Bookshop.org, as the Guardian articles below suggest, is exactly what the publishing world has been waiting for.
Bookshop.org supports independent bookshops (it doesn’t undercut them, as the unmentionable does) and it makes it possible for independent bookshops to benefit from online sales wider than they, on their own websites, could reach.
From this article: Bookshop.org is being described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”: a socially conscious alternative to [the unmentionable] that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller.
You can nominate your own local bookshop to be supported when you use Bookshop.org’s website. It began in the US. Sharmaine Lovegrove writes:
Bookshop.org allows any independent shop to customise its own online store front, select books to recommend and, any time a bookshop directs a customer to the site through one of its links, it gets 30% of the sale.
The importance of supporting local bookshops as a vital part of the community has been increasingly recognised, and is reflected on this platform: every time a reader buys a book from an author, publisher, magazine or influencer page, 10% of that purchase will go to the page owner and another 10% into a profit pool for independent bookshops. In the US more than $7.5m has been raised to share among 900 bookshops. On day one [2 November] of being established in the UK, the pot was already at £12,500. [Today, 14 November, the pot is close to £124,500.00.]
This new platform offers practical solutions to keep our indie bookshops thriving and our writers reaching scores of readers. No wonder everyone is excited and delighted.
And many many people are also excited and delighted by the result of the American election. Van Jones, an American news commentator, said, on CNN, after the Democrats’ Joe Biden and Kamala Harris became President and Vice-President elect:
What a man.
The exciting thing about the Indie bookshop imitative that not only will it attack the all- powerful Amazon and give a life line to struggling bookshops so they will have a chance of staying open (meaning we can savour the old- fashioned joy of visiting and browsing for real but each bookshops will offer Hand picked recommendations that are based on their staff’s knowledge and not on algorithms. So goodbye to “if you like this you like that” and all that nonsense
Goodbye to algorithms. Hello to real people recommending real books to other real people x