Bookshop.org, the benevolent alternative to Amazon for online purchases, entered the E-book game. The company announced today the launch of its own e-bookstore Along with reading app for Android, iOS, and the site.
For those who do not know, Bookshop.org launched in 2020 as a place for local mom and folk stores to easily sell paper pockets online. The site allows users to choose their local store, which can offer their own recommendations and lists via a bookstore. When a user orders a book on bookshop.org, their local bookstore gets the benefit. The company says it has earned $ 35 million so far for local bookstores.
Bookstore.org told The verge This launch of E-books was essential for bookstores to support the times. The new digital store launches with about one million titles, and the deal with local bookstores will remain the same – they will get about 30 percent of the list price when a book is sold by its store. When a customer in Bookshop.org did not choose a specific bookstore to support, the company distributes the profit through all its stores and keeps a small cut for itself. The company hopes that a particular sales point will convince people to choose their shop over Amazon.
Although physical books have remained stubbornly more popular than e-books, studies found that e-books readers tend to read more average.
Andy Hunter, general manager of a bookstore. The Kindle of the company is synonymous with E-books, accounting for 75% of the market-most people who want E-books, simply buy Kindle and where the books actually come from is secondary. Amazon recently released new versions of the Kindle, including one with a color screen for the first time. Other companies have created color web readers before, but have no chance against Amazon.
This domain is problematic for two reasons: similar to Apple’s iPhone, the Kindle only allows users to buy e-books from Amazon’s store and read them in Kindle, and Amazon has deals with publishers that books in the Kindle store Must be comparable to versions sold elsewhere. These two points choke competition from alternative stores and devices, making it difficult to support a model like Bookshop.org. If you own Kindle, you buy from Amazon’s store. Alternative E-readers cannot offer a better price to books or any charitable content, so they don’t have much to attract people away from the Kindle.
To add insult to injury, Hunter told Gizmodo that as Apple takes a 30% cut in in-app purchases, Bookshop.org cannot sell e-books through its iOS reading app. Users have to buy books through its website and then open them in the app.
Hunter hopes that the first step to loosen Amazon’s control is to ask it to allow books.org books on the Kindle so that readers will at least support local. If it says no, he hopes lawyers will come in and try to force their hand with legal activity. When consumers buy a piece of hardware like Kindle, he argues, they should be able to charge whatever they choose on it.
Anyone who has followed anti -trim cases in the United States knows that they are moving incredibly slowly. Almost all tech giants are fighting such cases of years with little practical change. iPhone owners in the United States still cannot download an alternative App Store, for example, although it is now the law of the land in Europe.
Hunter says he hopes his company will finally be able to create its own web reader, where people can read E-books from the bookstore shop, but it won’t come soon. That will probably make the company’s digital store difficult. The vast majority of e-book readers who are in Amazon’s ecosystem are effectively closed from a bookstore.
Another possible way forward here could make e-books transferable so that people in the Amazon ecosystem can freely leave with their collections, but that is not likely to happen soon. Currently, at least, Bookshop.org hopes that supporting local bookstores will be enough to convince people to shop from their store despite the limitations.