YouSaid · the spoken record

Josh Cook

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-08-28
most recent: 2025-08-28
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

“I really am one of these people who say books change my life or save my life. And so giving back to that, preserving that culture, making sure that it's sustainable and thrives in the next 10, 20, 30 years is completely worth the fight.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, we do a lot of different things at once, and then some of them will succeed, and some of them will go nowhere. But the ultimate goal is we're going to have the best ecosystem and reading experience for people who buy e-books and we're going to use that platform to support local businesses, keep money in people's communities, support the kind of activism and endorsement of books and literary culture that small books perform every day in their communities. And so it's all going to be good. And it's not going to be owned by a giant monopolist. So that's going to be good too. And it's going to preserve culture. And I personally like feel like my life would have been totally empty without books.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. No, not at all. Time goes on. All those fights would take five years anyway. Like, that's why diplomacy is our first option. You know, I'm going to try to reach these through diplomacy, and I'm also going to try to build really robust alternative systems that will make this less important.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just bring that back to the specifics of we've launched ebooks, and there's a fight against Apple to let you sell ebooks in your app and a fight against Amazon to let you read ebooks on their device. Even just in the past six weeks, the dynamics of the regulatory environment that would let you win or lose those fights have changed. Has it changed your appetite for those fights?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's going to be seems like there's going to be very little antitrust enforcement under this administration. And then you look at what happened just now with OpenAI and the Chinese AI company, and you see what can happen to markets that are so reliant on capital that they have this great consolidation, they can actually get disrupted pretty in the end by a free market that is much more loose and distributed. So I think it's too Like the Trump administration and the big business people that think that they're going to hit the jackpot by removing all regulation are infra-root awakening because they're not going to be helping themselves in the end unless they can reach complete control, in which case we're all screwed. They're going to end up being too big to fail and then being disrupted and failing.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think is really dangerous. I think that people mistakenly think that, oh, this is capitalism. But it's really monopolism. So capitalism and free market can be fine, but if you try to allow companies to become monopolies and let them control the market so they can ensure profitability and stifle company, that's no longer what's good about capitalism. And so while the Trump administration might pretend that they're unleashing business, what they're really doing is just allowing for more consolidation and more control. And if you have other control, like if Musk buys TikTok, which they're floating, then you've got one person in charge of two major social media companies that then creates more possibilities of bias.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's the 10 year horizon, and then there's just the reality of today. And I kind of want to end here because it's more or less where we started. The Biden administration, the Lena Khan FTC, they were probably broadly supportive of these ideas, right? I haven't asked any of them, but we should make things more interoperable in the big companies should be smaller. Broadly speaking, that was what the Biden administration thought. The Trump administration is like, do more mergers. We're getting rid of our antitrust enforcement. Like, how do you see all these fights playing out now that the landscape has shifted so dramatically?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd say that that's phase two. Phase three is looking at the whole way that ebooks are sold and owned and transcending the kind of leasing model where people don't actually own ebooks. They're all unlease. And figuring out a better way to do it where consumers can buy ebooks and have a library that's portable and that they can own for a hundred years that they can give to their grandkids, you know?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We can do it for DRM free titles. Now of the major US publishers, there's only one imprint that supports DRM, which is Tor, which is a great science fiction publisher. I love them. And Tor books would be possible. And any publisher or author, indie authors especially that don't require DRM, you could use that for it. But there is no way to buy a DRM encrypted book, which means there's no way to buy a book from Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the country, and read it on your Kindle without buying it from Amazon. So if you want to read any, almost any book on the New York Times would sell list on your Kindle, you have to buy it from Amazon right now because those publishers require encryption. That is like changing that whole landscape either by giving Amazon permission or whether Amazon giving us permission or enabling sideloading somehow or send a”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like I can hear Dakota listeners with Kindle's. They've been yelling at us the whole time because the send a Kindle button exists for like EPUB files or whatever. It's been there for a minute. Would you, is that an acceptable ad? Is that something you can let people just do from the Bookshop app?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I would love it. I think all digital content should be portable. And, you know, I'm not a big blockchain person. I think a lot of it has been hype and smoke and mirrors, but blockchain makes sense for me in that regard. Like there should be some kind of portable ownership of digital goods that is verifiable, that can control piracy, but also allows people to say, this is my e-book, this is my movie. I'm getting a new device. I'm switching from Apple to Samsung or whatever. I'm going to take my library with me. That's like basic. Everybody would agree with that. So it's going to take a long time for that to happen. But I think the next five to ten years is possible.