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ysabetwordsmiththewayne has posted about a site called Bookshop.org. It's an alternative to Amazon that gives 80% of its profits back to independent bookstores. I like that.Curious, I visited the website. What I found on the front page was even more interesting. Amazon just kind of slops things at you. But Bookshop is ... surprisingly like an actual bookstore in how it organizes its "hey look at this" material. At the top is a rotating rack of several hot items. Below that are horizontal rows of books in categories: New Books, Bestsellers of the Week, a couple more featured titles, 50 Books for Earth Day: Literary and Climate Fiction, Independent Press Top 40 Nonfiction Bestsellers, Step into the world of Castle Knoll with these cozy murder mysteries!, Acclaimed Crime Procedurals from Michael Connelly, For the Love of Bookstores and Libraries, Indie Next List Books: April 2026, There's a Jesse Q. Sutanto book for that!, queer whimsy, Get in the Know: Billionaires, Big Tech, and Monopoly, You Can Do It: Cookbooks for the Busy (and Lazy), and so on. It works exactly the way bookstores put things on tables and racks near the front of the store to snag attention. Want to browse a table? Click on it to see the full list of its books. Want to pick up a book? Click on it to get a summary description. You aren't relying wholly on an algorithm to find things; you can skim for topics you like and explore those.
Okay, I don't want to spend the whole day browsing the nifty tables. Where are the backstock categories? I hit the three-line "show me the menu" button, and there they are. The top several items are Choose a Bookstore, New Books, Ebooks, Best Sellers, Pre-Order Offers, Kids, and then it goes into Fiction with its subcategories and so on. Neato. Where's the bargain section? At the bottom of the categories list! Offers has a bunch of things like 20% off select titles for Earth Day or 15% off new books to inspire and transform from Harper Focus.
When is the last time you looked for something on a website and found it under the first thing you tried? This one is just so logical. The whole site is just ... what it would look like if somebody smushed an actual bookstore flat so it would fit on a screen. There's even a cat, who appears in a pop-up that I mostly ignored but might have been about joining the site.
I actually behaved as I would in a new bookstore. I looked at how it was laid out, then went back and started browsing. Sadly the Earth Day books were all full of modern stuff that I really don't like, such as personal issues muddling the topical plot, or things I would've enjoyed 30 years ago but are now too familiar to be fun, like climate collapse. :/ But the first title I tried in the cookbook section was worth looking up. Sadly, You Do You had no sample section available on Amazon. I love the concept of a cookbook about riffable recipes, but I'm not sure I want to buy it without being able to read at least some of the recipe titles. Half Baked Harvest Super Simple looks promising though.
Take a look at the site and see what you think. It seems well designed for actual bookworms to enjoy.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-04-28 05:37 pm (UTC)Similar to how you browsed the collection as if it were a real book store, I'm jotting down titles I think look interesting as if I were in an actual book store! You're right, this is great! I'll have to buy some indie books from here, I think.
Thoughts
Date: 2026-04-28 06:03 pm (UTC)I do love how they have the indie book list!
(no subject)
Date: 2026-04-28 06:45 pm (UTC)And my own books are there, huzzah! XD
I like it, too.
Date: 2026-04-28 07:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2026-04-29 02:41 am (UTC)