Bookshop.org is launching an ebook store to take on Amazon

Bookshop.org launched in early 2020 and quickly became a lifeline for local bookstores that found themselves suddenly in need of a way to sell books online. The Bookshop model is a simple one: when you use the website, you pick a store you’d like to support, and when you buy a book that store gets all the profit. Stores can have dedicated pages and curate their own lists, adding a bit of local bookstore charm. The service was built in direct opposition to the faceless infini-brands of Amazon, and it has carved out a niche in the market.

Now the company is making its next move: Bookshop.org is getting into ebooks. It’s launching an ebook reader app for Android, iOS, and the web. For bookstores, the deal is exactly the same: you choose your store, the store can share recommendations and lists, and it gets the money every time you buy something. “Part of surviving the digital age is selling digital products,” says Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter. “If Amazon can do it, your local bookstore should be able to do it, period.”

The app is relatively Kindle-y, with a library of book covers and lots of recommendations, but it also has a unique social feature that Hunter is very excited about. “We’ll allow anybody to share any quote from any ebook to social media, and then people who are on social can click through, buy the ebook, and start reading it on their phone immediately.” He can’t find anyone who has done that before, and he likes the idea of helping books go viral.

Hunter blames Amazon for the fact that ebooks aren’t better, more popular, or more lucrative for bookstores. Amazon is the dominant force in ebooks, with roughly 75 percent of the market, but Hunter thinks it’s time for a change. Amazon made deals with publishers more than a decade ago, when those publishers were terrified that the digital revolution would break publishing the way it broke the music business, by promising to use DRM to keep books safe from piracy. That mostly worked, but it made Amazon too important and left ebook innovation to die.

Hunter knows all this intimately: his first startup, Electric Literature, made digital apps for publishers, and was stymied “because Amazon had most-favored-nation agreements that said you can’t have anything in an ebook that Amazon doesn’t have.” So ebooks stagnated, sales stuck at about 20 percent of all book sales, and nothing changed for a very long time.

Now, Bookshop.org has signed deals with all of the big five publishers and “most major indie publishers,” Hunter says, and the Bookshop.org app will launch with about a million titles — and many more to come. (Supporting self-publishing authors is coming in the next few months.) Building an app that could support the publishers’ security and DRM needs took a while, he says, as did working with the surprisingly complicated and messy technology.

Competing with Amazon won’t be easy, but ebooks might actually be a more level playing field than most. Publishers require consistent prices across stores, so Amazon can’t simply lower prices and lose money until its competitors go out of business — a thing the company has done in the past. Amazon also doesn’t have a huge advantage in shipping times or logistics when all you’re doing is downloading a file. “There’s really no reason not to do it,” Hunter says. “Why would you give your money to a billionaire who is trying to be in a space race with Elon Musk, who is kissing Trump’s ring? Why give money to a billionaire when you can give money to your local business?” Bookshop’s deal is the same for ebooks and physical books — the store gets 30 percent of the list price. That’s almost certainly more profitable than with physical books.

The looming fight with Amazon actually seems to be the thing that animates Hunter and Bookshop.org. When I bring up the Kindle, and the fact that making great reading hardware might be as important as the software, he begins laying out the antitrust case he’s clearly hoping to spark. “Because you own the hardware, you shouldn’t be forcing everyone to buy everything for that hardware from you, so I don’t think they can support that in the future. And publishers should not be supporting that — people should be able to buy an ebook from any local bookstore and read it on their Kindle.”

The plan at first is to ask Amazon nicely to support Bookshop.org books on the Kindle. That almost certainly won’t work, and Hunter knows it. “Then we will see if there’s a group of lawyers that want to try and take it on, and make it so you can buy your ebooks from whoever you want.” Imagine, he says, if you could only listen to music on your iPhone that you bought from Apple — that’s not a world he wants, and he reckons most people don’t want either. He knows that would be a long, expensive, uphill battle, but he’s clearly been wanting to wage it for years. (Hunter is going to be a guest on Decoder in the next few weeks, and I suspect he’ll have a lot to say on the subject there.)

In the meantime, there’s always Kobo and other ebook readers. Oh, and Hunter is also pretty interested in building a Kindle competitor himself. “I do want to have an E Ink device somehow,” he says. But not yet. The Bookshop team is small — seven engineers, two of them contractors — and getting the app and ebook library running is plenty of work on its own. “We’re not going to be changing the world right when we start,” he says. “Once we have a community of ebook readers, and writers that can engage with those readers, then we can start innovating, And the first place to innovate is to take ebooks out of the walled garden.”