YouSaid · the spoken record

Andy Hunter

lines on the record: 82
first: 2025-02-03
most recent: 2025-02-03
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So they tried to pass a bill in Texas that said if you sell a book to a minor, it's not appropriate, or if you sell a book to a library and that gets a minor access to it, then you're responsible and you're liable. And that would have destroyed independent bookselling in Texas, but thankfully was overturned by a judge. And so that is no longer a threat. Now, Trump administration, I think yesterday or the day before, said that there is no such thing as book bans. There's no book band epidemic in the country, and that it's a hoax. And what they're saying is that if you're in a library and you remove all the books about trans people or gay rights or civil rights, that's not a book ban. That's just taking books that shouldn't be available to 18 year olds and putting them behind the counter or getting them out of the library, but people can access them some other way. So they're arguing about.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See that coming with the Trump administration? It seems like book bans and public libraries and school libraries are on the table. The next thing that happens is we yell at our local bookstores, right? That's the history that happened in the 80s. It's going to happen again now”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's like social media flack and emails, but it has never become like a lawsuit or something like that. And we're pretty strong about what we believe, you know. So it doesn't cause me a ton of stress. I guess it causes me the most stress when it's somebody who I agree with ideologically who feels like somewhat betrayed by the fact that we maybe are featuring a book or that we accepted an ad for a book that they disagree with. And it doesn't have to be political like we could have an ad for a book that's about fitness that somebody finds offensive. And, you know, we just have to try to stand our ground because if booksellers are going to start engaging in deciding what books are okay or not okay for people to read, then we're really screwed. Like it's bad enough that the government's trying to decide that. We need to be committed to letting people have access to information.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always think that's so interesting because the book community is old, right? Like the norms there have withstood much more pressure and many more kinds of ways over time. And you bring that into the modern world and platform dynamics and how people think social platforms should moderate it. It does seem like there's a real tension there between boy, we're committed to free expression. Also people are going to yell at us because these Harry Potter books are front and center. Does that actually play out for you at your scale? It seems like Amazon is so big they can ignore it. It seems like the local bookstore, you know, you can physically yell at those people. But you're like right in the middle of that scale. How does that play out for you?”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Angry comments from people on the far left. And I think if you are committed to books, you are committed to discourse and freedom of ideas and educating people and promoting critical thinking that allows them to parse the ideas that are in these books. And so absolute hate speech or lies is a threshold that we will certainly pull something or something that is stolen or plagiarized. But if it's civil discourse, like we're going to let people discover for themselves what they think about it.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the American Bookseller Association always had a commitment to free expression as part of their mandate. And we, our mission is to support local independent bookstores. Well, guess what? There are Christian local independent bookstores. And so we're not going to say no to them. So we have a very high standard for removing books. We do get pressure all the time and we get pressure from both sides of the political equation. There was actually like a Wall Street Journal editorial that was angry about us once in the books that we were featuring. But we also get”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, on tyranny is always a top seller, and there are also books like braiding sweetgrass that are kind of more like how to live well and how to live with wisdom, which I think a lot of people are kind of just the world is crazy. And I need to find some kind of inner balance or I need to turn off the world and find a way to live well in this environment. And then you also have like all the escapism. So there's a ton of fantasy and romance and sci-fi being sold because people just want to opt out and go into a different world.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're like, we want to have 3 million customers. We're going to get 3,000 groups of businesses or organizations that each can bring a thousand customers. And that's how we've managed it so far. So they are all telling the same story and telling people about us.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's almost all word of mouth. The thing about being a direct-to-consumer e-commerce retailer that sends all of your profits somewhere else is that you don't have any money for digital marketing. So, like, our digital marketing budget is 1% of our revenue. And even if we tried to put all these ads out saying, support booksellers, not billionaires, we wouldn't have the reach. So we rely on word of mouth. And it's almost all word of mouth. There are people on blue sky, people on threads, people on Twitter who are all saying, you know, how do I get out of Amazon? Like what alternatives are there? And bookshop.org always comes up in those conversations. Now, to some extent, it's also bookstores and to some extent it's also us. So all three of them combined and affiliates. We have got podcasts, newspapers, magazines, literary organizations, influencers. They're all bookshop affiliates, so they let their people know too. Bookshops kind of trick the way that we got enough customers to compete with Amazon in the first place was by reaching out to small communities. So we didn't try to like say, okay, we want to have three million customers. We're going to go big.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, I know that probably the listeners are all over the political spectrum. I can say that I'm personally am worried about the Trump administration. And so it's weird for me that every time something what I consider bad happens, Bookshop benefits. COVID happened, it was terrible, and bookshop boomed. As soon as Trump won the election we saw sales start to go up, and then on Trump's inauguration day, and since we've been up seventy five to 100% year over year. So we've seen a massive amount of customers who are switching from Amazon to bookshop for these reasons.