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

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Friday, July 31, 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 at 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?

00:01:41 Andy Hunter: I'd say yes when it comes to book sales. I will say that, like, all those headlines didn't have anything to do with book sales, which is kind of speaking to the change that has gone on in Amazon over the past twenty years. Amazon has gone from being primarily a bookseller to being a retailer of everything to being, a cloud services provider. So it's really, 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. And Amazon almost eradicated them. Amazon put over half of the bookstores in this country out of business over the past twenty years, and so we're helping them stage a comeback.

00:02:30 Andrew Keen: 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?

00:02:56 Andy Hunter: I think we're just— we're trying our best to be as good as we can be. You know, we started Bookshop because we're book lovers, and we understand the importance of independent bookstores to a dynamic vibrant ecosystem for books. And independent bookstores, we can't afford to have them go away. And Amazon was very rapidly making it impossible to be an independent bookstore, but also online shopping was also making it very hard to be an 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. And, you know, it's really working. It's working great. Like, 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 kind of just doing it because it's what we love and care about. And that keeps us about as good as you could hope.

00:04:11 Andrew Keen: Not as easy, though. It always sounds easy once you've done it. I— to prepare for this, I was looking at a video you put up, on YouTube about the struggle just to raise $750,000 when you got Bookshop.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 Lit Hub, Electric Lit. So you are a book man through and through. How did you get the bookstore— the Bookshop.org idea, and how did it come about? How'd you raise the money?

00:04:51 Andy Hunter: Yeah. Well, the truth is in 2011, I had— I was watching Amazon grow, and I thought we should have an independent nonprofit version of this thing to support, books and support book culture. And I spoke to a bunch of, charitable foundations to try to get them to back the idea, and it went absolutely nowhere. So my very first idea for it was in 2011 because I wanted to have a nonprofit online bookstore that could support independents. After that died, I forgot about it for a long time, but Amazon was growing six to eight percent every year. And so Amazon ended up at about 50% of the book market by the time I revisited the idea. And it really happened because I was having dinner at a conference called Winter Institute, which is like the big bookseller conference where all the bookstores from all over the country get together. And I sat next to Christine Onorati, who was, on the board of the American Booksellers Association, and she owns WORD Bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I, you know, shop for books with my kids. And she's like, you're good at the internet. You should help us try to figure out a better online solution and strategy than the one we've got now because it's not working. And that set me off on, like, reignited my passion for the idea. Then I worked out a plan for how Bookshop would work. I went to the American Booksellers Association. I pitched it to them, and they ended up eventually getting on board, but I still had to raise the money for it. And I spent, as you referred to, I spent, like, nine months knocking on doors, pitching everybody I knew in the book world, all the investors that some people could connect me to, the conference calls where I tried to talk a bunch of Silicon Valley angel investors into buying into the idea, and almost everybody said no. That conference call was, like, 20 Silicon Valley investors. The guy says, like, well, can you— can you beat Amazon on price or speed? And I said, no. Not usually. And he's like, well, then you don't have a chance because Americans only care about price and speed. So there was a lot of, criticism and,

00:07:18 Andrew Keen: So what was the pitch, though, if— if you couldn't compete on price and speed?

