Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#2This sounds similar to hive.co.uk they offer profit sharing with a bookshop of your choice and you can pick up your purchase from a local bookshop.
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#3Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#4Storefronts are becoming the discovery location, while sales shift online. In the past few months I’ve had more than one staple household purchase disappear from grocery shelves to require us to buy from Amazon. It makes sense - stores now charge something like $250k for stocking/shelf space fees. Bookstores have a different structure, but I hope to see more online warehouses show up to rival Amazon, because scalpers do enjoy hiking prices there whenever something is out of stock elsewhere.
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#5[deleted]
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#6This sounds similar to hive.co.uk they offer profit sharing with a bookshop of your choice and you can pick up your purchase from a local bookshop.
There was a Dutch initiative in 2019 as well (bookaroo.nl), but that seems to have failed quite miserably. The concept had local bookshops deliver the orders with Bookaroo acting as a nation-wide online shop and asking a 5% commission. It quickly proved too expensive for bookshops to be worth their efforts.
In the Netherlands people who know the value of a good local bookshop tend to make an effort to support them and just go there, and many already deliver. The rest of the readers won't switch from the convenient and cheap bol.com (Dutch) or amazon.de (amazon.nl coming soon for physical products too).
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#7Storefronts are becoming the discovery location, while sales shift online. In the past few months I’ve had more than one staple household purchase disappear from grocery shelves to require us to buy from Amazon. It makes sense - stores now charge something like $250k for stocking/shelf space fees. Bookstores have a different structure, but I hope to see more online warehouses show up to rival Amazon, because scalpers…
> because scalpers do enjoy hiking prices there whenever something is out of stock elsewhere.
True, but if you despise scalpers, how are you going to get an unavailable something?
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#8By far most of the books I buy are from thrift stores, and the sales the public library does. It's not unusual for me to come home with a shopping bag full of books.
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#9By far most of the books I buy are from thrift stores, and the sales the public library does. It's not unusual for me to come home with a shopping bag full of books.
I used to do this a long time ago but now I find that picking books like this, semi-randomly, isn't a good use of time. Reading a book takes time and there is already more interesting content than I can consume. This means if I choose carefully I can spend all my reading time reading the most interesting/useful books possible, instead of being constrained to whatever the thrift store happens to have at this moment.
Re: Local bookstores have a new weapon in the fight with Amazon
#10(The article sums up a lot of this, but the actual website is more misleading)
I went through and clicked on the about page. The books aren't sold through local book stores. It's a front for Ingram, which handles the orders. The local bookstores that sign up as affiliates get a percentage of the sale, basically as referrers.
I'd love to see this as a search-model that drives to the actual stores, but it seems that would be much more difficult to implement with arbitrary stocking information. In its current state the site represents itself as a method of shopping local, borrowing its respectability from the local stores.