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The underlying user experience that makes all this work is really just about seamlessness, right? You buy one of those devices and maybe you bought some books from Bookshop and maybe bought some books from the native Kobo experience and maybe you've bought some Kindle books. You're kind of right. I keep making the comparison of Roku, but you're kind of right where people are with streaming video now, which is I have a million different pieces of content across a million services and no one has built a UI that harmonizes at all. And it's kind of even weirder with books because it's just text files. Like it's crazy that the DRM can silo text files in that way. Is there any push to letting other apps read the files you're selling or alternatively letting your app read the Kindle files? Because that's what you really want as a unified library.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Over 3 million customers. We have over 2,200 retail locations. Like there's a lot of opportunity for other ink companies to go in and use e-reading as a way in to become a much more popular device. And so I'm looking for people to partner with on that.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's better, it'll benefit consumers, it'll benefit everybody if the app stores change, but also it's really important for EIK devices to change because most people who read e-books, they want to read it on e-income. And Kindle is by far the most popular. So I'm glad that books exist. I reached out to remarkable. I've been reaching out to all these eink companies. None of them write me back. It's very sad. But one day they will. Maybe now that we've been in the New York Times about this and now that I'm on this podcast, they'll start writing me back. And we can really start pushing their products because we have...”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thirty percent of all of your book sales after you pay the publishers, we would be selling tons of ebooks on Apple. And maybe that's a rational perspective and we could get them to do it. I think that the reason that they wouldn't do it is not because it doesn't make sense. I think they wouldn't do it because they don't want to lose any leverage. They're trying to stir very firm against things like gaming companies, et cetera. And so to make anything that would look like a concession, even if it made sense, I don't know if they would do it. But we'll try for sure because we don't want customers to have to jump through hoops. I mean, literally, I had an employee's mom try to buy an e-book yesterday and be like, oh, I don't understand this app. Like, I'm very excited about you guys doing this, but I can't buy an ebook. I can only add it to a digital wish list. And like, she just think we're bad at our jobs. She doesn't understand, no, this actually in economic reason for this.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It would, and that's another big part of it. So as I think I said in the beginning of the podcast, like if Apple wants this 30%, that's fine, but it should be 30% of the available profit margin, not 30% of the cover price, because the cover price does not reflect what the profit is for us as a retailer. If Apple was like, we're going to take”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm going round the I will say the only thing I truly remember about the Apple eBooks case was that there was some evidence that there were back rooms. And NAQ was in the back rooms, like drinking wine and making deals. And to me, as a baby reporter, my eyes are open. I was like, there are back rooms.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strategic plans with publisher partners, et cetera. So we don't do that. I mean, I'm very open about what our ambitions are. I'll talk on a podcast about them. But I don't go into any back rooms because I think that's what really screwed over Apple and the publishers is that they were kind of plotting like, how do we rest the e-book market from Amazon and create a more diverse ecosystem like Bookshop? It's like we're trying to do the same thing. We want to create a diverse ecosystem around e-books too. But we're not like smoking cigars in the back realm of hanging random house trying to figure out how to do it. We're just openly operating and trying to just negotiate contracts with people and work within existing frameworks.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know what the Justice Department are thinking. That was like a big priority for them. It was a big gift to Amazon I mean, what I learned from that is be very, very careful not to collude with anybody, like be very careful talking about discounts, talking.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other antitrust case that I think about in this context is actually a books case. The Justice Department, I believe, sued Apple because it wanted to create new kinds of contracts to compete with Amazon to put books on the iPad at the beginning. Some very complicated dynamics around pricing and who would get to price what and how and most favored nation trading agreements. And in the end, Apple lost and it feels like they also stopped carrying out books at all. They're not a competitor. We have barely even mentioned them in this context. And Amazon still dominates the marketplace. Have you looked at that case at all? Is there anything to learn from that? Because I think most people would tell you that one was a failure. It didn't achieve its goals, even though they won.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I would love to, but I think Bookshop is just becoming big enough that we would be on people like that's radar. We are an underdog with almost no funding and we didn't exist five years ago and now we're becoming big enough that people are noticing us. And so I'm hoping to have this kind of conversations now.