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Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

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Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The local library is networked in with all the other libraries in King County. You can order a book from anywhere in their system. It's still a thin supply of scifi, and wait times for single copies are often several months.

kcls.org

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#73
post #37

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.

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.

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.

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#74
post #51

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…

This is one a the points of Strongtowns. Local independant shops hire local accountants, local attorneys to setup shop, are more likely to hire local businesses for marketing etc. Big retail chains funnel all the money to HQ. Same thing with automobile dependency, all that car and gas money leaves the local economy.

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#75
post #70

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 academi…

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.

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#76
post #55
post #51

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…

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…

When theory does not match experience, do we throw away theory or experience?

That is, when we see the local economy drying up again and again, and towns in permanent recession, disappearing, do we just keep doing what the theory says.

Besides, the theory does not say "open economy is good for everyone". It says, at most, with its caveats and conditions, "open economy is good to maximize global wealth", the sum of the wealth of all the participants.

Maybe that benefits smalltown (good), or maybe a chinese smalltown more than it hurts smalltown (still good, but a though time convincing smalltown to go along against their interests).

Maybe that benefit Jeff Besos more than it harms smalltown (in dollar terms, that are the issue the theory is about).

Saying that the economy produces good results is like saying evolution produces good results: true, as far as it goes, but your blind god optimize for things you care only incidentally, and often not at all (see also: covid-19 :P)

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#77
post #70

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 academi…

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.

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?

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#78
post #37

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.

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.

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

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 ...

Re: Thanks to Bookshop, indies stand a chance against Amazon

#80
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost is a factor, but the 7-10 day delay is far worse for me and it’s ~$10 shipping to get 2-3 day delivery. Also, do we know for sure the Ingram warehouse employees are better treated than Amazon?

To be honest, Amazon shipping works because it's a monopoly. They don't care how much you buy, it's almost the same for the company, they have to hire the same amount of staff, and same paid hours, at least in urban area. But for any independent store, they have to negotiate a rate with a shipper, which would charge a flat base rate, and overweight if there are any. So it can be difficult for them to offer quality an…

The reasons makes no difference to an end consumer. They just care about the services provided.
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