"Support local bookstores, shop online with Bookshop"
In North America only?
Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
61–70 of 87 posts
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#62I 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.
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.
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.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#63What 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…
This is a fascinating argument, thank you for sharing.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#64What 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…
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…
That's if the market is optimal. The market is not optimal as the big players buy the smaller ones and centralise where taxes are low, rather than stay where they came from.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#65Did 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…
Yes, a big part of what local bookshops offer is the physical environment. Mine (near the University of Chicago) does book events, which is why I keep supporting them. Good bookstores also provide a free service: curation. Really good bookstores are usually small, located near a good university and are run by book-loving alumni who never left the area. Small is important -- limited space means having to be super sele…
The first big chunk of value added for independent bookshops is that they are not Amazon. That is enough for me. I avoid Amazon. But there are a few possible other pieces of value to add that the other sellers might add, but they are not doing it.
How about, if a bookseller does absolutely no business with Amazon or any of its affiliates, ever, they advertise that so that I can favor them with mine. That would be a value-added.
Now, I have bought many used books from Alibris, since I stopped buying from Abebooks when I learned that Amazon owns Abebooks, but now I find that Alibris has a deal with Amazon to ship the books that I buy from independent booksellers who list on Alibris through Amazon's shipping system. And part of the deal seems to be that any bookseller who lists both on Amazon (or abebooks) and on Alibris always lists the book a little higher on Alibris, and shipping always costs a little more if I buy through Alibris, too. So the independents, who present themselves as wanting to compete with Amazon, are being lured into supporting both the giant and the giant's ability to manage prices throughout the market. If an independent bookseller wants to offer any value beyond what Amazon offers, they should stay out of Amazon's network and sell used books that Amazon's network does not offer.
When I want to buy a used book that I find on-line that was published with one or more CD's included, I have often contacted the bookseller and asked if their copy of the book has the CD included. If the bookseller is one that lists through abebooks, Amazon, or Alibris, either my inquiry is ignored or the response is that they cannot access their inventory to answer my question, and that their terms of sale are that the CD might not be included, no matter how essential it may be to the value of the book. This uniformity of poor service across supposedly-competing sellers is suspicious at best, and an independent bookseller could certainly offer value added by not doing what everyone else is doing.
Bottom line is that it is possible for bookshop to be better than Amazon for some buyers, but I'll wait to see it before I believe it.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#66Did 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…
Yes, a big part of what local bookshops offer is the physical environment. Mine (near the University of Chicago) does book events, which is why I keep supporting them. Good bookstores also provide a free service: curation. Really good bookstores are usually small, located near a good university and are run by book-loving alumni who never left the area. Small is important -- limited space means having to be super sele…
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Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#67Cool concept, but the books I compared were 20-50% higher than Amazon, and they charge another $3.50 to ship in 7-10 days.
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.
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.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that not what libraries are for?
For some reason libraries have very, very small scifi collections. I'd get my scifi from used bookstores (long before Amazon). My favorite was a hole-in-the-wall about a mile walk away. You could return the books after reading them for half price store credit. I read hundreds of books that way. I few years ago I got into buying boxes of 50-100 random scifi books from ebay. In bulk they're about $.50 each.
You can order almost any book in the world to be sent to your local library in most library systems.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#69There 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.
Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon
#70Brazilians 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.