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“argument will have to be more like how is this harming small businesses it definitely harms small businesses because it makes it impossible for them to sell e-books to their customers and the more that you have market control definitely like in terms of discounts daily deals sales that kind of thing like independent bookstores can't create their own ecosystem right so maybe an author would be like okay i love my local bookstore so i'm going to do a special deal where For my local bookstores they can sell my e-book for $199 for the next six weeks. They can't do that right now because of Amazon's control of the market. So if we have a more diverse market, then there's competition between them and then possibly consumers will benefit.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well the apple has android to point to saying we don't control this market. So the phone market is very diverse compared to the e-reader ink device market, where Amazon has a very, very lockdown control of it. And all books and Kobo are just tiny fractions of the market compared to Amazon's control. So I think that there's a much stronger argument that there isn't another place to go. If you're an independent bookstore and you want to sell books, e-books to your customer, they've almost all got Kindles and asking them to buy a different device is onerous. How is it harming consumers? I think that that”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you have complete control of a market and you're shutting out all of these content sellers based on your ownership of the hardware, you have an antitrust risk. And so I think that we have a strong case that As a hardware manufacturer, they have a very popular piece of hardware, that's great. They can't control where people buy things in order to use it on that hardware.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“e readers and say actually you got to buy everything on this device you got to buy it from us and that's equivalent to like if Apple said on the iPhone you can only buy music from Apple music you're not allowed to have Spotify or any other platform title whatever no other music is allowed on the iPhone you have to buy it from Apple Music because of piracy and you also can't watch Netflix on your iPad anymore no you got to go through Apple TV and you got to download all of your movies from Apple TV as well because we're worried about piracy so we can't allow Hulu or Netflix or whatever. Obviously nobody would stand for that. It would be insane. And back in the 80s when Microsoft was selling every copy of Windows and they were like, you have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. That was an antitrust issue too. And Netscape successfully sued them. And Microsoft had to open it up.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, unfortunately, I spent the past five years badmouthing Amazon, but So, asking nicely probably won't work. But I will say the first thing we're going to do is ask nicely because Don't make sense for you to have to buy an ebook from Amazon in order to read it on your Kindle. And we know that they did an integration with Libby to allow people who take out library books to read them on their Kindle. So we know it's possible. We know that took a couple of years for Amazon to agree to it and to facilitate it. So this isn't going to be a quick fight. But I think our first tack is going to be to go to Amazon and say like, hey, you know, independent bookstores are in trouble. A lot of independent bookstore customers have Kindles. They want to use them. They want to buy their ebooks from local bookstores. Be the better company. Do the right thing. Let people read these on their Kindles if Amazon says yes, then we're going to announce that people can read ebooks on their Kindle. They bought from their local bookstores and then we're done. If Amazon says no, then it's an antitrust issue because you can't have a device that has like 85% of the market for”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's the alignment, right? And I kind of want to drill on this a little bit too. You guys are aligned because you want to take market share away from Amazon So, you'd like to just sell some books that Amazon isn't selling. That's pretty zero sum. I think Kobo would like to say, our device is more flexible than the Kindle. Look at this huge list of supported partners. That's not going to be like it feels like whatever you learn from Kobo is not going to be applicable to the fight you have with Amazon.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then when I think about other platforms that are sort of similar, Roku comes to mind, right? Roku is pretty open. They'll take any app that wants to play, but then they take a cut of the advertising that appears across all the apps. And sometimes we hear about some friction in those relationships. Do Kobo ask for a cut of your revenue to appear on their service to do that work?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For Kovo, they want to support us and we want to support Kobo readers. So we will build a tool to be able to send to buy an ebook from your local bookstore and read on your Kobo. Now there is a danger to bookshop in that COBO also sells ebooks. And so if people are... People are buying Kobos because they want to read bookshop ebooks, they could switch and just out of laziness or lack of knowledge just end up buying e-books from Kobo. And that wouldn't be great. But, you know, we try to introduce these agreements with good faith. And I think that the Kobo team has a lot of respect. I know that their CEO has a great reputation. So I'm kind of thinking if our customers want it and Kobo wants to support it, We're going to trust them to not try to steal all our customers and we're going to support COBOL”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Virge team was the book swam. We talk about this bizarre little thing all the time. There's a difference there, right? The Books Palma and that ecosystem, their Android devices. You can put your app on there, and that's the support. That's all the more help you need from them, right? They're running the Google Play Store, your apps in the store, you can support your own DRM standard, you can do whatever you want to do. The Kobos of the world are sort of less like that, right? They're more integrated in some way. You've got to work directly with them to support your standard and your DRM.