Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

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 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.

TL;DR: ignore me. i am talking to myself.

I shopped on bookshop.org’s main page, so 10% went to bookstores. I believe you have to shop through a specific book store’s page for them to get 30%.

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?

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)

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.

I joined the coop years ago when I was a student and never sold back my shares.

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.

(Doesn't apply to specialist bookshops.)

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.

> authors get the same royalties whether the book is sold by amazon or other channels

If the authors get the same, what's the problem? Everyone else is a middleman.

Is that not what libraries are for?

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.

In order to avoid amazon I get my books from abebooks. Sadly today I just found out Abebooks is owned by Amazon.

Actually, occasionally Waterstones is actually cheaper than Amazon :)

The cost is a factor, but the 7-10 day delay is far worse for me and it’s ~$10 shipping to get 2-3 day delivery.

Also, do we know for sure the Ingram warehouse employees are better treated than Amazon?

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.

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.