Transcript 0:00 [upbeat music] Welcome back to Tasteland. I am your co-host, Francis Zehr. And I'm Daisy Alioto. And Daisy, who are we speaking to today? Today, we're talking to Andy Hunter. He's the founder and CEO of Bookshop. 0:18 He's also the publisher of Literary Hub and the chairman and co-founder of Electric Lit. If you haven't used Bookshop before, Dirt exclusively uses Bookshop. Mm-hmm. 0:29 It's an alternative to Amazon, and it aggregates, uh, the stock of indie bookstores around the world, basically. So if you wanna buy from an indie bookstore, it's the best place to find the title that you're looking for. 0:41 If they don't have a website of their own, as Andy says themself in interviews. Yes. Mm-hmm. Um, but I think for some of them, even if they do. Mm-hmm. But we'll, we'll get into that. Yes. 0:51 I, uh, I went into my, my Gmail to find the, my first bookshop.org purchase. It was in April 2021. Uh [laughs] and one of those books I, I've not opened. The other I did read. Uh, it was, it was a two-book order. 1:06 We're talking, uh, Strunk and White's Elements of Style- Mm-hmm... which, you know, in high school you read that, and I was like, "I should, I should get that. I should bone up on that." It's a classic. Yeah. 1:15 I did not bone up. [laughs] Um, and then also Lauren Oyler's Fake Accounts, which I, which I did like. I probably also bought that from Bookshop because it was, like, a COVID purchase. Mm-hmm. Yep. 1:27 Um, and I went nuts on there- [laughs]... during, during lockdown. Um, but for a while, like, the thing that was holding me back from shopping on Bookshop more was that I like to buy e-books. Oh. 1:41 Um, because I often realize I have time to read something at the last minute and need it- Mm-hmm... immediately. Um, but now they do have e-books, which wasn't the case. As of the beginning of this year, mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 1:51 Yeah. So really there's no excuse, guys. [laughs] Yeah. It seems like the last time Andy did any, did many podcasts, he did a couple in February- Mm-hmm... um, kind of around the release of their e-book. 2:01 So it'll be interesting now that it's been most of a year to hear how that's been going. Um, anyways, while we wait for him, um, one thing I did last week was, uh, I went to the Press Publish NYC event- Mm-hmm... 2:17 uh, in the Domino Sugar Refinery. Mm-hmm. Towering, glittering above Williamsburg. Um, this is Colin and Samir's... 2:26 Uh, it's their first conference of this kind, but Colin and Samir, if you don't know them, they're, like, the main vi- you know, from YouTube, of YouTube media commentators is kind of how I, I would put them. 2:37 They've been doing it for, like, 10 years or something. They started making the Cross videos, and now they're kind of like the premier, like, YouTuber talk show- Mm-hmm... I would say. Um, it was cool. 2:46 It was, like, I think there was, like, 400 people there. There was some good, um, there were some good speakers. Most of the programming I enjoyed. The best one was, I... 2:55 My, my, my favorite one at the beginning was this, uh, 20 years of YouTube history guy by... Let me... What is this guy's name? Um- While you're doing that, I was gonna say, like, 3:06 you and I are both going to a conference thrown by Air and our friend Ari- Oh, yes... former guest of the pod, and he was listing off everyone coming to this thing. 3:16 I was like, "I hope there's a designated survivor"- A designated survivor? What does that mean?... "that's not coming." [laughs] Well, you know how, like, when you have- Oh... 3:24 um, executives from a company, you can't fly- Yeah... everyone on the same plane in case it crashes? Like- Yeah... if this conference blows up- [laughs]... good luck, guys. There's not gonna be any media left. 3:34 Good luck- We, uh, we-... finding stuff to look at... the world could be so lucky. The world should be so lucky. [laughs] Yeah. Okay. Well- Okay, but-... don't get any big ideas... 3:41 the guy I spoke to- B for Betta, F for Francis. [laughs] The guy... Or not the... I didn't speak to him, but the guy who was speaking, Kevin Alloca, YouTube's- Mm-hmm... head of culture and trends. 3:50 This was a good presenta- It was one of those presentations that's just, like, really well dialed in and performed, and good almost call and response with, like, clips in the, in the presentation. 3:58 Um, but he had some good data. Um, other than that- So not like Daisy Alioto's The Taste Economy presentation at FWB Fest 2024 that she didn't rehearse? Well, you know, as, as a non- [laughs]... 4:09 attendee of, of what, you know, those in the know call Fest, simply Fest, I, I can't really speak to the, to the quality of, of your presentation. 