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if that was really a priority for BNN. I think BNN did a good job of doing that with their internal company own stores, but how we won, we went to all the bookseller conferences. There's regional conferences, there's national conferences, we put members of the American bookseller association on our board of directors. Our board of directors actually is majority independent booksellers. We put in our shareholder agreement we put that we could never sell to Amazon or any other major US retailer. So the bookstores didn't have to worry about us becoming big than becoming reliant on us and then boom, Amazon buys us, we all get rich and they are left out in the cold. So there's so many things that we did to prove ourselves. But I think forbidding the sale of the company, the Amazon, putting independent booksellers on our board, and really servicing book.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Project, but now we have 90% of the bookstores in the country participating in this project so that we never thought we would get to 90%. And that's a testimony of how much buy-in there is and that buy-in comes from the transparency and how we make decisions and how we govern ourselves.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rules that we can as a company because we know that people are shopping for us for ethical reasons. We have salary transparency. The B-Corp company that certifies companies said that we were in the top 5% of all the B Corps according to our internal policies and also the good we do in the world. So we got their best for the world designation, which we're really proud of. So we basically try to walk the walk in every way. One reason for that is the booksellers are very vocal and very independent people and if we strayed from the path and it seemed like a money grab or like a bait and switch where we were going to become predatory the booksellers would freak out immediately. So we have to be very transparent. We've got to get this whole community of independent booksellers on board and it's very hard to get a group of independent booksellers all aligned to the same”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, the first is alignment with the mission. So, you know, we're very close to the booksellers. Everybody at this company got into this because we wanted to build an alternative ecosystem to the Amazon ecosystem that was kind of controlled by readers, writers, publishers, people who are really invested in book culture so that we don't just kind of seed the whole territory of this incredibly culturally important product to a single mega retailer. So we all want that more than anything. And so for us, success is building out this network of a sustainable, independent ecosystem for bookselling and book lovers that can't be controlled by Amazon. or any other retailer. That's number one. So everything has to be on the roadmap supports that end goal. And we try to follow the best at the”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you would pay Apple 30% of the profit margin. 30% of the margin would be reasonable. But by saying it's a flat 30% whether or not you're a reseller, it makes no sense because if your margins on the product are 30% and they take 30%, then it suddenly impossible to have an e-book app, which is why Kindle you can't buy the ebooks in the app either.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we launched the app yesterday and We do not support purchasing in the app. And the reason for that is publishers say that resellers can get 30% margins when you sell an ebook. So the publisher gets 70%, you as a retailer get 30%. Now, if you sell it on the App Store, Apple says we get 30%. So that leaves 30% for Apple, 30%, 70% for the publisher. Now that's 100%, so that leaves 0% for the bookstore. So you cannot sell ebooks in the app and make even a penny. It's impossible, so there's no choice but to circumvent the app store purchasing and force customers to go to the website to buy the books, which is unfortunate because customers don't understand that. They just think like, oh, you built this dumb app and I can't buy ebooks in it. Why not? So you got to try to explain it to them. And I'd say like what would be rational is if you were a reseller of a digital good.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's engineering. No, sorry, it's customer service and then engineering is a little bigger than the rest. Yeah, because we're trying to create. Best possible experience for internet shoppers who are interested in buying books. So we want to be the best store to buy books online, period. And that means we have to build out our technical infrastructure. We've got to really invest in that. So that's where our focus is over the next five years. We want like if you want to buy a book online, this is the best place to do it. You feel at home here. You love it. You've got a lot of personality which meshes with your personality as a person who loves books. all that and so that requires a lot of development, a lot of user experience work.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We got about 40 people. We have a sales team, a marketing team, a dev team, an operations team, and a customer service team. And we try to stay really lean. We have over a million dollars in revenue for every single employee. And by staying lean, we're able to accomplish our mission, which is to give the revenue back to the local bookstores.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Last year we weren't, but that's because we've been putting most of our expenses into building out this ebook platform. We were profitable for the first three years when we have been not profitable for two years and then we're projecting a profit this year.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Money in my local community, then that's a perfect time to switch and start supporting independent local bookstores when you're buying your books.