I bought a book on bookshop last week. It was $5 more than on Amazon, and bookstores got $1.80 from my purchase. I should have just bought the book on Amazon and mailed four dollar bills to my local bookstore—everyone would have come out ahead.
Brazilians have been enjoying the exact same setup for more than a decade. The estante virtual (virtual shelf) site is exactly that, a single store front where you can search and buy books which are fulfilled from indie bookstores throughout the country. In our case, since books are often rare and expensive, the website is mostly focused towards the second-hand books market (which is huge in Brazil, specially academic and specialized books) but it also sells new books.<p>I'm sure other countries have similar setups. I've heard that in Germany, Amazon never really got that much of a foothold as there is a system of fulfilment between the various bookshops where you can order on your local shop and have the book arrive there in couple days from a different unrelated shop using the same system.<p>It always surprise me how American tech ecosystem reinvents the wheel from other countries and then proceed to make huge deal out of it as if they invented sliced bread all over again. If people looked away from the U.S. and into home grown, grassroots, little tech startups from different countries, they'd find a plethora of new ideas and solutions.
What studies discuss how money flows internally and permanently out of an economy? This seems tangential here.<p>I recall an article/conversation long ago about how open source consulting projects keep money local. IIRC, the argument was that paying someone to develop open source software for a government project leads to that money being cycled around six times inside the local economy, as opposed to money leaving the local economy.<p>For example, if you buy Oracle's database (and associated consulting) for that municipal government accounting project for the city government of Smalltown, USA, then all that money leaves that economy permanently.<p>If instead the city council of Smalltown, USA can be convinved to hire a few weird local Perl programmers to build it that money will go into their bank account at the local credit union. That credit union will then loan out that money, and multiply it inside the local economy there. That Perl programmer will go down to the pub, and spend money there, and on groceries (and not Amazon), etc.<p>There are complications to doing it local (Perl programmers aren't great salespeople), but in Oregon we were bitten by Oracle and it turned out to not be cost effective at least: <a href="https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html</a>. Oregon tax payers paid $240M to Oracle. Oracle settled for $100M, but let's be straight: $75M of that is Oracle software. You cannot find Oracle software being exchanged for pizza at any brew pubs here.<p>It seems like buying local is keeping money local. But, I never hear people talking about it that way, other than in that random open source advocacy discussion.<p>I cannot find that link, and perhaps it was only a dream I had, but this makes sense to me logically.
Did someone really call their bookshop 'Bookshop'?<p>And I really don't get it - printed books are commodities. They're the same wherever you get them. Anyone except the author is a middleman. Independent bookshops can't value-add anything except in-person, and even then it's limited to creating a nice environment.<p>I love my local bookshop, and we're buying from them during the crisis to be delivered, but being honest with myself it's because of the toast they do rather than anything to do with books.<p>(Doesn't apply to second-hand booksellers.)
This is an interesting concept. Fulfillment is handled through wholesaler Ingram, which works if the book is in Ingram's catalogue, but not for titles gathering dust on the shelves or in a back room.<p>Also, my experience with shipping via Ingram is it's slower.<p>Certainly not an Amazon (books) killer, but it certainly gives an option to indie bookstores which can't bother with their own website.
So this turns bookstores into super affiliates? Also while sharing a pool of secondary affiliate revenue.<p>I am a heavy user of Amazon's Abebooks. When I buy from there bookstores get 92% of the revenue, and bear the costs.<p>Surely a model like this for new books is better than bookstore.org model?
There was a bookshop around the corner which had a lady sitting in the corner and tens of thousands of second hand books everywhere, on shelves, in piles, room after room of these books.<p>I wondered if there was a way to sell them online.<p>I thought maybe it would be possible to photograph a bookshelf, and some sort of program could identify each book from its spine and find its ISBN and automatically list it for sale online.<p>Then if it sold, it would be referenced back to the photo so it could be easily found even without an indexing system.<p>I still wonder if the current tech is good enough to do that.<p>Sadly the shop closed recently and its all gone.
This type of site has excited for almost 15 years in Denmark (antikvariat.net). It's a shared archive and purchasing platform for all used book sellers, and it has proven to work exceptionally well.
The site is not that great, and there are a lot of what look like shoddy print-on-demand books that Amazon also sells. Not exactly your indie-bookstore mix.
If the website is run as poorly as that article is written I don't have high hopes. They wait until the 10th paragraph to tell you how the hell it works!
I don't seem to any benefit here. In fact it takes away from the experience of going to a bookstore and everything related to it; at a higher cost and with a delayed delivery. Besides is this site a non profit? For all I know they might get acquired and then we all will get to see that last email.
> Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason* to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore<p>*other than (but not limited to) the following: larger inventory, lower prices, faster/cheaper shipping, kindle, prime video, amazon smile, etc.