Bookshop.org Now Sells Ebooks
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.”
There are some other places to buy ebooks that support independent sellers—a handful of small publishers sell ebooks directly, and the ebook retailer Kobo has an affiliate program that sends a percentage of your ebook purchase to your favorite local bookstore—but Bookshop’s one-stop shop is a unique experience that adds a needed layer of convenience.
Rights and Wrongs
The copyright and ownership arguments around ebooks are sticky. Unlike physical books, which you can freely loan out or resell, digital books have more draconian restrictions placed on them by both publishers and marketplaces. Amazon, for instance, has a proprietary ebook file type that can only be opened by a Kindle device, or within the Kindle app. Publishers also tend to hold on to the rights on their ebooks, which limits what customers can do with the titles they purchase.
Cara Gagliano, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who focuses on copyright law, also cautions that ebooks are almost always just licensed to the reader—even when you buy an ebook, you don’t actually own the ebook itself. If something goes wrong with that publisher, or if it decides to pull its ebooks from retailers’ stores, then you run the risk of losing access to the book you bought.
“The problem with a licensing model is that it gives them the ability to include terms that go beyond copyright law,” Gagliano says. “We’ve especially been looking into the use of end user license agreements and terms of service to try to expand copyright. So you might also find you’re limited in other ways.”
It is these kinds of machinations that Hunter hopes will entice people to use Bookshop instead. The new marketplace is not exactly the anti-Amazon, and there are some caveats. First, many ebooks you can buy on Bookshop are in an e-pub format that cannot be loaded directly onto Amazon’s Kindle devices, which are the most popular e-readers in the world. Second, some books will have digital rights management restrictions that publishers use to limit how a book can be distributed. If the books don’t have DRM, then you can swap that book between devices. If it does have DRM, then you can’t.
Gagliano says the solution to these kinds of problems is only likely to be reached through some kind of legislative action. Hunter knows that won’t happen overnight, but he hopes his new store will push things in the right direction.
“The first step is to launch the platform,” Hunter says. “Our second step is to make it popular, so we have leverage. And then we can start fixing what we consider to be the industry problems around ebooks.”
Buying an ebook on Bookshop.org works a little differently than buying a physical book on the platform. Shipping physical books requires storage and labor, so Bookshop takes a cut of the proceeds from sales. For physical books, Bookshop lets buyers direct 30 percent of the proceeds of a sale to their favorite participating bookstore. An additional 10 percent of those sales, plus the sales of books that are not earmarked for a specific store, gets split up and distributed to every store on Bookshop’s platform.
Ebook sales through Bookshop, however, will see 100 percent of the proceeds going to the store that sells them through the platform. If a user buys an ebook directly from Bookshop without naming a bookstore they want to support, then a third of that profit will go into the pool of funds that gets divided between stores. The rest will go to pay for Bookshop.org’s engineers and server costs.
Hearts and Minds
Perhaps the biggest thing Bookshop’s new model is going to have to contend with is what Gagliano describes as “lock in.” Many readers may already have so many books in their Kindle library that it could be hard to just move to a new platform. It’s sort of like the effort of making a switch from a Mac to a PC. The more costs you’ve sunk into a particular ecosystem, the harder it is to pry yourself out.
Hunter gets that, but his hope is that his app is good enough to make the jump—and that people will see the extra value in keeping their local bookshops around. He views it as an important, almost existential step.
“There’s a future that we’re all getting pulled into where technology and people and governments that don’t have our best interests at heart and don’t have humanity’s best interests at heart and are putting their own agendas ahead of the general good of humanity,” Hunter says.
He sees independent bookstores as bastions of community—places in small towns or big cities where people can meet, share culture and knowledge, and make roots. Keeping them in business is good for everyone.
“It’s motivating, being able to make a difference, even as the ground erodes beneath our feet,” Hunter says. “We’re trying to replenish the topsoil and keep the sustainable systems around the culture of reading and writing strong.”