When e-commerce website Bookshop.org launched in January 2020, its goal was to take share from Amazon and deliver some of its profits to local bookstores. According to The Nation, the House Judiciary Committee found in 2020 that Amazon controlled more than 50% of the print book market and more than 80% of the e-book market. Many bookstores at the time had no e-commerce presence.“I understood the importance of independent bookstores to the entire market, where I would liken them to coral reefs in the ocean,” said Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter. “They might not be more than 10-15% of book sales, but they’re where so many communities interact with authors, they’re working with their local school systems, they’re working with their local businesses — they’ve got this huge, outsized impact that is way beyond the portion of sales they have.”
Amazon doesn’t publicly share its book sales figures. However, in 2024, Business Insider reported, based on leaked documents, that Amazon made $16.9 billion in gross merchandise sales from the books category in the first 10 months of 2022. That included e-books and audiobooks.
Hunter and his team raised only $750,000 of their $1.2 million goal at launch, providing only enough runway to survive about eight months. But Hunter saw it as important to take the risk, fight Amazon and get ahead of consumer habits. Two months after Bookshop.org launched, the pandemic hit, and bookstores couldn’t serve their customers at all, so it was a massive tailwind for the company. But this was just the start of a long journey for the platform, which eventually had to find its footing again once the pandemic subsided.
