4 ms·

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 an

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.
  - mangodrunk 7y ago
    Really good points! I definitely support the indie bookstores, and have been exclusively using them around my area for quite some time (only wish I was doing this sooner, how dumb was I before to be using amazon so much). They may not typically have books that I am interested in, technical books, but I do use the web to find those and all the stores support ordering books online that I then can pick up in the store. Though the price is typically more than amazon's, but it's worth it to me. I do enjoy the curation that they have at the shops, and it is great to find a book that I probably would have not have found otherwise. I also would like to support small businesses over larger corporations, because to your last paragraph, I also think it's important of part of that supply chain to reap the benefits of their labor (the store owner) and have more creativity and autonomy over what they do. So, I wouldn't want to support Bookshop (and especially amazon when it comes to books), and would rather just support my local bookstore which can do everything that Bookshop or amazon can do. Not sure why we would want a middle layer that takes most of the money and then gives money out to stores like charity.
daybreaker2 7y ago
How do you figure the bookstore only got $1.80? Bookstores get 30% of every sale. Yes, it's still not as much as the 40-45% they get normally, but unless the book you bought was only $6, the bookstore got more than $1.80.
- treebog 7y ago
  I shopped on bookshop.org’s main page, so 10% went to bookstores. I believe you have to shop through a specific book store’s page for them to get 30%.
- Hnrobert42 7y ago
  I think the article says they get 30% of the profit not the sale/revenue. Edit: although I don’t understand that because why would they only get 45% if they do it themselves? Seems like they would get 100% of the profit if they do it themselves. If they have to pay some cost out of the profit then it was not by definition profit. Edit 2: From https://bookshop.org/pages/about https://bookshop.org/pages/about, it looks like it is a 30% commission, which is more like 30% of the sale than of the profit. TL;DR: ignore me. i am talking to myself.
riedel 7y ago
In Germany we have fixed book prices and people still shop books on Amazon. There is even online shops like Buch7 that distribute their profits to charities, but its even more difficult to support local book shops because they either become part of franchises or have no good online ordering. IMHO it is much a matter of affordance and UX and only secondarily price.

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.
- mangodrunk 7y ago
  Really good points! I definitely support the indie bookstores, and have been exclusively using them around my area for quite some time (only wish I was doing this sooner, how dumb was I before to be using amazon so much). They may not typically have books that I am interested in, technical books, but I do use the web to find those and all the stores support ordering books online that I then can pick up in the store. Though the price is typically more than amazon's, but it's worth it to me. I do enjoy the curation that they have at the shops, and it is great to find a book that I probably would have not have found otherwise. I also would like to support small businesses over larger corporations, because to your last paragraph, I also think it's important of part of that supply chain to reap the benefits of their labor (the store owner) and have more creativity and autonomy over what they do. So, I wouldn't want to support Bookshop (and especially amazon when it comes to books), and would rather just support my local bookstore which can do everything that Bookshop or amazon can do. Not sure why we would want a middle layer that takes most of the money and then gives money out to stores like charity.

daybreaker2 7y ago

How do you figure the bookstore only got $1.80? Bookstores get 30% of every sale. Yes, it's still not as much as the 40-45% they get normally, but unless the book you bought was only $6, the bookstore got more than $1.80.

treebog 7y ago
I shopped on bookshop.org’s main page, so 10% went to bookstores. I believe you have to shop through a specific book store’s page for them to get 30%.
Hnrobert42 7y ago
I think the article says they get 30% of the profit not the sale/revenue. Edit: although I don’t understand that because why would they only get 45% if they do it themselves? Seems like they would get 100% of the profit if they do it themselves. If they have to pay some cost out of the profit then it was not by definition profit. Edit 2: From https://bookshop.org/pages/about https://bookshop.org/pages/about, it looks like it is a 30% commission, which is more like 30% of the sale than of the profit. TL;DR: ignore me. i am talking to myself.

riedel 7y ago

In Germany we have fixed book prices and people still shop books on Amazon. There is even online shops like Buch7 that distribute their profits to charities, but its even more difficult to support local book shops because they either become part of franchises or have no good online ordering. IMHO it is much a matter of affordance and UX and only secondarily price.