10 ms·

Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

152 points by fraXis 7y ago

ilamont 7y ago
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. Also, my experience with shipping via Ingram is it's slower. Certainly not an Amazon (books) killer, but it certainly gives an option to indie bookstores which can't bother with their own website.
WorldMaker 7y ago
How does it differ from previous IndieBound efforts?
- dhosek 7y ago
  The indiebound site now directs people to bookshop.org for purchases. Previously, it would direct you to an individual bookseller's website which may or may not have had online ordering available. Update: The changeover to bookstore.org has been postponed to June 1st to direct as much traffic to individual bookstores' websites as possible.
  - _delirium 7y ago
    I can see why they went this way, but this change does seem to be in one sense admitting defeat vs. the Amazon model. The new Bookshop model is basically the Amazon model as far as sales and fulfillment goes: centralized online ordering, with centralized fulfillment from warehouses directly to consumers, bypassing retail. The main difference from Amazon is that they hope to sell at higher prices, producing a surplus from the online sales business that can be distributed to indie bookstores, which they can use to cross-subsidize their brick-and-mortar business. But unlike the previous Indiebound model, the indie bookstores involved in Bookshop no longer actually touch the books at any point in the sales/fulfillment process.
    - WorldMaker 7y ago
      Sounds like it is a lot more like what AbeBooks used to be then. (Before Amazon bought and gutted AbeBooks.)
dahdum 7y ago
Cool concept, but the books I compared were 20-50% higher than Amazon, and they charge another $3.50 to ship in 7-10 days.
- throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
  Haven't read the article but like what you say, I tried to get a book from waterstones, a UK bookshop on my high street. I don't mind paying 20% or 25% extra as I don't like amazon and I do want to support local bookshops but when they cost that much more and they don't have it in stock and can't tell me when they will get it in, I say screw you and go with amazon.
  - wdb 7y ago
    Actually, occasionally Waterstones is actually cheaper than Amazon :)
  - tartoran 7y ago
    In order to avoid amazon I get my books from abebooks. Sadly today I just found out Abebooks is owned by Amazon.
    - jrmg 7y ago
      Alibris is basically the same thing and not owned by Amazon.
  - Obsnold 7y ago
    I recently bought a book from waterstones online but only because amazon would have taken at least 3 weeks to get it to me. It was the same price as amazon but I did have to pay a couple of pounds for postage. Though another reason to not buy amazon is to avoid fakes. I have bought a book from amazon that was clearly fake.
- jfim 7y ago
  Amazon typically sells books below MSRP, whereas it seems that Bookshop sells at MSRP (ie. the same price that you'd buy the book in a brick and mortar book store).
teruakohatu 7y ago
So this turns bookstores into super affiliates? Also while sharing a pool of secondary affiliate revenue. I am a heavy user of Amazon's Abebooks. When I buy from there bookstores get 92% of the revenue, and bear the costs. Surely a model like this for new books is better than bookstore.org model?
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Abebooks is for second-hand and antiquarian - I think that's a completely different market and model.
- dublinben 7y ago
  If you'd rather not enrich Amazon with your used book purchases, I recommend checking out Alibris. It's a marketplace just like Abebooks, and I've found that many of the same big name sellers are on both platforms.
runemadsen 7y ago
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.
- madhadron 7y ago
  Used bookshops have been on abebooks.com for years in the USA. This is new booksellers.
bookshelf11 7y ago
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!
chrisseaton 7y ago
Did someone really call their bookshop 'Bookshop'? 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. 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. (Doesn't apply to second-hand booksellers.)
- wellusee292 7y ago
  It’s not true that having independent stores doesn’t value add anything. They add protection against monopoly which is dangerous, especially when talking books, to allow in a free society. They don’t add anything in the narrow context we are usually meaning when we say such. There’s always another abstraction that says otherwise. And in the case of society, I’d prefer a robust, unmonopolized trade. But most people don’t think in abstractions, opting for adherence to obvious social norms.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    But they just buy exactly the same books, from exactly the same publishers, as every other bookshop in the world. Where are they adding any kind of protection against anything? My local bookshop sells the same as I could get in a chain bookshop. The books aren't any different! What's the point? And anyway you don't need bookshops to disseminate free thought, if that's what you mean. You can do that with a website. (Doesn't apply to specialist bookshops.)
    - abathur 7y ago
      Could you disseminate free thought with a website if there were but two massive corporate hosts? Does it matter if anyone can be bothered to interact with your free thoughts, or only that you're free to post them? Perhaps it is sufficient that we're all free to shelve our free thoughts in the closet?
treebog 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- mangodrunk 7y ago
  I'm not sure I see the point either. I want to shop at my local bookstore. The one that is a 10 minute walk from my place. Bookshop seems like an amazon clone but they donate to independent bookstores. Well, amazon has smile, so I don't see how this is better. Perhaps I missed something.
  - notechback 7y ago
    You get a warm fuzzy feeling. And maybe the Ruby Goldberg machine of human suffering you activate when buying with them is a bit less cruel than that of Amazon.
  - soapdog 7y ago
