Indie Bookstores Will Soon Be Able to Sell E-Books to Customers

New York Times

28-01-2025

When Andy Hunter started Bookshop in 2020, his goal was to build an online bookstore that served as an indie alternative to Amazon. Five years later, more than 2,200 independent bookstores sell books through the site, which has generated more than $35 million in profit for participating stores.
But Bookshop didn't sell e-books, leaving member stores shut out of a lucrative format.
Bookshop is now aiming to change that, too. On Tuesday, the online bookstore started selling e-books on their site and launched an app that allows customers to read digital books purchased from Bookshop or from independent stores. Bookstores will be able to sell digital books directly from their own websites, and when customers buy e-books through Bookshop and select a store to support, all profits from digital sales will go to stores, Hunter said.
To start, Bookshop's website will have more than a million digital books on offer. Later this year, Bookshop plans to add books by self-published authors and more independent publishers.
'Independent bookstores have been looking for ways to compete in the e-book space,' said Rachel Kanter, the owner of Lovestruck Books, a romance bookstore in Boston. 'It's really a godsend.'
Ever since Amazon introduced its Kindle e-reading device in 2007, the e-commerce giant has dominated the market for digital books. Other companies made some inroads, including Kobo and Barnes & Noble with its Nook e-reader. But most independent bookstores simply ceded the e-book market to the retail giant. A 2023 survey of independent bookstores found that just 18 percent sold e-books, according to the American Booksellers Association.
Siphoning e-book sales away from Amazon will be difficult. The company created a seamless ecosystem with its Kindle and app. Its e-book subscription service allows readers to consume unlimited books for about $12 a month.
Digital book sales haven't overtaken print, as many in the book business once feared. But for many readers, especially heavy readers in genres like romance and thrillers, digital books are more convenient, and often less expensive.
Publishers' revenues from e-book sales totaled some $945 million in the first 11 months of 2024, and e-books accounted for 11 percent of those revenues, according to the Association of American Publishers. By comparison, sales of physical books, including paperback and hardcover, accounted for $6.5 billion in revenue for the first 11 months, and made up 75 percent of the market in that time period.
Lea Bickerton, owner of the Tiny Bookstore, a 270-square-foot store in Pittsburgh, said she hopes Bookshop's addition of e-books will appeal to customers who like reading digitally, but want to support her small store rather than a behemoth like Amazon.
'With our current political environment, I suspect there are going to be more people who want to pivot out of the Amazon ecosystem,' she said. 'There's a window of opportunity to make this market competitive again.'
Bookshop took off during the pandemic. Many stores had to close during quarantine, and online sales through Bookshop provided them with a lifeline. Even after retailers reopened, many bookstore owners found it convenient to sell through Bookshop, which handles the inventory and shipping through Ingram, a major book distributor. The site has proved popular with booksellers: Out of the 2,433 stores that the American Booksellers Association counted as members in 2024, around 90 percent use Bookshop.
Bookstores see lower profits when they sell print books through the site — 30 percent of a book's list price, compared with roughly 40 percent they get selling directly to customers — but don't have to manage inventory or pay for shipping. For print books that are sold directly by Bookshop, 10 percent of the list price goes into a pool that gets distributed to independent bookstores. When customers buy e-books from Bookshop without identifying a particular bookstore, 30 percent will go into the shared profit pool for stores and the rest will go toward funding Bookshop's operations.
Hunter said he's wanted to add e-books to Bookshop from the beginning. Independent bookstores already had a way to sell digital audiobooks, through Libro.fm, but no one had found a good solution for digital books.
'Up until now, customers had to go to Amazon or Kobo or some other place,' Hunter said. 'They had no easy way to buy e-books from an independent bookstore.'
He began tackling the problem in 2022. But first, he had to raise money for the initiative, and then get major publishers on board, which required passing encryption security tests to prove that Bookshop was secure and wasn't vulnerable to digital piracy.
Hunter's initial goal is to launch with 'a minimum viable product' and develop a customer base. At launch time, customers will be able to read e-books from Bookshop on their web browser and on iPhone and Android apps. Later, he'd like to add other features, like a subscription service, he said.
Once e-book sales are working seamlessly, Hunter has other ambitions, including building an alternative to Goodreads, the book review site owned by Amazon.
'That's still on my to-do list,' he said.