Do We Still Love Our Bookstores?
Image courtesy of Bookshop.org.
Since its humble beginnings operating from Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1994, Amazon has come to dominate the world of online shopping.
It has manipulated how people desire products and shop for them to the extent that it’s sometimes hard to recall what the retail landscape was like before its rise to power. It may also be tricky to remember that Amazon started life selling books online, the domain in which a new project, Bookshop.org, proposes to take back control. Begun during the Covid-19 lockdown, when pressures on the already struggling bookselling industry increased, this new site is designed to offer an alternative, socially conscious outlet for independent bookstores, authors and publishers.
In many cases, Amazon is the only option in the landscape of book buying, and can afford to pay commission on every book sale that online media companies direct their way. It means that most articles will link to Amazon and exclude independent bookstores. Such moves enabled its sales to grow by 46 per cent in the first half of 2017 (to £2.33bn) and it now accounts for more than half of all consumer book sales. It’s a dominance that has not gone unnoticed, with the UK’s Competition & Markets Authority even proposing new regulations so smaller companies stand a chance against companies judged to have “entrenched market power”.
Books may seem an odd place to have started for a company as emblematic of future modes of consumption as Amazon, but since the beginning they seem to have been an important guide for Bezos. The company started after Bezos took an American Booksellers Association course where, he revealed in a 1997 video interview, he observed that no one person or bookshop could own all books (i.e., all knowledge), yet warehouses linked together by a website could “build a store online that couldn’t exist any other way.” Books are just another commodity for Amazon, but they’re also a mission statement and a concept model for its monopolising aspirations. Is it possible to offer another option with such a vast reordering of how books are bought and consumed? Or, due to Amazon’s near complete ubiquity, does attempting to compete result in the same problems in different guises?
When first alighting on the Bookshop.org web page, I was curious. For a platform trying to be different, it shares Amazon’s anachronistic full-width page layout (an endangered species in current websites). And both pages have odd colour palettes: one similar to pharmaceutical companies attempting to look benevolent, the other, something you might see in a used car dealership. But that’s where the similarities end for now. Amazon’s homepage has a wide highlighted search bar heading the page, whereas on Bookshop.org this function is placed within a crescent of book covers that place the emphasis on browsing rather than searching for what you already know you want. Bookshop.org’s search bar is very literal in comparison to Amazon’s personalised and context-aware features. Search “happiness” and you will get books with that keyword in the title, or, you have the option to switch search criteria and look for bookshops with the phrase in their name instead.
Rather than using this function, it’s better to keep on scrolling down
the page. Next you will be met with one of the keys aspects of the enterprise: a full-width banner showing how much the website has currently raised for local bookshops (£782,585.46 at the time of writing). Affiliates of the site – be they authors, publishers, influencers or reviewers – are assured that when they link to Bookshop.org, authors will make 10 per cent of every purchase made through the site, which is then matched by an additional 10 per cent that will go to independent bookshops semiannually. Of the rest of the revenue on a sale, Andy Hunter, the website’s founder, says that the publisher gets about 50 per cent, Bookshop.org gets 5 to 10 percent to cover costs, and the rest goes toward processing and shipping the book. In the UK, Gardners, the country’s largest wholesaler, will fulfil all orders and provide two- or three-day shipping, customer service, and a competitive return policy. It’s a similar structure to Amazon, where sellers are linked through a building in the middle of nowhere. It has already led one bookseller, speaking to Ellen Peirson-Hagger of The New Statesman, to claim that Bookshop. org is “just another big warehouse” .
Much of the more sensationalist press around Bookshop.org has taken the angle that the website plans to compete with Amazon, but really it aims to get money into the hands of the right people in a way that the latter rarely does. As recently as January 2021, Amazon had to remove hundreds of Durham University students’ PhD theses after they were listed for sale without the authors’ knowledge. It regularly uses shady third-party sellers obfuscated through the convoluted design of its notorious “Buy Box” – sometimes not even the publishers know where Amazon is acquiring its books from, as Penguin Random House’s investigations revealed in 2017. This means that publishers may not be getting paid, and, by extension, neither is the author. While Bookshop.org seems more transparent and remunerative in comparison, some booksellers have said that they find its financial structure incredibly complex and do not fully understand how it works – it is seen, Peirson-Hagger summarises, as being “not at all transparent”.