    When you allow a company like Amazon to control that much of the publishing business, you end up with some real problems. Among them, these are some very important ones: * Amazon can dictate with their recommendation engine and promoted shelf what books you'll read. They can bury authors and whole topics and since they control so much of the market, these other books don't get a fighting chance to actually be seen, let alone bought. I'm not saying all books are the same. All stores prepare their shelves and exposure tables with care, but when you have multiple stores with different curators, the net effect of this is a variety of exposure. You can go to two indie stores on the same street and get a complete different experience in terms of what they recommend. Even though their recommendation engine does its best to place you in front of books that people like you enjoyed, that just create filter bubbles and echo chambers. It is good to be exposed to something else even if just to browse and decide to buy something different later. * With it's quasi-monopoly, Amazon can dictate terms to publishers and authors alike. Royalties are always bad unless your self-publishing but Amazon can also extend that bad aspect of the business towards not only authors but publishers themselves. Negotiating with a company that owns the market is not really negotiating, it is compromising to unfair contracts. * Have you tried buying an eBook from Amazon and adding it to a non-kindle device legally? What about DRM? Amazon vertical control of their eBook platform where they are the shop, the hardware supplier, and the only way to consume that content is much like Apple vertical control of iOS. New eReader companies have a hard time trying to survive the market because they can't read the books offered by the company that controls most of the market. It is quite refreshing to pick a device that supports ePubs and buying a non-DRM ePub from a publisher and just reading it without walled gardens. * A big part of the bookshop experience is curation and the relationships you establish there if you're fortunate enough to be in near a shop that has events and fosters a local community. Don't get me wrong, books are products as well and selling them just like you sell shoes is a legitimate way of doing business, but it can be more than that. I've discovered many good books completely outside of my usual taste by going to events in bookshops and having interaction with real humans. If local bookshops die, this kind of experience dies with them. So in the end it is not about using "bookshop" to avoid "Amazon", it is about keeping local shops alive so that the experiences and features they offer and that can't be replicated with a cold robotic Amazon shop, cease to exist. There are many other problems with Amazon that goes beyond the book part of their business. Amazon is too big and companies working on that scale tend to be uncaring and treat their workers bad as you can't grow that large and not be playing the ROI and spreadsheets game of how much value can my capitalist practices can extract from both my clients and my workers. On the other hand, local shops tend to more caring towards their clients and their workers. That is not an absolute and I've seen my fair share of horrible local shops as well, but for each one of those, there a many more shops run by people who actually love books and you can't have a good publishing industry if people who love books are no longer in every part of the supply chain. If all those people are in just half of the supply chain as authors, publishers and readers, but the commerce part becomes dominated by a single company, your overall industry quality will suffer IMHO.
balladeer 7y ago
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.
paraschopra 7y ago
Check out saveyourbookstore.com - my wife built it to help indie bookstores survive during the lockdown.
- xrd 7y ago
  This is a cool site, and I like the clever way it "works" on my desktop.
xrd 7y ago
What studies discuss how money flows internally and permanently out of an economy? This seems tangential here. 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. 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. 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. 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: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html. 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. 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. I cannot find that link, and perhaps it was only a dream I had, but this makes sense to me logically.
- hantusk 7y ago
  Don't have a link to a study, but would also appreciate a good one of anyone is into this. From my understanding of economics, the idea is that, optimizing for local money is suboptimal. Compare that to Smalltown finding their own niches/specialization and earning more money from that to purchase Oracle software. Smalltowns will end up having more value by exporting what they are good at, and importing what they need from the area/company that is best at what they are good at.
  - hantusk 7y ago
    Of course this requires everyone to be good purchasers and sales people (Oregon, perl programmers and Oracle alike). Individual cases can be outliers but in general we are rational (to a certain degree)
WalterBright 7y ago
I've bought lots (figuratively and literally) of books from ebay.
steveharman 7y ago
"Support local bookstores, shop online with Bookshop" In North America only?
andrewstuart 7y ago
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. I wondered if there was a way to sell them online. 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. Then if it sold, it would be referenced back to the photo so it could be easily found even without an indexing system. I still wonder if the current tech is good enough to do that. Sadly the shop closed recently and its all gone.
soapdog 7y ago
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. 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. 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.
- Roritharr 7y ago
  Amazon is absolutely dominating in Germany. Although what you otherwise said is true, we could also always order via ISBN Numbers from any small bookstore, there just wasn't a good way to search before the internet became mainstream.
  - phhedinkus 7y ago
    I moved to Germany about two years ago from the US. I have used Amazon a lot to help me get settled here. I’d like to move away from them but English books seem like the hardest thing to find off their platform. Do you know of an alternative?
    - riedel 7y ago
      Use amazon search/reviews and then use the ISBN to shop anywhere (I would promote Buch7 as a social book shop knowing its not the best for English books). Your local book shopde will also order most things for you. (Call them, they call you back when the book arrived). The big problem is that English books are not fixed price in Germany ...
maskboy 7y ago
does anyone know of an existing alternative to goodreads?
passthejoe 7y ago
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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
musicale 7y ago
> Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason* to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore *other than (but not limited to) the following: larger inventory, lower prices, faster/cheaper shipping, kindle, prime video, amazon smile, etc.