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I want to come to that because that seems like the big upcoming fight. But let's just stay with the other readers for a second. Basically in the world, there's the Kobo, which a lot of people like. There's the Nook, which still exists, the Barnes& Noble Nook. I don't know if that is a very popular on your radar, but it's out there and exists. And then there is the Books Palma and sort of the ecosystem of basically Android devices with ink screens.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We are small. We have a hundredth of the resources that our competitors have. In the case of Amazon, we have probably one-tenths the resources that they have. But we do think that we will be able to create the best environment and platform for e-reading. It's just going to take a few years before we can really do everything we can. And we want people to be able to buy a e-book from their local bookstore and read it on their Kindle too. But we need Amazon to give us permission to allow us to say, send this to your Kindle and have that sync with the user's Kindle account, which hopefully they'll give to us, but it's going to take time for us to negotiate that.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it does. If we go that route, we're going to do it first through crowdfunding, like an indie alternative to the Kindle, where you can support your local bookstore. And we haven't decided whether we're going to try that or not. We're going to make that decision in a few months. But we already know it works on devices like books, which is BOOX, which is an Android e-reading device that is quite popular. And our Android app works great on that. We're going to work with Kobo to make sure that people who buy ebooks from their local books can read it on Kobo. And we're going to just try to create as much flexibility as possible. You know, when we launched, like a lot of people want us to solve every single problem with ebooks on launch day, but that's not possible. We're small. We raised $2 million to do this whole thing. Fable, this is another ebook company. They raised $40 million to do this. Scribb has raised $200 million to do e-books.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kindle model works because Amazon sells the Kindle hardware at a loss or break even maybe and then they obviously assume that you're going to buy tons of books because it's all a closed ecosystem. You don't have any hardware yet. A lot of people like having hardware. Does your model support you selling cheap hardware?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are almost all DRM protected using LCP DRM, which is a new standard, which is a great standard, but that's because major publishers require it. And then we have a small selection of DRM free ebooks that people will be able to buy and download and use on whatever device they want. And we're going to be growing that DRM free selection so that we end up with hopefully a catalog that is diverse and has like maybe half DRM-free and half publisher supported DRM.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“DRM was implemented based on Amazon's designs and publishers working with Amazon to prevent piracy, and that happened in 2005, 2006, 2007. It's been a long time. There's new technologies out there. We can find a way to create portable, flexible e-books that are owned that still make sure that the publishers and authors get paid. So that's, I guess, my holy grail. And that's not going to happen right away. But in five over 10 years, I would love to have the kind of cloud that Steve Jobs had in saying like this has to end or this has to change. But the thing is, before you get that kind of cloud, you actually have to have some customers. You have to have some readers so that the market will listen to you.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they should be portable. They should be able to put them on whatever device they want. I think that there should be a way to do that and still keep authors paid because completely removing every restriction and just being like, okay, we're going to release the new Harry Potter book as a PDF and hope that people pay for it. I think that they would suffer a massive loss of revenue. And I particularly am concerned about authors even more than I care about publishing companies. Authors should get paid for their work.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I have a slightly more nuanced view. I think that if you go out on the internet, there's like 80% of readers don't notice or care and 20% of them are adamantly and virulently against DRM. And then publishers, of course, are terrified of the Napster days happening to their industry. They don't want it to all be piracy because the recording industry saw 80% of their revenue disappear when music went digital. brought it back now with Spotify and streaming. And so now they've recovered. But it was a big blow. Publishers obviously don't want that to happen. I think that if there's a system that allows people to own their books, e-books, so they're not leasing them, but they actually own them. They don't have to worry about a device taking them away from them or a retailer taking their books away or making changes to their books after they purchase them, which we've seen with e-books. So they should own them. They should have control of the content.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With a very late 90s DRM problem embedded in the heart of it. How do you think about that problem? We need a new format. Is it the publishers need to give up on DRM because the people want to pay regardless of the existence of piracy? What is the shape of that conversation in 2025?