Scrolling still further down, the main space of the website comes into view. Hunter has said that Bookshop.org wants to utilise readers’ “fondness for their local booksellers”, and the website design does mimic the experience of walking into a physical bookstore. Publishers, independent presses and authors who sign up to be part of the website’s affiliates network are able to curate
their own selection of books in horizontal displays of covers you can scroll through and click on for more information, much like table and window displays in IRL bookshops. Combining the idiosyncrasies of actual humans rather than algorithms, this includes, at the time of writing, recommended reading from the author Elena Ferrante; Barack Obama’s favourite reads of 2020, compiled by Reading Roots Bookshop in Wetherby; a “sapphic selection” from The Bookish Type in Leeds; and many more thematic groupings in continual flux. The feed they create in the centre of the page – a procession, like walking between shelves – captures the random collisions and constellations of words and images that can often lead to unexpected discoveries in real-life bookshops. It may be a subtle effect as it stands, but could easily be intensified with something along the lines of Google’s I’m Feeling Lucky function.
Though it may sound a bit chaotic – in the way creative processes always are – it has none of Amazon’s visual distractions that lead to impulse buying and the concealment of supply chains (‘Frequently bought together’ and ‘Books you may like’ carousels, for instance). The simple and homemade design of the Bookshop.org website means that it is always clear where you are and who you are buying from; it’s easy as well to learn more about each affiliate and their ethos from witty profile pages. Daisy Buchanan of the You’re Booked podcast, for instance, promises to ask your favourite writers about “the first forbidden books they read under the covers” and is currently displaying those chosen by Dawn French.
On the surface, capturing the quirks of real-life browsing is a positive move in the sterile world of the internet. Amazon may appear to give the potential for access to “all books” and infinite variety but conversely, it actually promotes – similar to Netflix and other online services – a global monoculture where everyone consumes similar content. Amazon’s A9 algorithm puts most emphasis on books that can be easily classified using simplistic keywords, and is more interested in words that have given high sales in the past. A cumulative effect ensues, whereby products that
are more highly ranked are more likely to receive more traffic and thus have a better chance of achieving high sales. In turn, this boosts their ranking, and so on, until there are a relatively small number of books getting any spotlight. Amazon cultivates an echo chamber of sameness, which seems curious considering that many of its subsidiary products are named echo. Echo Connect, Echo Spot, Echo Look, Echo Plus, Echo Dot – the list goes on. Bookshop.org cuts through this and allows for chance encounters, potentially with writers you have never heard of. Or does it? All buying platforms have their biases, and if it’s not the algorithm (many profiles on the site boast of “life without algorithms”) then it’s biases inherent in the literary canon. As Jorge Carrion, the author of Against Amazon and Other Essays points out, many of the most well-known independent bookshops stock a remarkably similar catalogue of titles, “with each list copying another”. The algorithm has always been there, albeit in a different form.
However, Bookshop.org’s proximity to actual shops has left some booksellers concerned. They claim that the website wants to turn them into a monoculture, by encouraging the use of the same platform which makes uniform their unique differences. Speaking to Peirson-Hagger, Blackwell’s digital director Kieron Smith argued that Bookshop.org “removes the agency” of independents. And with bookshops making 13-20 per cent less than if the customer had bought the same books at the same cover price directly from
a shop, they fear the site, rather than competing with Amazon, is diverting shoppers away from the high street. While Nicole Vanderbilt, UK MD of Bookshop.org, has rebuffed these claims, they could also respond in the site’s design. It’s good to have the total amount raised for local bookstores emblazoned across every page, but it would be even more beneficial to show how much individual shops make and how much more they would profit if you visited in person or bought your books direct – putting emphasis away from buying online. In tandem it would make the complex financial structure of the site more accountable.
