could be easily found even without an indexing system.
I still wonder if the current tech is good enough to do that.
This type of site has excited for almost 15 years in Denmark (antikvariat.net). It's a shared archive and purchasing platform for all used book sellers, and it has proven to work exceptionally well.
The site is not that great, and there are a lot of what look like shoddy print-on-demand books that Amazon also sells. Not exactly your indie-bookstore mix.
If the website is run as poorly as that article is written I don't have high hopes. They wait until the 10th paragraph to tell you how the hell it works!
The indiebound site now directs people to bookshop.org for purchases. Previously, it would direct you to an individual bookseller's website which may or may not have had online ordering available.
Update: The changeover to bookstore.org has been postponed to June 1st to direct as much traffic to individual bookstores' websites as possible.
I can see why they went this way, but this change does seem to be in one sense admitting defeat vs. the Amazon model. The new Bookshop model is basically the Amazon model as far as sales and fulfillment goes: centralized online ordering, with centralized fulfillment from warehouses directly to consumers, bypassing retail. The main difference from Amazon is that they hope to sell at higher prices, producing a surplus from the online sales business that can be distributed to indie bookstores, which they can use to cross-subsidize their brick-and-mortar business. But unlike the previous Indiebound model, the indie bookstores involved in Bookshop no longer actually touch the books at any point in the sales/fulfillment process.
I don't seem to any benefit here. In fact it takes away from the experience of going to a bookstore and everything related to it; at a higher cost and with a delayed delivery. Besides is this site a non profit? For all I know they might get acquired and then we all will get to see that last email.
