The Robin Hood of the Book Biz: How Andy Hunter's Bookshop.org Is Standing Up to Amazon.

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon

Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today’s $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today’s digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. These network effects, you see, can be subverted. They might even be used as weapons against a seemingly dominant player like Amazon.

Take, for example, Bookshop.org. Founded by Andy Hunter in 2020, this online bookstore has aggregated 3,000 independent bookstores, these affiliates contributing to a counter-Amazon network that already does 2% of Amazon’s book business and will, within the next thirty days, pass $50 million distributed to local bookstores.

When Hunter originally pitched the idea to Silicon Valley investors, they asked him if he could beat Amazon on price or speed. No. Then you don’t have a chance, they told him, because Americans only care about price and speed. But they were wrong. Since Bookshop.org launched in 2020, American bookstores have grown from 1,900 to 3,300, with 90% of these independents joining Bookshop.org and 98% of booksellers polling the company as a positive force. His is a winner-share-all marketplace where stores keep the full profit of their own sales, while a $4.5 million annual profit pool flows to any real brick-and-mortar ABA bookstore. Nobody gets rich, Hunter says, but everybody does okay.

Hunter suspects that if Bookshop.org grows to take 5% of Amazon’s book market, things might turn nasty. Could Amazon just buy Bookshop.org, I asked. No, Hunter responded, all his investors signed a clause barring a sale to any major US retailer. So even if I got hit by an Amazon delivery truck, he explained, his mission couldn’t be undone.

So is Amazon evil? Not exactly evil, he explains, since evil requires malignant intent. But Amazon is more like fishermen who overfish until the stock collapses and wrecks their ecosystem beyond repair. That classic tragedy of the commons. Hence Bookshop.org’s anti-Prime campaigns, which used Amazon’s “discount” holiday as a way of generating an extra $1.2 million for its affiliate bookstores.

Hunter wants to replace Amazon’s seemingly infinite scalability with a more moral kind of scale. He imagines a Bookshop.org for everything from hardware stores and art supplies to bikes and toys. Silicon Valley’s conventional winner-take-all economics would be replaced by a Robin Hood style winner-share-all model. Except for our tech bro friends, I suspect we would all be wealthier for it.

Five Takeaways

•       “Americans Only Care About Price and Speed.” That was the verdict of a 2019 conference call with twenty Silicon Valley angel investors: if Bookshop couldn’t beat Amazon on price or speed, it had no chance. Hunter’s counter-pitch: enough people care about their values when they shop — if supporting a local bookstore is made just as easy. His sharpest insight was the affiliate economy: by 2019 the internet had become one giant funnel pushing every reader toward Amazon, with the New York Times, NPR, BuzzFeed, and celebrity book clubs all earning Amazon kickbacks on their book coverage. Bookshop’s universal link gave them an alternative that pays local bookstores instead. Nine months of rejection later, he had cobbled together $750,000 — with the publisher Morgan Entrekin introducing five of the original seven investors.

•       Winner-Share-All. Bookshop is a marketplace, like Etsy: over 3,000 bookstores plus affiliates from Literary Hub to The Atlantic to Dakota Johnson’s book club. Stores keep the full profit on their own s