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what's interesting about the music industry is that got digitized first through Napster, which had no business model and everyone was stealing everything. Then the iPod, and there was a fight over DRM and Steve Jobs famously won the DRM fight with the iPod. And they said, just publish MP3s. DRM is never going to work. And the music label was capitulated. Then we moved to Spotify and we brought DRM back. And now everybody has a streaming service that streams DRM music Sokos with video, broadly DRM just one from the beginning. Everything was always DRM from the start. Books could go either way. Like a book is a PDF. I get a lot of galleys from authors who come on Decoder and I just get PDFs with watermarks. And I'm like, why don't books just work like this? But the publishers obviously want DRM. The Kindle file format is DRM to hell them back and no one else can even read it. There's other formats. The most decoder question of all is like you're in a format war.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About the fact that there is a fight. It shouldn't be a fight. These should be open systems where every retailer can support the same kind of products and every device can read the same kind of products the way that music works.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that retailer has its own self-interest in mind. That is not good for the whole culture around books. It's not good for authors. It's not good for readers. It's not good for publishers. So we need to diversify the e-book landscape and we need to give people who want to support their local bookstores a way that they can buy ebooks and support their local bookstore at the same time. That was so important. Additionally, it's a new revenue stream for bookstores. Bookstores are always hanging on by their fingernails. We have more bookstores opening now than we've had in the past 15 years, but there were like one downturn from disappearing. And so if we can open up a new revenue stream, they can get 5 to 10% of their revenue from e-books, that's going to be a total game changer for them. It'll make them so much more secure in their communities and help all of their outreach and all their programs that make them so valuable. So it really accomplishes a lot of positive things all at once. And I think that I have a little moral indignation.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is about also taking the corporate control out of ebooks. Like if one mega retailer is determining how ebooks are sold, what ebooks get marketed, what ebooks get exposed to readers, how the commerce works, and how the authors are promoted”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, I think it starts with readers. One out of every six books sold in the country is an ebook. And I can't buy it from my local bookstore. I took a trip with my kids to Europe. My kids wanted to read ebooks. They had to buy them through Kindle or if you're very educated, you can find something like Kobo, which is an alternative platform. But basically, there's no way to buy ebooks from your local bookstore. That in itself doesn't make sense. Something is like 15 to 20% of the market. Bookstores should be part of that. And people that want to support local bookstores should be able to do that when they buy ebooks.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, let's talk about taking this project and making it digital, right? Because one, it does seem like you have the stomach for a fight, even if you don't want to have the fight. But once you make everything digital, once you allow other people to publish ebooks, which is a huge part of the ebook phenomenon in the background that I want to get to. Once you have distribution that puts you in a fight with the app stores and their fees, you're in a lot more fights in a lot of different ways. So tell me why even start ebooks? Why open the door to this level of conflict in order to sell a product that Amazon essentially dominates the market for?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a farce because the people who are involved are only doing it for political clout, leverage fundraising. It's not actually about protecting kids. If they wanted to protect kids from certain disturbing images or points of view, then they would be looking at the World Wide Web.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Horrible things available, like any 13 year old with Google find the most horrible thing that they can think of in an instant. And they're all online. They're either on Discord or Fortune or whatever. They are not going to be corrupted by a book. If you're lucky they're reading the diary of Anne Frank. Like you have to be really lucky if your kid wants to read books in the first place and nobody's going to have their worldview rocked and corrupted by any of the books that they're trying to ban. It's a complete charade. There is so much worse material available to every kid and they've all seen it on the internet every single day. The book band thing is just speaking of a hoax. Like they say it's a hoax because it's not really happening.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We will fight if we have to, we will fight. You know, I'd rather not because we don't have a lot of money. But if we have to, we'll fight. And I will say that it's so hypocritical. It's just such nonsense because every one of these people who are screaming about somebody, some kid reading, seriously Anne Frank. Like Anne Frank is one of the books that they're concerned about because she talks about sexuality when she's 13 years old. And so they're concerned about books like The Dyer Van Frank. Meanwhile, the internet is filled with porn and the most screwed up.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pressures the bookstore. The bookstore doesn't have the resources to fight back. If they come and pressure you, you have a coalition of bookstores you might have the resources to fight back. Do you see that as part of your role here?”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just thinking about the history of this, and I promise you I'll bring this to ebooks because everything gets bigger once it's digital, right? The problems magnify in certain ways. But just thinking about the history of book bands or putting explicit lyric labels on CDs, the pressure was always on the retailers, like in the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s. We don't want B. Dalton booksellers to have these books in the mall that kids go to, so we'll pressure the retailers. We'll pressure Walmart to not sell certain music, and that means the music is just broadly not available. You represent the independent book.”
2025-08-28 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT