Thanks to a new Bookshop.org app, supporting independent booksellers has never been so easy
You Can Now Buy E-Books That Support Local Bookstores—Here’s How
Published on Jan. 30, 2025
Please tell me I’m not the only one who still considers You’ve Got Mail both a romantic comedy classic and a melancholic cautionary tale. Sure, it’s lovely that Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan finally share a kiss in the last scene. But hello? His fancy new chain bookstore still put her delightful family-owned spot out of business (in my Upper West Side neighborhood, no less!). The message is not exactly in fine print: We must support indie booksellers!
Enter Bookshop.org. In the five years since it launched, the online retailer has garnered a devoted following because it shares its sales revenue with independent bookstores around the United States. In the process, it’s become a popular destination for customers who want to read some of the best books ever written—and support their local bookstore in the process. But until now, e-book readers were out of luck.
That’s about to change. Bookshop.org is now enabling local bookstores to sell e-books through its marketplace. The company has launched an e-book platform, complete with an app for shopping, purchasing and reading digital offerings. Think of it as a more convenient way to both read more books and avoid giving your money to the retail giant working hard to put bookstores out of business. Keep scrolling for the details.
Join the free Reader’s Digest Book Club for great reads, monthly discussions, author Q&As and a community of book lovers.
Wait, can you really buy e-books on Bookshop.org?
Yup! The new platform gives readers—who previously had no way to buy e-books locally—the ability to purchase and download e-books from their favorite bookstores through the Bookshop.org website or app.
The diverse catalog covers more than 3 million e-books, including works from all your favorite authors. There’s something for every type of reader in pretty much any book genre. Horror novels? Romance reads? Fantasy escapes? They’re all here for the taking.
Why should you buy e-books from Bookshop.org?
If you value the ways booksellers support readers, your favorite authors and the local community, you’ll want to rely on Bookshop.org whenever you can’t shop in person. Each purchase there makes a difference to community bookstores.
For starters, you can browse e-books and then choose which bookstore to support with your purchase. In that case, the shop you’ve selected gets 100% of the profit from the sale. But even if you don’t specify a store, Bookshop.org will put a chunk of the sale price into a profit-sharing pool that’s distributed among independent stores.
Think of shopping on Bookshop.org as your way of sticking it to the man. And in this case, the man is the behemoth that is Amazon.
How do you read e-books purchased on Bookshop.org?
First, download the Bookshop.org app (either in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store) and create an account. Add an e-book to your Wishlist—from a curated list on the app’s homepage, the explore page, any of the category pages or by finding a book through the in-app search—and then click “buy now” on your desired pick. Complete the checkout, and you’re good.
You can also purchase an e-book through Bookshop.org on a web browser, provided you have an existing account. Once an e-book is downloaded to your device, it will instantly be available to read offline.
A big, written-in-lights caveat: You can read your e-book purchase only via the Bookshop.org mobile app or its web browser. In other words, you can’t load the e-books onto your Amazon Kindle or any other e-reader device, including a Nook or Kobo. (It’s a proprietary thing.) Though it may be tough to transition, Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter has said readers will see the switch as a trade-off in keeping their local bookshops around.
Does this new e-book platform have any perks?
Sure! The Bookshop.org app offers plenty of features that help you find, read and share the books you love. You can keep a handy TBR list with the wish list tool, which you’ll find on the homepage, explore page and various genre category pages. And there’s even an endless scroll option that lets you read the book in a format similar to a web page. (Don’t worry, there’s also a standard book mode.)
You’ll get some standard functions too:
- Bookmark pages
- Adjust the type size and font
- Search the text
- Highlight and annotate passages
- Sync between devices.
As for a cool feature that sets the app apart, check out the quote function. When reading an e-book, you can select up to 300 characters of text, press the “Share” button in the pop-up menu to generate a quote link and then post that link to any social media platform that accepts regular web URLs. It’s a fun way to share your love of reading with your friends and family.
Plus, it’s worth repeating: Local bookstores receive 100% of the profits from each e-book sale. That’s as good of a reason as any to stock up on some new books!
Get Reader’s Digest’s Read Up newsletter for more books, humor, travel, tech and fun facts all week long.
Why trust us
At Reader’s Digest, we’ve been sharing our favorite books for over 100 years. We’ve worked with bestselling authors including Susan Orlean, Janet Evanovich and Alex Haley, whose Pulitzer Prize–winning Roots grew out of a project funded by and originally published in the magazine. Through Fiction Favorites (formerly Select Editions and Condensed Books), Reader’s Digest has been publishing anthologies of abridged novels for decades. We’ve worked with some of the biggest names in fiction, including James Patterson, Ruth Ware, Kristin Hannah and more. The Reader’s Digest Book Club, helmed by Books Editor Tracey Neithercott, introduces readers to even more of today’s best fiction by upcoming, bestselling and award-winning authors. For this piece, Mara Reinstein tapped her experience as an entertainment journalist to ensure that all information is accurate and offers the best possible advice to readers. Read more about our team, our contributors and our editorial policies.
Sources:
- Bookshop.org: “Read Ebooks”
- PR Newswire: “Bookshop.org Launches Revolutionary Ebook Platform to Support Local Bookstores”
- Bookshop.org: “How does Bookshop.org work with independent bookstores?”