152 points by fraXis 7y ago

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. Also, my experience with shipping via Ingram is it's slower. Certainly not an Amazon (books) killer, but it certainly gives an option to indie bookstores which can't bother with their own website.

WorldMaker 7y ago

How does it differ from previous IndieBound efforts?

dhosek 7y ago
The indiebound site now directs people to bookshop.org for purchases. Previously, it would direct you to an individual bookseller's website which may or may not have had online ordering available. Update: The changeover to bookstore.org has been postponed to June 1st to direct as much traffic to individual bookstores' websites as possible.
- _delirium 7y ago
  I can see why they went this way, but this change does seem to be in one sense admitting defeat vs. the Amazon model. The new Bookshop model is basically the Amazon model as far as sales and fulfillment goes: centralized online ordering, with centralized fulfillment from warehouses directly to consumers, bypassing retail. The main difference from Amazon is that they hope to sell at higher prices, producing a surplus from the online sales business that can be distributed to indie bookstores, which they can use to cross-subsidize their brick-and-mortar business. But unlike the previous Indiebound model, the indie bookstores involved in Bookshop no longer actually touch the books at any point in the sales/fulfillment process.
  - WorldMaker 7y ago
    Sounds like it is a lot more like what AbeBooks used to be then. (Before Amazon bought and gutted AbeBooks.)

dahdum 7y ago

Cool concept, but the books I compared were 20-50% higher than Amazon, and they charge another $3.50 to ship in 7-10 days.

throwaway_pdp09 7y ago
Haven't read the article but like what you say, I tried to get a book from waterstones, a UK bookshop on my high street. I don't mind paying 20% or 25% extra as I don't like amazon and I do want to support local bookshops but when they cost that much more and they don't have it in stock and can't tell me when they will get it in, I say screw you and go with amazon.
- wdb 7y ago
  Actually, occasionally Waterstones is actually cheaper than Amazon :)
- tartoran 7y ago
  In order to avoid amazon I get my books from abebooks. Sadly today I just found out Abebooks is owned by Amazon.
  - jrmg 7y ago
    Alibris is basically the same thing and not owned by Amazon.
- Obsnold 7y ago
  I recently bought a book from waterstones online but only because amazon would have taken at least 3 weeks to get it to me. It was the same price as amazon but I did have to pay a couple of pounds for postage. Though another reason to not buy amazon is to avoid fakes. I have bought a book from amazon that was clearly fake.
jfim 7y ago
Amazon typically sells books below MSRP, whereas it seems that Bookshop sells at MSRP (ie. the same price that you'd buy the book in a brick and mortar book store).

