Inside the Australian and New Zealand book industry

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Bookshop.org to sell ebooks, publish first book

In the US, Bookshop.org will start selling ebooks by the end of the year, and is publishing its first print book in October, reports Publishers Weekly.

The ebook program will launch in beta late this year, enabling users to buy and read ebooks in their web browser, prior to the launch of an ereader app that is also being developed.

Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter said: ‘We want to give independent bookstores a way to sell ebooks and capture those sales that they are losing to Amazon.’

Speaking at the American Booksellers Association (ABA) Winter Institute in Seattle, Hunter told booksellers they had a ‘significant way to go in recapturing their rightful share of online sales that were long ago ceded to Amazon’.

‘I estimate that online sales for independent bookstores, including those that are on Bookshop.org, IndieBound, Shopify, and other platforms, amount to $100 million a year,’ Hunter said. “Amazon’s online sales account for about $4-$5 billion. If you consider that independent bookstores account for approximately 10% of the book market, then their fair share of online sales should be $500 million a year.’

Bookshop.org’s first book will be a hardcover print edition of a new short fiction collection by Lydia Davis, to be published in October. The book will have an initial print run of 10,000 and be available only through independent bookstores and Bookshop.org.

Davis told her agent, Denise Shannon, she didn’t want her new book to be sold on Amazon, and every publisher told Shannon it wasn’t possible for them to publish the book and not also sell it on Amazon. ‘Working with Ingram, Baker & Taylor, and other, we decided we could keep the book off Amazon, so we decided to publish the book,’ Hunter said.

Hunter said he is open to working with other authors. ‘They just have to be willing to opt out of potential sales from Amazon,’ Hunter said.

 

Category: International news