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Today is Independent Bookstore Day – a time set aside to celebrate and support our indie bookshops. These bookstores are not only a beautiful piece in our communities but also bring so much love to readers of all ages. They individually hand-select each book they sell and pour their souls into their shops.
We headed to a local indie shop in CT and found the shelves stocked with new and backlist books and the store was packed with readers!
We were going to just buy one book each but ended up with three books each- whoops!
If you don’t have an Independent bookstore close to you or you are more comfortable shopping online – the best solution is book shopping through Bookstore.org.
Bookshop.org began as an idea to help support bookstores and their communities at a time when more and more people were buying their books online. We saw an opportunity to create an alternative to Amazon for socially-conscious online shoppers. Amazon sells over 60% of all books in the US and is growing. That shift threatens the future of bookstores and will hurt readers, authors, and publishers who rely on a diverse, healthy ecosystem for books.
We had a better idea — give readers the convenience of online shopping while supporting independent bookstores at the same time.
We launched in January of 2020, with just 88 bookstore partners and a team of four passionate book people.
As the COVID-19 pandemic surged, our growing platform helped our community of independent booksellers survive shutdowns. That spring, traffic to Bookshop.org hit 1 million users in a single day. By the end of 2020 we had grown to over 1,000 bookstores, raised over ten million dollars for our profit-sharing pool, and 78% of our customers said they regularly bought books from Amazon before they made the switch.
How it works: We ship your books from our wholesaler’s warehouse directly to you, handle the customer service and overhead, and the bookstores get the profit. Bookshop.org partners with over 1,400 independent bookstores. If you want to locate a specific bookstore to support, find them on our map and they’ll receive the full profit from your order. Otherwise, your order will contribute to an earnings pool that is evenly distributed among independent bookstores.
You can visit Bookshop.org and search for a book you would like or you can also visit my page on the site where I list the books I have read over the last 3 years.
There is something very magical about an indie bookstore. Whether you visit in person or shop online at Bookstore.org you are helping to strengthen your community through the education, resources and great knowledge our bookshop booksellers possess.
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