00:07:23 Andy Hunter: Pitch was there are people who care about, their values when they shop, and there are enough of them that we can get a significant percentage of Amazon shoppers to shop for books online in a way that supports local bookstores if we make it just as easy. Right now, it's too hard. You buy a book online and wanna support local bookstore, it should be just as easy. And part of the pitch also was about affiliate links. I don't wanna get too technical in, but Amazon had an affiliate program for decades where if you wrote about a book online and put a link to Amazon along with that book coverage, somebody goes through that link and buys the book, Amazon will give you a kickback of four and a half percent of that book sale. So a lot of publications and book bloggers and huge organizations too, celebrity book clubs, they all became Amazon affiliates, and they would just earn a little bit of extra money, or in some cases, a lot of extra money, from linking to Amazon when they covered books. And so in 2019, before Bookshop existed, I was dismayed to find the entire internet was like one giant funnel that pushes people who are reading about books to Amazon. I'm at the New York Times, and I read a book review, and I wanna get the book, now they link to Amazon. If I'm at NPR and I read about a book, now they link to Amazon. If you go to any website, BuzzFeed, wherever, Instagram with celebrity book clubs like Reese Witherspoon, they'd all link to Amazon. So I'm like, we also need to have an affiliate network that supports local bookstores so that all of these people, many of whom who love local bookstores, have an alternative that they can link to where they can support their coverage with affiliate fees still, but they're supporting local bookstores instead of Amazon. So that was one of the big pitches. Big parts of my pitch was, like, we need an affiliate network. We need a universal link, one place that anybody who wants to can link to when they write about books online that supports local bookstores instead of sending more customers to Amazon. Now none of those are, like, good pitches for investors, though. And, you know, my other part of my pitch was and we're gonna give away all the profits to local bookstores. So you can see why investors might not like the idea, which is probably why I went through, nine months of people saying no. But I eventually did cobble together $750,000 to start Bookshop.org.

00:09:53 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I know that, our mutual friend, Morgan Entrekin, from Grove Publishing [ed.: Grove Atlantic], he was an investor, wasn't he, or is an investor?

00:10:04 Andy Hunter: Yeah. He invested. And, honestly, of the original seven, he introduced me to five. So he was really, really critical. And—

00:10:14 Andrew Keen: I mean, I'm talking to you from San Francisco, Andy. You know this as well as I do. $750,000 is not a lot of money to ask for. In fact, there's often the old cliche in investing and in the startup world that it can be a mistake to ask for too little. Should you have gone out and asked for $7.5 million or $75 million?

00:10:37 Andy Hunter: I think that in a way that would have been a better strategy. It would have helped people take us more seriously. And in the end, the size of the business justifies that kind of raise. But what we would have given up is control of our destiny. Once somebody gives you $10 million, they expect a return. And they want that return to be 10x, 100x, etcetera, which probably means that they're gonna pressure you to sell at some point. And we don't wanna sell Bookshop. We want Bookshop to exist to serve and benefit independent book stores for eternity or at least as long as of eternity that we can control. So by taking if we had really gone the venture capital route, we would have had to make compromises, and we would have had a lot of pressure on us to grow the business in ways that were more profitable, but benefited bookstores less. Like, right now, we give the maximum possible profit that we can to local bookstores, and that means a ton. And it's made such a big difference. I mean, there are literally hundreds of stores that would not be in business today if it hadn't been for Bookshop. And we're about to hit $50 million sent to independent bookstores. In about within the next thirty days, we'll have sent $50 million to local bookstores. If we had taken money from venture capital, they would be like, why don't you just send $10 million to local bookstores and keep 40? And we didn't have to have those conversations because all of our investors were passionate angel investors that love local bookstores as much as we did. So it wasn't we don't have to have those arguments. So in a way, it would have been nice to have a ton of money. And, honestly, none of my projects have ever had a ton of money. Everything I've ever done has been done on a shoestring, including Bookshop. But I like the freedom that comes from bootstrapping and the lack of obligation to other people, especially if their interests don't end up being aligned.

00:12:38 Andrew Keen: $750,000 is, again, a rounding error, not just for, angel investors, early stage venture people, but also for the consolidated book industry. I mean, Morgan runs Grove, one of the larger in independents. Why don't you just go to Random House to get the money?

00:12:59 Andy Hunter: I think I did pitch some publishers, and they weren't interested. I think it's too far outside of their wheelhouse.

00:13:06 Andrew Keen: But it's their business, Andy, isn't it?

00:13:08 Andy Hunter: Well, they're not investing in book startups. And, also, the Amazon is— Amazon's paying their bills. They're— god bless them. Book publishers are afraid to piss off Amazon. And maybe for good reason, because Amazon has had the history of doing very aggressive things like taking down all the buy links to their books when they have pissed them off. And if a book— if a publisher is getting 50 to 60% of their revenue from Amazon, they don't wanna piss them off. And we are very— we have, like, really serious anti-Amazon messaging sometimes. You know? We'll strongly go after Amazon and condemn them when we feel like they're harming the ecosystem. And I think that the publishing companies would not be comfortable with that. They would not be comfortable with having invested in a stridently anti-Amazon business like ours. So I don't blame them for not saying yes.

00:14:05 Andrew Keen: How evil is Amazon? I mean, Google, of course, was founded in the idea of not doing evil. Amazon always has marketed itself as bringing low prices and efficiency to consumers. But in your mind, certainly in the book business, how leaving aside the fact that they sometimes pick on people like yourselves or people who go against them. In a broader sense, do you consider them an evil company?

00:14:31 Andy Hunter: I don't really throw words like that around. Like, evil for me, and this is really very personal. Evil for me is, like, the intention— intentional malignant intent, or malignant intent towards other people. I don't think that Amazon has malignant intent for other people in general. I think that they also don't have the same values about society and their impact on society as I would have. I think that and values change over time too. Like, even Google has changed. I don't think they say don't be evil anymore. Amazon starts as a retailer, and they've got a bunch of managers, and the managers are told to grow profits every quarter. And the managers have to prove that they're doing the right thing to grow profits every quarter. And in doing so, they wanna take more of the book market. They also wanna make terms worse for publishers so they can keep more of the money. They wanna dominate self-publishing so they can keep more of the money. They wanna eliminate their competition so they can grow more market share. In the end, all of these impulses, this focus on quarterly earnings growth at all costs, and eliminating competition ends up destroying the diversity in the publishing world that is, like, extremely important to having a thriving and strong publishing industry and, ultimately having a strong culture around books. If you ended up like, if Amazon succeeded in keeping growing, and one of the things I think is so great is that Amazon is no longer growing their market share for books. It's static now. I think it's pretty much flat. And that's the first time in, like, twenty-five— twenty-three years that that's been true. So but if they had kept growing and had put every independent bookstore out of business, would the culture around books be as strong in The United States as it is now when there's now 3,300 bookstores? No. Because every bookstore is, like, advocating and being an activist for the importance of books in our culture. Like, every bookstore is bringing authors to those communities. Every bookstore is working with schools, is educating and bringing in, generations of new readers who love books and are introduced to them through browsing their local bookstores. Like, we need those bookstores. Amazon might not be evil because they're not thinking we wanna put all the bookstores out of business because we wanna destroy reading. It's more like the equivalent of, like, some fishermen who are overfishing, and then they end up completely destroying the fish stock. Like, Amazon, through their blind, desire for growth and profit, would end up damaging the ecosystem in a way that would be beyond repair. So what we're focused on is making sure the ecosystem is strong, that there's diverse voices, diverse narratives, and that no single company, whether good or evil, controls a market that is so essential to humanity and human consciousness as books. We just don't want anybody in charge of it. We want it to be 5,000 retailers, 10,000. We want all kinds of people who have all kinds of points of view selling books. You know, it's so important. I was just reading about how in Hong Kong, five booksellers were arrested because of the books that they were carrying in their stores. Like, we can't take it for granted. Bookstores are the vanguard of free expression. They need to be preserved. We can't let Amazon, like, nuke them. Also, Amazon has problems with labor practices, carbon footprints. You know, Bezos used to be very interested in climate change and mitigating climate change until he became interested in AI and rocket ships, and then it's like, oh, climate change. What was that? Like, oh, I just wanna build rockets and data centers, and suddenly climate change is completely out of the question. It doesn't matter anymore. All that capriciousness of kind of being one of the oligarchs who kinda control the world and the way that people become so arrogant when they get— reach that kind of control. They're just not working in the best interest of humanity anymore. And so, like, evil is reductive, but the effects, the impact of the business is evil even if the intent isn't evil.

00:19:03 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I think in your own way, in my words, Andy, you're suggesting perhaps they are evil, though maybe unintentionally so. Are you— is Bookshop.org on their radar, Andy? Are they— have they woken up to what you're saying? You said their sales— their book sales are flat now. As you noted at the beginning, they're not— they're certainly not a book— online bookshop anymore. They began in that way. They're much more interested in cloud and AI. We'll come to AI in a few minutes. But have they noticed you? Do they see you maybe not individually, but in a conceptual sense as a threat? If there were Bookshop.orgs in every vertical that they're in the business of, would it be a threat to Amazon?

00:19:46 Andy Hunter: I think it would be if they were everywhere, and I kind of wanna create that future. So I would love it if there was a Bookshop.org for toy stores and for bicycle stores and for, you know, all kinds of small mom-and-pop businesses, hardware stores that are being squeezed by the rise of these dominant monopolistic e-commerce companies. I would love that. Right now, Bookshop has taken about 2% of their customers. So—

00:20:11 Andrew Keen: Which is significant. I mean, that's a lot.

00:20:13 Andy Hunter: Yeah. It's not bad. It's not bad. So we're more than, like, a gnat, but we're not as, you know, we're not a threat. Right? I think that if we grew to 5%, they might really come after us right now. I think they are aware of us. I think they don't like it when we, talk about their labor practices or, like, make it seem like it's bad if consumers support them. Like, I don't think they like it, but I don't think that we are big enough yet for them to get into the war room and decide, like, how they're gonna take us down. I think in the beginning, like, they wanna prove that they're not a monopoly. They don't they wanna say that there is competition. So if they can point to us at 2% and say, like, oh, look. You know? We don't own the book market. Look at Bookshop.org. They're doing fine. Look at ThriftBooks and Barnes & Noble. Like, as long as their competition is so much far below them, I don't think there it's an issue for them. But if it becomes a social movement, which we kinda want it to become, then I think we'll have more to worry about.

00:21:19 Andrew Keen: Could they buy you?

00:21:21 Andy Hunter: No. They can't buy us because we put in our shareholder agreement from the very beginning that we could never sell to Amazon or any major US retailer. So Amazon, Walmart, Target, and no major US retailer can buy us. We kinda put that in there, first of all, in case I got hit by a bus. Like, obviously, I would never sell to Amazon, but who knows?

00:21:43 Andrew Keen: Especially an Amazon bus. Yes. An— or—

00:21:45 Andy Hunter: An Amazon delivery truck. Exactly. So it safeguards the company, but it's also a way to reassure booksellers that they can trust us and that we're not going to, like, grow a business on their backs and then flip it. So we put that in our shareholder provision, so there's no way Amazon could buy us. It's impossible.

00:22:05 Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier that your background and strength is in technology and digital. You relatively recently launched an ebook platform. Is your best defense against Amazon to be one step ahead of them when it comes to tech? You're a smaller company, certainly a more flexible company when it comes to innovation and application.

00:22:27 Andy Hunter: You know, I wish that we could be one step ahead of Amazon. Right now, I think what we want is parity. I think I wanna have like, anything Amazon can do, we can do better. I wanna have a better customer experience. I wanna have a better sense of community. I wanna make our customers feel better about themselves than somebody would on shopping on Amazon. I want people searching for books to be able to find books easier with less junk than on Amazon. I want them to be rewarded for their loyalty and feel good about themselves for making the right, like, ethical consumerist choices, all of that. Like, are we gonna compete with Amazon on a tech pure technology basis? I never say never. I would love it, but their resources are effectively infinite compared to ours. Like, we not only are we a much smaller business, but we give away almost all of our profits. We try to keep expenses at 12 and a half percent of revenue. So we really have a small team. We've got 12 engineers. I don't know how many engineers Amazon has, but I'm sure it's over 100,000. So they probably won't be we probably won't be able to beat them on technology right now, but, you know, we can try to innovate. We can try to do things that they don't do, Things that maybe it's not worth their time to do, but that would make a big difference for readers and book lovers. And so we'll try to get an edge that way.

