Local Bookstores Have A New Weapon In The Fight With Amazon

Local Bookstores Have A New Weapon In The Fight With Amazon

In the book industry, Amazon is Goliath, the giant who overshadows everyone else. But there’s a new David on the scene, Bookshop.org.

It doesn’t expect to topple the giant, but it has launched a weapon that could make Amazon’s shadow a little smaller, and help local bookstores fight back.

Bookshop.org, a website that went live at the end of January and is still in beta mode, is designed to be an alternative to Amazon, and to generate income for independent bookstores. And, perhaps more importantly, it seeks to give book reviewers, bloggers and publications who rely on affiliate income from “Buy now” links to Amazon a different option.

Profit from books sold through Bookshop will be split three ways, with 10% of the sale price going into a pool that will be divided among participating bookstores, 10% going to the publication that triggered the sale by linking to Bookshop.org, and 10% going to Bookshop.org to support its operations.

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Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say ‘I don’t know.’ It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It’s quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.

Hans Rosling’s Factfulness

Oh, FRICK.

You’re absolutely right. The resonance between LOTR and WWI gets even more incredible when you think about the central theme of power, and the terrible willingness to fight for its sake instead of to protect those you love.

It makes sense that someone who fought in a war which was HEAVILY CENSURED for its pointlessness, the bizarre happenstance of its beginning with the assassination of a single archduke, and the way it seemed so many countries got dragged in bc of old treaties and posturing, rather than to any noble end, would write this. LOTR responds to those arguments and agrees. It shows how people prolong wars for the sake of selfish ends, how long-past agreements (like the ringwraiths accepting the rings) can bind you to a terrible end. It celebrates, above all, PEACE, and the good things in the world that are worth fighting for—and worth ending the fighting for.

And I’m still reeling over the Gollum comparison. FRICK.

it’s just hard not to think about the fact that in 1915, JRR Tolkien went to war not with but certainly in the same army and many of the same battles as his 3 best school friends, all nicely upper class young men who had never known much loss, and only he and one other came back alive - and a couple decades later, he wrote a book in which 3 nicely upper class young men (and one very excellent gardener) who have never known much loss go to war together, or at least they start out together, and they all come home alive. (Though one cannot bear it, and does not stay.)

Questioner: What are we going to do when you retire?

Brandon Sanderson: Retire? RETIRE?! I would NEVER! 

Brandon Sanderson: I will stop writing when they find me dead in my office and my face is on the keyboard and I type the word “k” seven thousand times.

(source)

Susan was bright enough to know that the phrase “Someone ought to do something” was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider “and that someone is me.”

But someone ought to do something, and right now the whole pool of someones consisted of her, and no one else.

Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather

“Deal with me in weakness. Or one day you’ll have to bargain with someone in a position of strength. The world changes.”

-Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods