https://www.wired.com/story/books-bookshop-org-thrives-amazon-world/
"“Do you remember what kind of beer it was?”
Andy Hunter pauses for so long before answering my question, it’s awkward. He’s
racking his brain. I’ve asked him to tell me about the night he came up with
the idea that led to his improbably successful bookselling startup,
Bookshop.org. As a former magazine editor, he wants to get the details right.
He remembers the easy stuff: It was 2018. He was on the road for work. At the
time, Hunter ran the midsize literary publishing house Catapult, a job that
required schmoozing at industry events. The night of his big brainstorm, he was
away from his two young daughters and his usual evening obligations—dishes,
bedtime rituals—and had a rare moment to think, and drink a beer.
But what kind of beer? “It was, uh, a Dogfish Head IPA,” Hunter finally
answers. OK, so, picture this: There he is, alone in a tidy Airbnb, a
light-blue bungalow on a quiet road in Berkeley, California. His brown hair is
a little mussed, and he’s nursing a pale ale. He’s grooving to music. (“You can
say I was listening to Silver Jews,” Hunter says.)
He couldn’t stop thinking about something a board member of the American
Booksellers Association, the industry’s largest trade group, had said to him
during a recent work dinner.
What if ecommerce was a boon for independent
bookstores, instead of being their existential threat? The Booksellers
Association ran IndieBound, a program that gives bloggers and journalists a way
to link to indies instead of Amazon when they cite or review a book. But it
hadn’t gained much traction.
That night, in Berkeley, the unusual combination of evening solitude and a
touch of alcohol knocked something loose in Hunter’s brain. Or maybe it knocked
something together. Either way, by the morning, he wasn’t hungover and he had a
proposal for how to grow IndieBound, including simplifying the logistics of
buying online and integrating it with social media. Plus: “I wanted it to be
better-looking,” he says."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
