Support indies online

Bookshop is a new website which hopes to give independent bookshops a better chance of surviving, or even thriving, in an Amazon-dominated market. The site went online in the US in January, and founder Andy Hunter wasn’t originally planning to bring it to the UK until 2021 or 2022. But then the pandemic happened. As Andy, a co-founder of LitHub, says, ‘Five weeks into what we thought was going to be a six-month period of refining and improving and making small changes, Covid-19 hit and then suddenly we were doing massive business.’ From ‘$50,000 worth of books in all of February, to… $150,000 a day in April.’

Bookshop offers a virtual bookshop window for independent bookstores. The American version started with 250 shops, and now represents 900. The individual shops keep 30% of the cover price of every book ordered through their Bookshop page (confusingly called a ‘website’), while Bookshop itself looks after the shipping of orders and takes a small profit from each sale.

Andy told the Guardian, ‘Bookstores have been in trouble for a while because of Amazon’s growth, but this pandemic has really accelerated it. I think we were so successful because enough people were conscious of that, and wanted to rally around their beloved bookstores, because they care about the world that we emerge from this pandemic into.’

The site launched in the UK on 2 November with 130 independent bookstores and hopes of having 200 or more by the end of 2020. Explaining why he brought the UK launch forward, Andy said, ‘If you don’t get there before Christmas, and give people a way to support their stores and buy their gift books, then it’s gonna be really catastrophic for shops, which is why we’ve scrambled all hands on deck to get it up.’

Website: https://uk.bookshop.org/

Use the Find a Bookshop link to find and support your local bookshop: https:// uk.bookshop.org/pages/store_locator