Literary staying power can be hard to achieve: Beach reads don’t often become Penguin Classics. The three-year-old Bookshop.org, which sells books to consumers and facilitates e-commerce for indie bookstores, is earning its place in the canon, cementing itself as a vital resource for local shops and Amazon-weary readers alike.
Its model is simple: Stores link buyers from their sites to Bookshop.org, which handles inventory and ships from a central warehouse, passing part of the revenue (30% of a book’s cover price and part of the site’s 10% profit-share pool) back to the local store. Indispensable during COVID-19 lockdowns, it has also steadily added members in the past three years. As of early August, the platform was serving 1,900 U.S. stores (80% of the American Booksellers Association’s members), which have earned $26 million from Bookshop.org.
The site is also asserting itself as a scrappy Amazon alternative. Last year, it debuted a bit of counterprogramming called Anti Prime Day, which encouraged shoppers to use Bookshop.org to buy books from local stores. This year’s event, which offered free shipping on July 11 and 12, saw $1 million in sales.
Bookshop has also worked to build partnerships with organizations of writers from diverse backgrounds, which have brought exclusive book lists to the site around identity-focused months. “We try to partner with organizations that know more than us and are really connected to those communities,” Hunter says. For AAPI Heritage Month in May, Bookshop worked with the Asian American Writers Workshop. For Juneteenth, it partnered with Black literary group Getting Word Collective to highlight banned books by Black authors, with 10% of proceeds benefiting the collective’s annual Fund Black Literature effort.
More than being the anti-Amazon, Hunter says Bookshop has become a genuinely independent space for book lovers. “If you look at our bestseller list, it’s completely different from Amazon’s, but it’s completely different from The New York Times’ too,” he says. “Our home page is a hub for all the different stakeholders from the publishing and book world.”
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