00:23:47 Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier that you'd like, perhaps, eventually, to enter other verticals, bikes or toys, audio equipment. And oddly enough, in the same way perhaps Amazon began. What's the secret sauce, Andy? Is it building the network? So if someone wanted to do a bikestore.org, which replicated Bookshop, do they need the relationship with all the bike stores around America? Do they need the investment? Where do you begin?

00:24:21 Andy Hunter: Yeah. Well, I think the secret sauce first of all, we're building a platform that supports this kind of stuff. And the platform, it's like a marketplace, so it's kind of like Etsy. If you've ever been to Etsy Yeah. With, like, all these different sellers on it. We're a marketplace. We've got over 3,000 bookstores on us, on Bookshop, and we also have all kinds of affiliates, like affiliates like Literary Hub or affiliates like The Atlantic magazine or affiliates like, there's some I don't know. People like Katie Couric is an affiliate for, you know, there are big influencers who are affiliates, Dakota Johnson's book club, etcetera. So there's all these people involved in Bookshop.org. And so it's beyond just the bookstore network. It's actually, like, this massive network of not only bookstores, but also anybody that cares about books can be part of Bookshop. And so that's kinda the secret sauce is to create a marketplace and get everybody with skin in the game involved. And then it's a winner-share-all model. So we share commissions with affiliates. We share profits with bookstores. If an author sells a book through Bookshop, they can earn an affiliate fee, and they can also earn a royalty, and they're supporting local bookstores. So by kind of taking away the extractive element of capitalism where, like, all the profits are extracted elsewhere, we put all the profits back into the community. And that is really, really compelling and it's a different way of doing business. And everybody like, nobody gets rich, but everybody does okay. And that's, I think, a really compelling model for any mainstream business. I think that we started to see our downtowns fail, over the past, like, three decades and started to realize how bad it is when a downtown fails. Like, a broken windows, empty storefronts, you lose a lot of community. You lose not just property values, but neighbors start— stop knowing neighbors. You don't rub elbows. You don't feel good about the community that you live in. You're all sort of homebound. And that's a really corrosive thing that can happen in our communities. And so I love the idea of Bookshop. Like, after we nail it on books, yeah, why not use our model and our software that we've built very carefully and look at other industries where they could use the same thing. Art supply stores, I was talking to some people who wanna do it for art supply stores. I would love it. I would love it if art supply stores were supported, and found a way to kind of team up because the power of 3,000 stores is so great, but when they're fragmented, you know, none of them individually have very much power. But when they get together, they can have a lot of power, enough power to offset a huge, retail quasi-monopoly like Amazon.

00:27:30 Andrew Keen: And then Amazon, of course, only became Amazon because they were very successful at raising money. I'm guessing, Andy, there are enough progressive VCs who would understand your message immediately, who themselves don't much care for Amazon, who might back a more ambitious project that you're describing?

00:27:52 Andy Hunter: Yeah. It might happen. We might come out with it. Right now, we're focused on, like, the next year and a half, two years of development, which we have to get through first. And then we'll think about moving it to other industries. And if we can find somebody that's really, really aligned, yeah, we could take VC money and, try to make it something bigger and accelerate that growth. I'm totally open to it, but it has to be somebody who, we're 100% certain, is not going to try to flip it and sell it to a big private equity company or something.

00:28:31 Andrew Keen: You've noted, you noted that things had turned around, and 73% of the stores that, work with you grew in 2025. 90% of these bookstores are part of Bookshop.org. Why wouldn't you if you're a book store, an independent bookstore, why wouldn't you be part of Bookshop.org?

