Bookshop.org, the benevolent alternative to Amazon for online book purchases, has entered the e-book game. The company announced today the launch of its own e-book store along with a reader app for Android, iOS, and the web.
For those who do not know, Bookshop.org launched in 2020 as a place for local mom and pop bookstores to easily sell paperbacks online. The site lets users choose their local store, which can offer its own recommendations and lists through Bookshop. When a user orders a book on Bookshop.org, their local bookstore receives the profit. The company says it has raised $35 million to date for local bookstores.
Bookshop.org told The Verge that launching e-books was essential for bookstores to keep up with the times. The new digital store is launching with roughly one million titles, and the deal with local bookstores will remain the same—they will receive roughly 30 percent of the list price when a book is sold through their storefront. When a customer on Bookshop.org has not selected a specific bookstore to support, the company distributes the profit across all of its stores and keeps a small cut for itself. The company hopes that particular selling point will convince people to choose its store over Amazon.
Although physical books have remained stubbornly more popular than e-books, studies have found that e-book readers tend to read more on average.
Bookshop.org CEO Andy Hunter argues that e-books have remained unpopular due to a lack of innovation caused in large part by Amazon’s stranglehold on the market. The company’s Kindle is synonymous with e-books, accounting for 75% of the market—most people who want e-books simply buy a Kindle and where the books actually come from is secondary. Amazon has recently released new versions of the Kindle, including one with a color screen for the first time. Other companies have created color e-readers before but do not stand a chance against Amazon.
That dominance is problematic for two reasons: Similar to Apple’s iPhone, the Kindle only allows users to buy e-books from Amazon’s store and read them on a Kindle, and Amazon has agreements with publishers that books in the Kindle store must be comparable to versions sold elsewhere. These two points stifle competition from alternative stores and devices, making it difficult to support a model like Bookshop.org. If you own a Kindle, you buy from Amazon’s store. Alternative e-readers cannot offer a better price on books or any bonus content, so they do not have much in the way to entice people away from the Kindle.
To add insult to injury, Hunter told Gizmodo that because Apple takes a 30% cut on in-app purchases, Bookshop.org cannot sell e-books through its iOS reader app. Users must buy books through its website and then open them in the app.
Hunter hopes the first step to loosening Amazon’s control is asking it to allow Bookshop.org books onto the Kindle so readers can at least support local. If it says no, he hopes lawyers will step in and try to force its hand through legal action. When consumers buy a piece of hardware like a Kindle, he argues, they should be able to load whatever they choose onto it.
Anyone who has been following antitrust cases in the U.S. knows they move incredibly slowly. Just about all the tech giants have been fighting such cases for years now with little practical change. iPhone owners in the United States still cannot download an alternative app store, for instance, even though it is now the law of the land in Europe.
Hunter says he hopes that his company will be able to ultimately create its own e-reader where people can read e-books from Bookshop’s store, but it will not be coming anytime soon. That will likely make it challenging for the company’s digital store to succeed. The vast majority of e-book readers who are in Amazon’s ecosystem are effectively shut out of Bookshop.
Another possible way forward here could be making e-books transferable so people in the Amazon ecosystem can freely leave with their collections, but that is unlikely to happen soon. For now, at least, Bookshop.org hopes supporting local bookstores will be enough to convince people to shop from its store despite the limitations.
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