teruakohatu 7y ago

So this turns bookstores into super affiliates? Also while sharing a pool of secondary affiliate revenue. I am a heavy user of Amazon's Abebooks. When I buy from there bookstores get 92% of the revenue, and bear the costs. Surely a model like this for new books is better than bookstore.org model?

chrisseaton 7y ago
Abebooks is for second-hand and antiquarian - I think that's a completely different market and model.
dublinben 7y ago
If you'd rather not enrich Amazon with your used book purchases, I recommend checking out Alibris. It's a marketplace just like Abebooks, and I've found that many of the same big name sellers are on both platforms.

runemadsen 7y ago

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.

madhadron 7y ago
Used bookshops have been on abebooks.com for years in the USA. This is new booksellers.

bookshelf11 7y ago

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!

chrisseaton 7y ago

Did someone really call their bookshop 'Bookshop'? 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. 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. (Doesn't apply to second-hand booksellers.)

wellusee292 7y ago
It’s not true that having independent stores doesn’t value add anything. They add protection against monopoly which is dangerous, especially when talking books, to allow in a free society. They don’t add anything in the narrow context we are usually meaning when we say such. There’s always another abstraction that says otherwise. And in the case of society, I’d prefer a robust, unmonopolized trade. But most people don’t think in abstractions, opting for adherence to obvious social norms.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  But they just buy exactly the same books, from exactly the same publishers, as every other bookshop in the world. Where are they adding any kind of protection against anything? My local bookshop sells the same as I could get in a chain bookshop. The books aren't any different! What's the point? And anyway you don't need bookshops to disseminate free thought, if that's what you mean. You can do that with a website. (Doesn't apply to specialist bookshops.)
  - abathur 7y ago
    Could you disseminate free thought with a website if there were but two massive corporate hosts? Does it matter if anyone can be bothered to interact with your free thoughts, or only that you're free to post them? Perhaps it is sufficient that we're all free to shelve our free thoughts in the closet?

treebog 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mangodrunk 7y ago
I'm not sure I see the point either. I want to shop at my local bookstore. The one that is a 10 minute walk from my place. Bookshop seems like an amazon clone but they donate to independent bookstores. Well, amazon has smile, so I don't see how this is better. Perhaps I missed something.
- notechback 7y ago
  You get a warm fuzzy feeling. And maybe the Ruby Goldberg machine of human suffering you activate when buying with them is a bit less cruel than that of Amazon.
- soapdog 7y ago
  When you allow a company like Amazon to control that much of the publishing business, you end up with some real problems. Among them, these are some very important ones: * Amazon can dictate with their recommendation engine and promoted shelf what books you'll read. They can bury authors and whole topics and since they control so much of the market, these other books don't get a fighting chance to actually be seen, let alone bought. I'm not saying all books are the same. All stores prepare their shelves and exposure tables with care, but when you have multiple stores with different curators, the net effect of this is a variety of exposure. You can go to two indie stores on the same street and get a complete different experience in terms of what they recommend. Even though their recommendation engine does its best to place you in front of books that people like you enjoyed, that just create filter bubbles and echo chambers. It is good to be exposed to something else even if just to browse and decide to buy something different later. * With it's quasi-monopoly, Amazon can dictate terms to publishers and authors alike. Royalties are always bad unless your self-publishing but Amazon can also extend that bad aspect of the business towards not only authors but publishers themselves. Negotiating with a company that owns the market is not really negotiating, it is compromising to unfair contracts. * Have you tried buying an eBook from Amazon and adding it to a non-kindle device legally? What about DRM? Amazon vertical control of their eBook platform where they are the shop, the hardware supplier, and the only way to consume that content is much like Apple vertical control of iOS. New eReader companies have a hard time trying to survive the market because they can't read the books offered by the company that controls most of the market. It is quite refreshing to pick a device that supports ePubs and buying a non-DRM ePub from a publisher and just reading it without walled gardens. * A big part of the bookshop experience is curation and the relationships you establish there if you're fortunate enough to be in near a shop that has events and fosters a local community. Don't get me wrong, books are products as well and selling them just like you sell shoes is a legitimate way of doing business, but it can be more than that. I've discovered many good books completely outside of my usual taste by going to events in bookshops and having interaction with real humans. If local bookshops die, this kind of experience dies with them. So in the end it is not about using "bookshop" to avoid "Amazon", it is about keeping local shops alive so that the experiences and features they offer and that can't be replicated with a cold robotic Amazon shop, cease to exist. There are many other problems with Amazon that goes beyond the book part of their business. Amazon is too big and companies working on that scale tend to be uncaring and treat their workers bad as you can't grow that large and not be playing the ROI and spreadsheets game of how much value can my capitalist practices can extract from both my clients and my workers. On the other hand, local shops tend to more caring towards their clients and their workers. That is not an absolute and I've seen my fair share of horrible local shops as well, but for each one of those, there a many more shops run by people who actually love books and you can't have a good publishing industry if people who love books are no longer in every part of the supply chain. If all those people are in just half of the supply chain as authors, publishers and readers, but the commerce part becomes dominated by a single company, your overall industry quality will suffer IMHO.