00:28:52 Andy Hunter: That's a good question. I have to argue against my own interest in all of my life's work to answer it, but I think that, first of all, booksellers are, by nature, independent. That means they're really iconoclastic. They're not joiners. In some for some people, the fact that Bookshop is getting so big and so many people are joining it is actually like a negative. Like, they're just like, oh, like, that makes them more skeptical to see everyone's rushing and joining Bookshop. Like, I don't want any part of it. I think that there is that kind of knee jerk reaction among some kind of iconoclastic Luddite curmudgeons. And the thing is I love iconoclastic, curmudgeons. So I'm all for them. Like, they don't have to join. If they don't wanna join, like, that's fine. And then I think there are some who worry that we're competition, but the numbers don't bear that out because if you look at what happened since we've joined— since we started, first of all, there's 70% more bookstores in the country. It went from 1,900 bookstores to 3,300 bookstores in the past six years we've existed. So, clearly, we're not competition putting bookstores out of business. We're actually helping bookstores open and grow. We're kind of changing the entire culture around bookstores. Also, last year, we grew 55%, but bookstores that have their own websites, they grew 25% on their website. So it is not an issue of competition. The rising tide is lifting all boats, and everybody is benefiting from the movement that we're creating. But there are, you know, some stores that might not have gotten that message that might just be like, you know, we were nervous about, you because you sell books and we sell books too, and we prefer that somebody shops directly from us. So that, like, distrust of any third party, even if they think our intentions are good. And then I think that there is a segment of them who, just hate everything online and just refuse to sell books online, don't really even wanna have a website that just are really anti-digital and care about real the real world and care about physical books, and they don't like it. They don't like the idea of somebody shopping online and buying a book because they want that person to come into their store. They wanna have a conversation with that person, and I don't blame them for that either. So, you know, I think there are some reasons. I don't think that they're good reasons, for almost all stores, but I respect the stores that haven't joined. I'm not gonna try to twist their arms. And, honestly, 90% is way more than anyone ever thought we would get. And we did a poll of, 3,000 bookstores, and 98% of the bookstores thought that we were, good, like a positive force. So 98% of stores, even if only 90% of them join, 98% of them think that we're a good thing for the industry, which means that only 2% are neutral. Actually, 1% is neutral and 1% is negative. So who ever polls at 99% positive or neutral, like, it's very rare. So I feel like we're never gonna get better than that. Like, 98% positive is about as good as you can possibly be in this world.

00:32:08 Andrew Keen: I think, Stalin and Pol Pot used to do better than that, but there may have been reasons for that. Your language, the marketing language of Bookshop.org suggests that you, quote, unquote, give away some of your profits to bookstores. What does that actually mean? Are there any obligations for the bookstores, or they just sort of take the money that you raise for them? Are you, like, in a sense, a charity for bookshops, Andy?

00:32:38 Andy Hunter: Some of it is, and some of it isn't. So when a bookstore sells a book through us, they get the full profit from the sale. So that isn't money I considered giving away. But the books that aren't sold through a bookstore, maybe they're coming to us through an affiliate network, like from the New York Times, or maybe just somebody hears this podcast and goes to Bookshop.org and buys a book without selecting a bookstore to benefit. Those direct sales, we give 33% of the profit to the bookstores. So that is the money that we're giving away. It's like the profit pool, what we call the profit pool. It's about $4.5 million a year that we give away. In that case, there's only one requirement, which is that they are a real brick-and-mortar bookstore, and they prove that by becoming members of the American Booksellers Association. The reason we have that requirement is because we don't wanna be like, if we're gonna give away $4.5 million, we wanna make sure we're supporting real bookstores. So we do have that requirement, and we don't want it to be an online only bookstore because we the point is to support bookstores that really impact their communities. But beyond that, that's our only requirement. Other than that, if you're a real brick-and-mortar bookstore and you're a member of the ABA, you can have our profit share.

00:33:54 Andrew Keen: You mentioned earlier that you've sometimes gone after Amazon. In the last few months, you've run an anti-Prime campaign. What was that? What did it involve?

