Bookshop.org raises £1m for UK s indie booksellers amid lockdown Alison Flood
Four months since it launched, Bookshop.org – billed as an alternative to Amazon – has generated £1m in profit for independent bookshops in the UK, the website announced on Monday.
Set up by Andy Hunter, the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Bookshop.org was launched in the US a year ago and in the UK in November. Pitching itself as a socially conscious way to buy books online, it allows booksellers to create a virtual shop front, receiving 30% of the cover price from each sale without having to handle customer service or shipping. When a sale is made and not attributed to a specific bookseller, 10% of the cover price goes into a pot that is split between all of the shops.
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January 8, 2021, 12:26pm
Here’s some surprising end-of-2020 good news: books are doing . . . well? According to NPD BookScan, unit sales of print books in the United States rose 8.2% in 2020. Units hit 750.9 million this year 57.2 million up from last year. This is fairly surprising, given the pandemic was expected to take a huge toll on sales; but online sales and sales through non-bookstore outlets offset the losses suffered by physical retailers.
And there’s even happier news from across the pond: the Booksellers Association announced that despite the pandemic, the number of independent bookstores in the UK and Ireland has grown for the fourth year in a row, rising from 890 shops in 2019 to 967 shops at the end of 2020. Said Meryl Halls, managing director of the Booksellers Association, “Thankfully, booksellers were able to adapt quickly to the new realities of 2020, pivoting their services online and finding new ways to reach their customers and continue operating.”