Sometimes David can beat Goliath or otherwise try: that’s what he is playing Andy Hunter, a hybrid figure between startupper and thinker contemporary, today a reference in publishing declined through digital.
The international press called him “the savior of small American neighborhood bookstores”, compared to Amazon’s relentless advance: in early 2020, a few weeks before the pandemic emergency came out, set up Bookshop.org, online sales platform for books in direct competition with the Bezos giant. Goal: to help bookstores cut down by Amazon dominance, lockdowns and restrictions. A few days ago his platform won the World Changing Ideas Awards 2021 promoted by Fast Company.
In the first three months of 2020, in conjunction with the launch, managed to aggregate 560 libraries, eroding a shy but significant 1-2% market share to Amazon. The affiliation mechanism is simple: if a bookshop enters the Bookshop.org network (membership is free) it can create a page on the portal in which to display the books, dividing them by lists, themes, genre, author.
the background
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How participating bookstores earn
But there is more: the booksellers of the community can enrich any text with reading tips and readers can buy on that particular page or directly on the Bookshop.org homepage. In the first case, the bookseller earns 30% of the cover price e nothing goes to bookshop.org; in the second case, Bookshop.org earns, but for each sale 10% is set aside, which goes to feed a fund redistributed every 6 months to all participating bookstores.
In just a few months, the fund generated $ 11.5 million for independent bookstores: “I love bookstores and I have dedicated my life to books. I know that if Amazon continues to grow, it will be impossible for many of them to survive. A year and a half. half ago I thought that the urgency was due to a response to Amazon. Now looking back it almost seems to me that everything has been guided by fate, because if we had not pushed ourselves in that way we would not have launched in time for the pandemic “, Hunter told Fast Company.
Today the project has conquered 5% of the American market, arriving in November 2020 in England, and it has been described by the Guardian as “revolutionary for the story of book sales. “Not just digital purchases for connected audiences, because with the end of the emergency, Hunter expects even bookstores to return:” We are not worried about losing business due to people returning to shop face-to-face, but I think there is still room for an e-commerce of books like ours, “said Hunter.
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Work as an infinite game
The story tells how the best ideas come from team play and are destined to make a difference even in highly complex sectors such as publishing. Ethnographer Simone Sinek, who wrote the best-seller, is also convinced of this The Infinitive Game: “In business we talk about competitors, but in the infinite game I am talking about, the real competitor is not represented by others, but by themselves. The others become the term of comparison to look for in order to improve”, explained on Forbes, suggesting a rethinking of the way of doing business.
It is the time of alliances, as James Bamford, Gerard Baynham and David Ernst have pointed out on the pages of the Harvard Business Review, suggesting that we no longer need silos, but integrated ecosystems: “Companies will need all the tools they have to survive the recession and relaunch their activities, they will have to recalibrate operations, reallocate resources and in some cases reinvent business models completely – wrote Bamford, Baynham and Ernst – This is why partnerships will play a role in many realities increasingly strategic especially for two elements: on the one hand, the need for cost sharing; on the other hand, the positioning modality for growth, once the emergency phase is over “.
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