The Robin Hood of the Book Biz: How Andy Hunter's Bookshop.org Is Standing Up to Amazon.

“Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.” — Andy Hunter on Amazon Network effects transformed Amazon from a startup internet bookshop into today’s $2.44 trillion everything store. The more ubiquitous its affiliate program became, the more powerful Amazon became. But, in today’s digital economy, winner-take-all might not be winner-always-take-all. These network effects, you see, can be subverted. They might even be used as weapons against a seemingly dominant player like Amazon. Take, for example, Bookshop.org. Founded by Andy Hunter in 2020, this online bookstore has aggregated 3,000 independent bookstores, these affiliates contributing to a counter-Amazon network that already does 2% of Amazon’s book business and will, within the next thirty days, pass $50 million distributed to local bookstores. When Hunter originally pitched the idea to Silicon Valley investors, they asked him if he could beat Amazon on price or speed. No. Then you don’t have a chance, they told him, because Americans only care about price and speed. But they were wrong. Since Bookshop.org launched in 2020, American bookstores have grown from 1,900 to 3,300, with 90% of these independents joining Bookshop.org and 98% of booksellers polling the company as a positive force. His is a winner-share-all marketplace where stores keep the full profit of their own sales, while a $4.5 million annual profit pool flows to any real brick-and-mortar ABA bookstore. Nobody gets rich, Hunter says, but everybody does okay. Hunter suspects that if Bookshop.org grows to take 5% of Amazon’s book market, things might turn nasty. Could Amazon just buy Bookshop.org, I asked. No, Hunter responded, all his investors signed a clause barring a sale to any major US retailer. So even if I got hit by an Amazon delivery truck, he explained, his mission couldn’t be undone. So is Amazon evil? Not exactly evil, he explains, since evil requires malignant intent. But Amazon is more like fishermen who overfish until the stock collapses and wrecks their ecosystem beyond repair. That classic tragedy of the commons. Hence Bookshop.org’s anti-Prime campaigns, which used Amazon’s “discount” holiday as a way of generating an extra $1.2 million for its affiliate bookstores. Hunter wants to replace Amazon’s seemingly infinite scalability with a more moral kind of scale. He imagines a Bookshop.org for everything from hardware stores and art supplies to bikes and toys. Silicon Valley’s conventional winner-take-all economics would be replaced by a Robin Hood style winner-share-all model. Except for our tech bro friends, I suspect we would all be wealthier for it. Five Takeaways •       “Americans Only Care About Price and Speed.” That was the verdict of a 2019 conference call with twenty Silicon Valley angel investors: if Bookshop couldn’t beat Amazon on price or speed, it had no chance. Hunter’s counter-pitch: enough people care about their values when they shop — if supporting a local bookstore is made just as easy. His sharpest insight was the affiliate economy: by 2019 the internet had become one giant funnel pushing every reader toward Amazon, with the New York Times, NPR, BuzzFeed, and celebrity book clubs all earning Amazon kickbacks on their book coverage. Bookshop’s universal link gave them an alternative that pays local bookstores instead. Nine months of rejection later, he had cobbled together $750,000 — with the publisher Morgan Entrekin introducing five of the original seven investors.•       Winner-Share-All. Bookshop is a marketplace, like Etsy: over 3,000 bookstores plus affiliates from Literary Hub to The Atlantic to Dakota Johnson’s book club. Stores keep the full profit on their own sales; direct sales feed a profit pool — 33 percent of profits, about $4.5 million a year — shared with any real brick-and-mortar bookstore in the American Booksellers Association. Within thirty days, total distributions will pass $50 million. Hunter kept the raise tiny and refused venture capital to protect the mission: a $10 million check would have demanded a 10x return and a sale, and Bookshop’s shareholder agreement bars any sale to Amazon, Walmart, or Target. The company runs on a 12.5 percent expense ratio and twelve engineers. Nobody gets rich; everybody does okay.•       The Comeback Numbers. Amazon put over half of America’s bookstores out of business in two decades. Since Bookshop launched in 2020, the country has gone from 1,900 bookstores to 3,300 — seventy percent growth — and 73 percent of member stores grew in 2025. The rising tide lifts all boats: Bookshop grew 55 percent last year while stores’ own websites grew 25 percent. Ninety percent of American independents have joined, and a poll of 3,000 booksellers found 98 percent view the company positively. Meanwhile Amazon’s share of the book market is flat for the first time in twenty-three years. Bookshop has taken about 2 percent of Amazon’s book customers — small enough to be useful anti-monopoly evidence, Hunter jokes, but a social movement in the making.•       Not Evil — Worse? Hunter refuses the word “evil”: evil requires malignant intent, and Amazon’s managers are merely told to grow profits every quarter. The better analogy is overfishing — blind growth that destroys the ecosystem beyond repair. But the stakes are not merely commercial: bookstores bring authors to communities, raise new generations of readers, and — as the arrest of five Hong Kong booksellers reminds us — stand as the vanguard of free expression. No single company, good or evil, should control a market so essential to human consciousness. As for Bezos, once so interested in climate change: now it’s rockets and data centers. “Evil is reductive. But the impact of the business is evil, even if the intent isn’t.”•       The AI Flood. Did OpenAI and Anthropic steal from authors? “They were,” Hunter says — a conscious choice that stealing was faster than dealing, and now they’re paying up because they got caught, in a race to be first that cuts regulatory, legal, and ethical corners. Meanwhile three times as many books are being added to Amazon each year than before AI — overwhelmingly scam books generated from search trends, uncopyedited, designed to defraud buyers rather than inform them. Bookshop tells its suppliers to keep AI books off the site entirely, with a tiny asterisk for serious poets making artistic investigations of AI. Hunter’s standard is simple: these aren’t books, they’re scams — and no retailer who cares about customers should sell them. Including Amazon. About the Guest Andy Hunter is the founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports local independent bookstores, launched in January 2020 and named by Time one of the year’s most influential social-good companies. A longtime literary publisher and entrepreneur, he previously co-founded Electric Literature and Literary Hub. He lives in Brooklyn. References: •       Bookshop.org — the marketplace itself: shop any of 3,000+ independent bookstores, or let your purchase feed the profit pool.•  &nbsp...