He believes publications and writers will welcome the opportunity to link to an online site that supports independent bookstores. “Even if they like Amazon, they don’t necessarily want Amazon to put all of the bookstores out of business,” he said.
“And I think that’s true of the major publishers, too,” he said. “There are publishers who feel that Amazon is a good partner. But everybody understands that if the only partner is Amazon, if Amazon completely dominates the market, that it’s not going to be healthy for anyone.”
Hunter said he’s been warned that American consumers care about one thing—price—and that Bookshop.org can never beat Amazon on price. He doesn’t buy that. He believes there is a growing population of consumers who care more about supporting local businesses than price. “From buying organic to choosing clean energy, it’s all part of a general consumer enlightenment that is occurring now and Bookshop is part of that,” he said.
I don’t know; I remember in the early days of blogging that linking to Powell’s instead of Amazon was the way you signaled your status as a socially-conscious reader, and I don’t think that revolutionized anything. I fear that “buying from Bookshop.org” will just become yet another progressive merit badge, like listening to a Vox podcast while driving an electric vehicle to the farmer’s market to think global while supporting local organic screen-free clean-energy shelter-rescued recycled genderfluid blahblahblah. We’ll see, of course. I wish them well. I have no problem with alternatives to Amazon, but I wish there were more alternatives to the increasing dominance of the online literary sphere by progressive assumptions.