Bookshop.org survives and thrives in Amazon’s world

This is an interesting point and a crux for many small businesses. I suppose curation is being monetized many ways, including subscription clothing boxes. In theory, I think this represents the problem that "influencers" should have fixed.

> The Gloucester-based bookseller was founded in 2004 by Stuart Felton and Andrew Crawford, a former Amazon employee, with the mantra of “selling ‘less of more’ rather than ‘more of less’”. It aimed to sell 6m titles covering a wide variety of genres and topics, as opposed to focusing solely on bestsellers. [0]

Seeing as Book Depository later became a subsidiary of Amazon, it's fair to question whether that model held true. I don't have enough insight into Amazon's catalogue to say either way. Also, I can't remember to which degree Amazon relied on "other sellers" back in 2004 or if that came later ("other sellers" being a way to offer a wider selection than what one carries oneself in retail).

To answer your question for an example of a title Amazon doesn't have; I recently found myself recently looking for "Hur svårt kan det va'" by Eva Bodfäldt, which may admittedly be a contrived example, although Amazon does carry another title in Swedish by the same author [1] (though used and from a third party). As it happens, Book Depository has the title... alas, it's not available for delivery anymore.

[0] - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/04/amazon-to-clos... [1] - https://a.co/d/bIEwL9W [2] - https://www.bookdepository.com/Hur-svårt-kan-det-va-en-liten...

You select a local bookstore you want to support, they can curate collections of books and they get some portion of what you spend.

Sometimes I've been able to get a better deal going directly to the site of the bookseller. Biblio will have a lower price but higher shipping than on the seller's site. Not always though

As for the cash, they have been around for about 20 years now and have revenues around $65 million a year. So $25m in lifetime donations is not as much as it seems. Also, they don't say they donated that much cash, they said they have "raised" it. Which usually means through programs like asking customers to donate in addition to their order.

But I just remembered that they were sold to Better World Libraries in 2019, who is a non-profit associated with the internet archive. (It seems that I made a similar comment on HN back then but I have little recollection of it.) So maybe all of their profits go to a good cause now, I can't really find many details on the acquisition. But they were originally VC and PE funded. So I wonder if the business has dwindled like many book/textbook resale companies have over the last few decades. I can't imagine that a non-profit would pay any kind of premium for a for-profit business.