{"id":633,"date":"2021-03-17T15:21:05","date_gmt":"2021-03-17T15:21:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/?p=633"},"modified":"2021-03-17T15:21:05","modified_gmt":"2021-03-17T15:21:05","slug":"how-best-to-buy-books-online-and-support-independents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/?p=633","title":{"rendered":"How best to buy books online and support independents"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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With bookshops closed for much of the last year many of us have turned to online book-buying. New platforms such as hive.com and bookshop.org have sprung up as rivals to Amazon and some independent booksellers have their own online sales web pages. We thought it would be useful to look into how we can best support radical booksellers in this online world.

The best thing you can do is to buy direct from an ARB member.<\/strong><\/em> Most of them have websites and many of those have a \u2018shop\u2019 tab or similar for online buying. The shop will send you your books in the post and some have a click & collect option for customers who can come to the shop. Where the shop doesn\u2019t have a website, ring them up to order (and pay) over the phone.

Where that\u2019s not possible, the next best option is the independent https:\/\/uk.bookshop.org\/<\/a>, (a \u2018B Corp<\/a>\u2019). What\u2019s crucial<\/strong>, however, is to choose a shop first<\/strong> from the \u2018choose a bookshop\u2019 tab. You will find many of the ARB members there. Once you\u2019ve done that the shop will receive 30% of what you pay. If you don\u2019t choose a shop first and instead go straight to browse, find the book and order it, \u2018your order will contribute to an earnings pool that will be evenly distributed among independent bookshops\u2019.

Hive, another alternative to Amazon, is less generous to booksellers than bookshop.org. It is part of Gardners, the UK\u2019s dominant wholesaler of books and related products. As an incentive to customers wanting to support independent booksellers, after you\u2019ve bought something from them, you choose a bookshop and they give the shop a percentage of your money. They\u2019re rather coy about the percentage, but it\u2019s never more than 8%, well short of bookshop.org.

We\u2019d be pleased to hear from our readers if you know of other ways to buy remotely from radical booksellers during lockdown \u2013 and once it\u2019s over too, because we hope that the habit will persist for those of you who for whatever reason can\u2019t visit a radical bookseller in person.

John Goodman<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With bookshops closed for much of the last year many of us have turned to online book-buying. New platforms such as hive.com and bookshop.org have sprung up as rivals to Amazon and some independent booksellers have their own online sales … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-633","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=633"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":638,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/633\/revisions\/638"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.radicalbooksellers.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}