00:34:05 Andy Hunter: Yeah. Well, you know, for years, every time Prime— Amazon did their Prime Day, which started as one day, but then it became two days. Now it's four days. So it's really almost Prime Week. And one of the things that they do is they deeply discount all popular books to, like, 50 to 75% off. So for years, it was, like, a really bad thing for bookstores. Whenever Amazon would do Prime Day, like, bookstores would suffer because people would get all their deals at discounts that bookstores couldn't possibly compete with. So Prime Day sucked for bookstores for years. Couple years ago, we started doing anti-Prime. And when Amazon makes a big deal about their Prime Day, we go all out with anti-Prime, and we give all of our bookstores materials, graphics, stuff to share on social media to say, like, this is our anti-Prime Day sale. We'll get free shipping. We'll give discounts. And we'll tell people, like, on Prime Day, avoid Amazon, and support your local bookstore instead and buy from local bookstores. And that's turned into this really great thing where we can raise an additional, like, I don't know. I think last Prime Day, we sold an additional $1.2 million worth of books and about two hundred and something thousand dollars' worth of books.

00:35:20 Andrew Keen: Last month, my understanding is $1,480,000 in revenue. You generated— certainly in revenue — which is quite an achievement.

00:35:27 Andy Hunter: Yeah. So it's pretty great because it takes this thing that was a negative, and it turns it into this great day to promote and celebrate independent bookstores. And so it's really worked well. And, like, there's something about it that kinda goes viral. Sometimes we can successfully tease Amazon in such a way that people, wanna share it and like it, and that helps.

00:35:50 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Certainly very, very successful. You mentioned earlier that the big publishers who control the industry, for better or worse, weren't interested in investing. You're a forward looking guy, dynamic guy, a social entrepreneur, very successful social entrepreneur, Andy. How frustrated are you more broadly with the industry? Leaving out leaving aside Amazon, we've talked about them. Is this an industry that needs to and I want to come to AI in a minute, but leaving aside AI for the moment, is this an industry that needs to be faster, more innovative, if it's to succeed really in the twenty-first century?

00:36:30 Andy Hunter: Yes. Yeah. I think absolutely. I mean, I've been trying to be entrepreneurial in the publishing industry for about seventeen years. And I very rarely see publishers being open to innovation, partnering with startups, taking risks. It almost never happens, really. And the large publishers will try to protect their revenue streams, and they also are pretty stingy with their purse strings as well. And so when somebody comes along that might have a big great idea, the publishers generally will say no. Like, they will wait to partner until you're huge. So, like, they'll partner with somebody like Spotify who wants to do audiobooks because Spotify is already like, has hundreds of millions of subscribers. So when you're that big or when you're Apple Books or when you're Google Books, like, publishing will say, okay. Or when you're AI, when you're— when you're big enough to have a ton of money and they can see the immediate return, they might say yes. But I think they do themselves a real disservice because every startup or innovative idea could potentially grow into something that would save them or help them or expand their reach. And by not nurturing it, it's like, you know, it's like not watering your garden. Like, that garden is gonna grow into the crop that, like, stabilizes you and takes you into the twenty-first century. But if you're too stingy with the water and you don't, you know, you can't— don't feel like you wanna give it up, then you're not gonna allow that opportunity to happen. And I think it's a real shame. And so, yeah, I mean, I am frustrated with that aspect. What I love about the publishing companies still is, like, there's still a ton of people in publishing that have a genuine love of books. There's still a ton of great writers who publish with big mainstream publishers. There's still, like, a lot of passion and art in the industry. So, you know, it's not like I hate all publishers, but I do wish that they, were more innovative for sure, especially when it came to scrappy startup ideas that haven't proven themselves yet. That's really where I think they missed the boat.

00:38:50 Andrew Keen: Some of those high-profile successful authors are in court now suing some of the generative AI companies. In your mind, I mean, this may not concentrate on the immediate business of Bookshop.org, but are companies like, OpenAI and Anthropic, are they in the business, and I use that word carefully, of stealing content from many authors in terms of establishing the intelligence of their algorithms?