balladeer 7y ago

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.

paraschopra 7y ago

Check out saveyourbookstore.com - my wife built it to help indie bookstores survive during the lockdown.

xrd 7y ago
This is a cool site, and I like the clever way it "works" on my desktop.

xrd 7y ago

What studies discuss how money flows internally and permanently out of an economy? This seems tangential here. 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. 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. 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. 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: https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2016/09/post_183.html. 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. 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. I cannot find that link, and perhaps it was only a dream I had, but this makes sense to me logically.

hantusk 7y ago
Don't have a link to a study, but would also appreciate a good one of anyone is into this. From my understanding of economics, the idea is that, optimizing for local money is suboptimal. Compare that to Smalltown finding their own niches/specialization and earning more money from that to purchase Oracle software. Smalltowns will end up having more value by exporting what they are good at, and importing what they need from the area/company that is best at what they are good at.
- hantusk 7y ago
  Of course this requires everyone to be good purchasers and sales people (Oregon, perl programmers and Oracle alike). Individual cases can be outliers but in general we are rational (to a certain degree)

WalterBright 7y ago

I've bought lots (figuratively and literally) of books from ebay.

steveharman 7y ago

"Support local bookstores, shop online with Bookshop" In North America only?

andrewstuart 7y ago

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. I wondered if there was a way to sell them online. 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. Then if it sold, it would be referenced back to the photo so it could be easily found even without an indexing system. I still wonder if the current tech is good enough to do that. Sadly the shop closed recently and its all gone.

soapdog 7y ago

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. 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. 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.

Roritharr 7y ago
Amazon is absolutely dominating in Germany. Although what you otherwise said is true, we could also always order via ISBN Numbers from any small bookstore, there just wasn't a good way to search before the internet became mainstream.
- phhedinkus 7y ago
  I moved to Germany about two years ago from the US. I have used Amazon a lot to help me get settled here. I’d like to move away from them but English books seem like the hardest thing to find off their platform. Do you know of an alternative?
  - riedel 7y ago
    Use amazon search/reviews and then use the ISBN to shop anywhere (I would promote Buch7 as a social book shop knowing its not the best for English books). Your local book shopde will also order most things for you. (Call them, they call you back when the book arrived). The big problem is that English books are not fixed price in Germany ...

maskboy 7y ago

does anyone know of an existing alternative to goodreads?

passthejoe 7y ago

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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

musicale 7y ago

> Thanks to Bookshop, There Is No Reason* to Buy Books on Amazon Anymore *other than (but not limited to) the following: larger inventory, lower prices, faster/cheaper shipping, kindle, prime video, amazon smile, etc.