The hype goes on.
Now it's CNN telling why you should buy thay way:
https://edition.cnn.com/style/articl...zon/index.html
Quote:
New bookselling platform Bookshop is pitching itself as a way for independent bookstores to claw back sales from Amazon, which controls a lion's share of a market worth nearly $26 billion in the US alone.
Bookshop, launched by literary publisher Andy Hunter in January, claims to be a "socially conscious" alternative to Amazon. A spokesperson for the enterprise also said it has already earned more than $7.5 million for US indie bookshops and taken 2 percent of Amazon's share of the market in its first year.
The platform allows booksellers to create their own digital stores and receive the full profit margin (30 percent) from each sale through their page. 10 percent of sales through Bookshop also go towards a fund that is divided between indie bookshops whether or not they are part of the platform.
Chris Doeblin, the owner of three Book Culture locations in New York, said he saw his sales plummet by half as Amazon grew in popularity in the late 1990s. "We've barely held on. It's been horrible," Doeblin said in a telephone interview. "Independent bookshops do wonderful things for a community -- they populate the storefronts, they offer a place to go."
Doeblin said the civic value of local stores has never been more evident than during the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced shops to close and emptied the streets. "People understand that more and value supporting us. They recognize the problem with having this incredible aggregation of sales through Amazon," the bookseller said.
The advent of Bookshop, then, offers small businesses a firmer foothold in virtual sales, helping them, in theory, stay afloat and compete with more established players. "We went from 1 to 5 percent of sales online to briefly it was 100 percent (at the height of the pandemic), and now it might be 20 percent online," said Doeblin of the upswing in online sales in 2020.
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More at the source.
A couple thoughts:
- If their bookstore payout is 30% and their first year they delivered $7.5M then their first *year* gross sales was $25M. That is a bit less than the $30M+ Kindle Unlimited pays its *authors* in one *month*.
- Their characterization of the US book market at $26B is off. That includes *every* book sold in the US including museum guides, textbooks, auto repair manuals, etc. The trade book business Amazon *dominates* at 60% is $15B which puts Amazon's share at $9B (vs B&N at $2B.) 2% of Amazon's business is $180M a year. A bit away from $25M. (Even more so if Amazon truly commanded 60% of the full $26B publishing world, which would be $15.6B or more than the entire trade book business.)
- Indie bookstores run around 5% of the trade business ($15B) or about $750M a year. Also quite a bit from $25M. Their $7.5M earnings would be 1% of their business. (Assuming all the sales through BOOKSTORE were new and not their regulars avoiding a drive.)
Those numbers they're so proud of...?
They don't add up. Either somebody slipped a decimal or somebody is unaware of the business they're trying to slip into.
If anything, this piece makes me even less sanguine about their prospects.
(I'm pretty sure the "socially conscious" book buyer is already spoken for by Powells, The Strand, and a few others.)