00:39:23 Andy Hunter: I think they were. They were before. You know? Now that it's kind of out in the open. So they're trying to make deals because they couldn't get away with it, and they're facing costly lawsuits. But certainly in the beginning, they made a very conscious choice that it was easier for them and faster for them to steal all the content than it would be to work out a deal with those publishers and authors. And they did steal it, and, you know, and then they're paying up now. And it's great that they're paying up, but, it's really unfortunate. And I guess it's because they're, like, obsessed with the idea of being first. Like, they're in this massive race with each other and very competitive with each other, and that makes them cut all kinds of corners, regulatory corners, legal corners, and ethical corners because the most important thing for them is that they are the leading model. They don't get left behind. And any other consideration is secondary. And it's bad. It's definitely bad for authors, and there's a lot of resistance now, which is good. Like, OpenAI, I think, just removed the ability to say, like, write me a book in the style of Colson Whitehead. Like, before you could do that, you could say, like, steal this author's writing style. You know? And that was fine. Like, literally, they shut that down, like, a week ago.

00:40:52 Andrew Keen: Finally, there was an interesting New York Times piece in which you were quoted about how AI books are sneaking their way into stores. Is that true? And what are you doing at Bookshop.org, perhaps to make sure that people don't, by accident, buy books that haven't really been written by human beings?

00:41:13 Andy Hunter: Yeah. Well, certainly, it's a massive problem, and, I think the figures are something that there are three times as many books being added to Amazon now in a year than there were before AI. So that's a big indication that there are hundreds of thousands of AI-generated books being put in the market. And if those books were actually good, that would be one thing. Right? If AI was capable of making a great book on traveling to Rome or cooking the perfect pesto sauce, that might be okay in some alternate universe. But that's not even what's happening. What's happening is that those books are being produced by scammers that don't even review the content and that are building those books based on, like, search activity. So they wanna see, oh, all these people are searching for books on rooftop gardening. Let's use a— tell AI to write an 80-page book about rooftop gardening. They won't even copyedit it. They'll just throw that into a, self-publishing platform and put it out there so it can be number one on the search results and sell copies to unsuspecting book buyers who then will be ripped off. So the conversation about AI-generated books is sometimes misguided because it's— they're being discussed as if they're books that have any value. They don't have value. They are meant to defraud and scam customers, which is why they should not be sold by any retailer who cares about their customers, including Amazon. If you just care about, oh, I sold $100,000 worth of books today, then maybe you can sell AI books because it doesn't matter to you. But if you want those customers to come back and not be betrayed, then you better be careful. And so the I'm super concerned about it, and we tell all of our suppliers not to give us any AI books, with a tiny, tiny, tiny, asterisk where there might— there's, like, a few, like, serious poets, that have experimented with AI. There's very, very few books, but there are a few books that are kind of— were artistic investigations of AI that sometimes have some AI content, which we would allow. But, mostly, we just tell people we don't wanna sell the AI books, and our suppliers are supposed to keep them off the site. Now they do get on the site because it's very hard to detect. If you support— if you support self-publishers. You want a self-published author to be able to sell books on Bookshop. Then you're gonna be opening the door. And once you have the door open, the AI books will try to sneak through. The only way you can close the door is by saying self-published authors aren't allowed on the site. We don't wanna do that. So once they're on the site, we just try to take them down as much as we can. Like, when we— if we notice one, if we get a complaint from a customer, we just remove it as quickly as possible.

00:44:07 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. A real Robin Hood, in our age of Amazon and Google and, OpenAI and Anthropic. Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org. He's not stealing from Amazon, but he's certainly redistributing the wealth in our digital economy. Andy, congratulations on everything you've done. It's really quite remarkable, and I will look forward to talking again in the not too distant future. I'm eager to hear if we're gonna see some books— Bookshop.org in other verticals. Thank you so much. And, again, congratulations on everything you're doing.

00:44:41 Andy Hunter: Thank you. Thank you for having me.