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

**Andrew Keen** (0:00)
Hello, my name is Andrew Keen. Welcome to Keen On America, the daily interview show about the United States.
Hello, everybody. It's Friday, July the 31st, 2026 Some things never seem to change. Yesterday, Amazon announced their quarterly numbers, their shares jump as they always seem to, as their cloud sales accelerate, at least according to the Wall Street Journal. And a lot of this is bound up with their associations with Anthropic and investment in AI. They're now, I think, a more than $2 trillion company, $2.44 trillion yesterday's valuation. And they seem unstoppable, but perhaps not quite as unstoppable as Jeff Bezos and his friends might like. There is a small little company, a feisty little company called bookshop.org, which was founded back in 2020 by my guest today, Andy Hunter, that is perhaps offers a path to stand up to a giant like Amazon. Andy is joining us today from Brooklyn. Andy, congratulations on bookshop.org. Are you the anti-Amazon model?

**Andy Hunter** (1:39)
I'd say yes when it comes to book sales. I will say that all those headlines didn't have anything to do with book sales, which is speaking to the change that has gone on in Amazon over the past 20 years. Amazon has gone from being primarily a bookseller, to being a retailer of everything, to being a cloud services provider.
Amazon's changed a lot. We are the anti-Amazon when it comes to book sales, because we're helping local independent bookstores survive and thrive. Amazon almost eradicated them. Amazon put over half of the bookstores in this country out of business over the past 20 years and so we're helping them stage a comeback.

**Andrew Keen** (2:29)
You're not only a remarkable story, but you're a good story. Last year, time made you, or earlier this year, time made you one of the 10 most influential social good companies of the year.
You're not only making a profit in the sale of books, but you're also distributing some of that profit to independent bookstores. What are we missing, Andy? Are you too good to be true?

**Andy Hunter** (2:55)
I think we're trying our best to be as good as we can be. We started Bookshop because we're book lovers, and we understand the importance of independent bookstores to a dynamic vibrant ecosystem for books. Independent bookstores, we can't afford to have them go away.
Amazon was very rapidly making it impossible to be an independent bookstore, but also online shopping was also making it very hard to be independent bookstore. So we wanted to take on Amazon and get independent bookstores to be better at selling books online and help them embrace the future.
It's really working. It's working great. Too good to be true. We're a bunch of passionate people and our investors are passionate too about books and the importance of literature and the importance of bookstores in our community. So we're just doing it because it's what we love and care about. That keeps us about as good as you could hope.

**Andrew Keen** (4:10)
It's not as easy though. It always sounds easy once you've done it.
To prepare for this, I was looking at a video you put up on YouTube about the struggle just to raise three-quarters of a million dollars when you got bookstore.org going. Tell me the story Andy of how you founded this thing. Your background, as you say, is in literature. I've known you a while. You've been involved with LitHub, Electric Lit. You are a book man through and through. How did you get the bookshop.org idea and how did it come about? How did you raise the money?

**Andy Hunter** (4:49)
Yeah. Well, the truth is in 2011, I was watching Amazon Grow and I thought we should have an independent non-profit version of this thing to support books and support book culture. I spoke to a bunch of charitable foundations to try to get them to back the idea and it went absolutely nowhere. My very first idea for it was in 2011 because I wanted to have a non-profit online bookstore that could support independence.
After that died, I forgot about it for a long time, but Amazon was growing 6-8 percent every year.
Amazon ended up at about 50 percent of the book market. By the time, I revisited the idea. It really happened because I was having dinner at a conference called Winter Institute which is like the big bookseller conference where all the booksellers from all over the country get together. I sat next to Christina Arati, who was on the board of the American Bookseller Association, and she owns Word Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I shop for books with my kids.