When the browsing has finished, then comes the checkout, which is a more familiar affair. While the serenity of the Bookshop.org website is refreshing, providing only the bare essentials for buying a book (price, format, add to basket, add to wishlist, and sometimes blurbs from other writers), it can feel a little static and quiet. Here, perhaps, there are a few tricks it can learn from Amazon, which creates the noise of the marketplace by having designed
a website that seems to be constantly evolving. A sense of scarcity is cultivated by telling you how many copies of a particular book they have in stock, adding urgency with the ‘Buy Now’ button to reinforce the fact that offers change daily, incentivising repeat visits. And, vitally, the book rating sits below the product name to guarantee its visibility and to highlight what UX designers call “social proof” to validate the purchase quality and mitigate buying anxiety. “Do I need this book?” Yes! Everyone else does.
Dialogue surrounding books – reviews, conversations and eloquent shelf talkers – is currently absent from the Bookshop.org website and it would do well, for example, to integrate some of the conversation from Twitter and other social media. Although these platforms have their own problems, independent publishers rely heavily on Twitter for publicity in the absence of large PR budgets. This is not to say Bookshop.org should attempt to copy Amazon, but if it wants a piece of the pie it could explore its own parallels. Other independent publishers and bookshops already do: the Sternberg Press website is particularly good in this respect, and has images of its latest releases activated and overlaid with a changing ticker tape displaying current announcements, as well as a vertical feed of videos from their most recent discussion events. It feels like a three-dimensional experience that you can almost touch.
The tactility of books is now perhaps even more important to shoppers: just look at the rise of #bookporn since 2010. The sad, flattened views of covers offered by the Bookshop.org website don’t even hint at this experience. Furthermore, such an image-led homepage runs the risk of alienating users who are unaccustomed to following visual cues on websites and don’t always realise they represent live links. Four Corners Books has a more contemporary-feeling website in comparison, using both text and image-based navigational cues. It also includes books photographed in a way that values them as design objects, detailing binding types, coatings and
the texture of paper – the only thing missing is the smell. The fetishisation of books as something approaching miniature sculptures or ornamentsis becoming increasingly important in publishing, with more elaborate hardback designs released each year. It could be that people want something indelibly physical in contrast to all that is digital and amorphous.
Though they share similar traits, Bookshop.org – if we return again
to its early press releases – was not started to compete with or replicate your local bookshop. It bills itself as a platform which supports them financially, to ensure that going to them IRL will be possible for many years to come. Yet these intentions become confused in the details, falling into similar traps as Amazon, though
to a lesser degree. And these issues become even more present when expressed through the site’s design, where it could be more transparent and even learn important lessons from the rival juggernaut. Bookshop.org has shown progress in getting more money to those in publishing who need it, and regardless of how people in the industry perceive this, they have still made a successful contribution to discourse. It has made clear, if it wasn’t already, that Amazon’s business model is toxic for the industry. But knowing this, how do we explain why we keep going back for more from Amazon?
Relatively speaking, Amazon hasn’t been around for that long, but already the site’s outdated design has nostalgia value, concurrent with the early and innocent days of the internet and its pained chorus of dial-up modems. It’s easy and cheap, and we keep going back in secret, or simply without thinking, just like we might go to McDonald’s for comforting junk food. Maybe it only appears that people still love their local bookshop, because it’s cool to walk through your neighbourhood with their name on a tote bag, or to post a picture of your new purchase – that you won’t have time to read – with their retro awning in the background. Maybe we like how they can express the fantasy version of ourselves, rather than being the place we spend our money. The bulk of our purchasing, our Amazon orders, don’t fit our vibe and will not be broadcast, just like your last Big Mac won’t be seen on your Instagram. Maybe Amazon is what we want whether we like it or not. Bookshop.org may simply be an expression of how we like the idea of independents, rather than actually buying from them.
Words Matthew Turner
This article was originally published in Disegno #28. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.
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