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you grow by increasing the overall size of the pie, right? If last year around 25 million was associated with bookstores, then next year, if we can keep, as long as we make enough to pay our bills, the bookstore portion could go up to 50 million, 100 million. There's so much money that Amazon is making selling books every year. Billions that Like right now we're at about 1% of Amazon's market share and 75% of our customers used to shop with Amazon. So all we have to do is get another 1% of Amazon's customers to switch and then bookshop and bookstores are going to both be making twice as much money. So that's our plan. Our plan is to go after Amazon customers, especially at this cultural moment where people are like, I'm not comfortable with like Bezos kissing Trump's ring and I want to be out of that whole ecosystem and I want to keep my”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We try to keep it stable. Like we try to make sure that customers affiliate with bookstores because we have our bottom line that we're trying to hit, but we don't want to convert more customers to direct or obfuscate in any way the ability to choose a bookstore because we're mission-based and we want as much money going to the bookstores as possible. So we're going to hopefully keep it there.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, exactly 50 50, so direct sales and bookstore and affiliate sales are each 50% of the revenue pretty much consistently since 2021. In the beginning, because bookstores were closed, 70 to 80 percent of the sales were bookstore sales. But once they reopened and their customers came back into the stores, that dropped.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, they don't have to fight for a better deal because we give them the full profit of all their sales. We, we, Allow people to onboard. It takes about a half an hour. And that was really important during the pandemic because they all went into lockdown. And suddenly these thousands of stores were like, oh, I'm going to, one day I'll get around to getting a website. We're like, oh, we have to start selling online immediately. So it only takes about half an hour for a bookstore to set up a bookshop and start selling books to their customers, which is really critical to its success. And that's part of how making it easy was the only way to make it work. And every bookstore, if they sell a book directly, they get the entire profit off the book sale. And if we sell a book through an affiliate, like we've got affiliate programs for the New York Times, the Atlantic, then we give booksellers a third of the profit, a third of the profit goes to support bookshop, and a third of the profit goes to the affiliate. And then we've got some customers that just dive into bookshop, buy a book directly without selecting a bookstore to support. In those cases, we split the profit between bookshop and the”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When the bookstore owners decide to come to you and sign up, do they get to negotiate the rate? Do you just tell them this is how much you're going to get? We just need your brand. What do they have to do and how do they fight for a better deal?”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because if we weren't supporting bookstores, nobody would buy from us. Really? I mean, the whole reason that we have customers in the first place is because people are like, you know what, I want to keep my money in my community. I want to support my local bookstore. Jeff Pizos doesn't need my money. I want to opt out of the Amazon ecosystem. And so that's our rationale. And that's also our mission. We're a B corporation and a benefit corporation. So we put our mission above financial gain. So yeah, we would make a ton more money if we didn't include the bookstores, but also people would have no reason to shop with us. We give over 80% of our profit to independent bookstores. It's been $35 million. Actually, maybe today is going to be $36 million to local bookstores in the US and $40 million to local bookstores worldwide. So it's our whole reason for being is supporting the stores.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bookstores have really limited inventory and they have very limited credit and they have very limited staff and tech know-how and all of that. So the idea that bookstores could ever compete with Amazon that has millions of books in inventory is like no way. But there are book wholesalers that do have millions of books in inventory that have the capacity to ship a book directly to a customer. So by partnering with wholesalers, we're able to do direct-to-consumer sales with a very lean team and the bookstores can sell hundreds of thousands of books without ever having to touch a book, without ever having to do the customer service, without worrying about returns and damages and all that stuff. So it makes it super easy for them. And it's really worked great so far.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's a funny story, but actually the kind of light bulb went off over my head when I was reading an article about Kardashians cosmetics where I read that they were a company with only six employees, but they were selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products because they didn't do any of the fulfillment. They just were, you know, running an Instagram channel. And I'm like, oh, I think a book wholesaler could do the same thing for books because.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So bookshop.org is a website. You can go to it, you can browse books. I actually just bought a book today on bookshop.org just to I bought a bunch during the pandemic, like you said. And then I was like, I should go check this out again. You go and then you're supporting local bookstores when you actually purchase the book. But you don't hold the inventory you're not shipping. They're doing all that work. How does that play out?”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Saving Sell books on To easily Independent bookstore, and right after it launched, the pandemic hit, and then suddenly we onboarded millions of customers and millions of bookstores, and it's been a wild ride ever since.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“working in the publishing industry for about 15 years. I started some companies, Electric Literature. And literary hub and some small presses, catapult, and works publisher for Counterpoint and SoftSkull press. This time I was watching as independent bookstores tried to fight off Amazon and I watched As about half of the independent bookstores in the country went out of business, as Amazon's market share grew to about 60% of all the books sold. And I knew that to have a future with independent bookstores. Was going to require Some kind of e commerce solution so that independent bookstores could sell books online and compete with Amazon for those sales or else it was just going to be a global extinction. For these”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm excited to talk to you. There's a lot going on. Bookshop is five. You just launched ebooks. It sounds like there's a brewing fight with Amazon that I'm eager to talk about. Let's start at the start. Bookshop is five. Tell us what it is, how it works, how you kicked it off.”
2025-02-03 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT