[greenie_beans]

cool, looks nice and easy to use. def gonna try out.

but, this doesn't support indie bookstores if it's using a bookshop, unless it's the affiliate link for a specific bookstore. instead, it's likely an affiliate link for the creator of booqsi. if you're trying to let consumers support indie bookstores, then linking to indiebound with the isbn in the url will let them choose a local bookstore, and not booqsi's affiliate bookshop. example: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781612194196

sorry, but as a former indie bookseller, i get bothered by these tech apps who link to their affiliate bookshop and try to sell themselves as helping out indie bookstores. they're not.

edit: might be a cool feature for a user to choose their preferred indie to link to. if you did that, you could probably market it to the bookstores and they might want to use it too.

[criddell]

When you were a bookseller, why didn’t you use bookshop.org? Is there some problem with it?

All of the independent book stores that I know about around me are on there.

[greenie_beans]

I don't have a problem with a brick and mortar indie sharing a bookshop link to their own shop, because they get a cut from that transaction. I don't like it when a bookish SaaS app uses the bookshop affiliate thing and tries to market itself as a win for the independent stores, it seems a bit misleading to me.

And when I was a bookseller, bookshop didn't exist except for an idea. I stopped working for the store right before it launched. I actually learned to code from doing a frontend redesign of my store's online store, which was offered by indie commerce. If done right, indie commerce can be a better deal for a bookstore because the store gets the full cut and just pays indie commerce a monthly subscription (at least when I was there, i think i've seen news of them changing their model or at least raising their subscription price). With indiecommerce, the store acts as a distributor (mostly, when the book is in stock at the store). Whereas bookshop doesn't use the bookstore's physical inventory, and instead ships directly from ingram (the monopolistic book distributor) and gives the bookstore a cut like an affiliate.

Bookshop is not a bad deal for a smaller store without a lot of resources or staff, but it doesn't always let an indie do what an indie does best: sell some of their unique physical inventory, like signed or rare or small press books that aren't distributed by ingram.