Hey! Now we have ebooks!
Bookshop.org and Ebooks
Bookshop.org is a partner to the American Booksellers Association that fills in the gap that small bookstore have in internet sales when they try to compete with the big book platforms (Amazon, Barnes and Noble). Most people in Emporia just come in and order their books from us, but some people at a distance order books through our bookshop.org site. They select us as their bookstore and then a decent share of the profit on the book goes into our account. Bookshop.org handle sales tax and shipping. It’s not a bad arrangement.
The bigger thing they do for us (that we can’t do for ourselves) is that they also allow us to sell ebooks. There are good reasons to use ebooks. You can carry a complete library in your pocket. You can scale the text (or even install a reader) if you are vision impaired. The books don’t take up as much space. Reading at night means you frequently don’t need a book light. However, there is a downside.
Everybody knows the ebook market is a racket controlled by Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Google. They own the platforms. They own the file formats. They own the means of distribution. . . and they usually require that every ebook has Digital Rights Management (DRM) that ensures that they control any book (or other media) that you ever buy from them and that it will only play on their proprietary platform. Also, if you ever choose to leave their platform you lose all the books that you paid for. (It is sort of disgusting that they hold your books hostage and can change the terms and conditions of use without notice or consent).
While it would be great if the Bookshop.org app was DRM-Free (like Libro.fm), it can’t be. Since the big players control the devices (apple vs. google) the device requires the ebook be either an Android DRM or an Apple DRM. This is the same reason that you can’t buy the book directly from the Bookshop.org app on an android phone, but have to purchase through a computer on the bookshop.org site. Google takes 30% of the sale (when the margin is 20%). Apple is a bit better, allowing you to initiate the sale on the app, but then finalize it on the computer. Hopefully, someday reason and fair play may triumph over the present monopolies, but in the meantime this is the best we can do. Bookshop lets us sell you an ebook. We don’t make a lot, but Amazon, Google and Apple get less than they usually do. Check out Bookshop.org and see what you think!