4:16 I will say, I got a meeting recently with somebody who was in the audience for that. Like- Mm-hmm... my friend was like, "Let me make an intro," and they were like, "Oh, you mean Daisy Alioto? I was at- Mm-hmm... 4:26 her talk in 2024. Make the intro right now." So I was like, "Oh, thank God." Mm-hmm. Um- My reputation precedes me. Your reputation does precede you. 4:35 Um, the last thing I'll say about the conference, it was fun, uh, but that venue, as you might expect for such a glittering glass dome in the sky, it's a little hot, and the acoustics are a little weird. Oh, man. Yeah. 4:46 Was it just a greenhouse affecting you? Only really, like, when you're in the, uh, in the sun. Um- Where you have, like, a glass wall. Yeah. It was a beautiful view. I saw pictures. I was like, "What is that?" 4:56 'Cause I think that only really reopened as a venue in the past couple years, right? Like, in the pa- like, a year ago even at most, I think. Yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm. Interesting. Reopened as a venue. 5:07 Opened as a venue for the first time. If, if for the longest time, wasn't it just an abandoned brick building? Um, yeah. Semi. But I don't know if you were in New York, but there were like... 5:15 When it was shutting down or, like- Mm... going into the process of transitioning, there were, like, some art exhibits in there, I think. Oh, okay. Oh, yeah, there was the, uh... Kara Walker, right? 5:27 Yeah, there was the big Kara Walker. Mm-hmm. The, the Sugar Sphinx. Mm-hmm. So I was like... Oh, I meant, like, venue for like- In retrospect... Kara Walker. Yeah. And now it's, like, a venue for YouTubers. 5:36 I love that Destroyer song. Which one? Doesn't... It's called, like, "Ode to Kara Walker" or something. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Yeah, I forgot about that. That's a great song. Yeah. Big Destroyer guy. 5:44 It's Destroyer season. We haven't talked about Destroyer on this podcast in a while. Surprisingly. Yeah, surprisingly. Yeah. Um- I should go through a Destroyer phase. That's good fall music. Mm-hmm. I'm definitely... 5:52 Yeah, I definitely, uh, have a, a specific [laughs] memory. Last fall, I was biking to Bam to see, uh-Andre 3000 do his flute jazz thing- Right... listening to Destroyer on the way this fall. That's great. 6:08 I was listening to some Big Thief- Mm... Thief this morning. You know, they don't do it for me. I've tried to listen. I don't, I don't know- Yeah... if I've ever listened to a full Big Thief song. 6:16 Um, anyways, Andy's here. Let's talk to him. 6:24 [upbeat music] One thing we talked about in the intro is how, how much I love Bookshop and shopping on Bookshop, but that I, um, had been waiting for e-books to be available there, which they have been since the top of the year, and that, you know, fully moved me over to shopping on Bookshop exclusively. 6:45 Um, but I'm curious, like, what the response has been like to that. It's been really strong. I mean, it's really nice to see something that we work on for two and a half years to be validated. Um- Yeah... 6:56 we're about, like, a year ahead of schedule. This year we're growing, we're gonna be bigger than every, any other year. We're growing faster than any other year. We're growing, like, 65%, which- Wow... 7:06 is pretty incredible. I- and publishing industry itself is down, like, 3%, so we're... I think a lot of people have, like, fully gone over now. 7:17 I think there was always, like, a problem where somebody wanted to support local bookstores, but they wanted to read an e-book. They had to go to Amazon or wherever, and now they don't have to. 7:26 Um, and that makes a big difference. And you fully attribute that growth to adding that feature? No, it's not all that. Yeah. 7:33 But we had, we had all these technology improvements to our user experience, et cetera, that we bundled with it, so it's like we were fixing a lot of things, and they all went live at once. Um, but it's a big part of it. 7:47 Like, you can find more books. Like, it doesn't have to be a book that we have in stock anymore. Like, so- Yeah... the, the amount of people that find a book and check out is just much better now. Um- Yeah. 7:58 Fewer abandoned carts. Exactly. Um, you said, you said that the publishing in- industry is down, but you guys are up a lot. 8:05 I think it was on The Verge, when you were on The Verge podcast at the beginning of the year, you said something about, uh, like, with kind of political moments, you guys receive a sales bump. 8:13 When, when Trump won the election, around Trump's inauguration, um, there seemed to be a relation there. Uh, do you think the political moment is partially, is partially to, to thank for your growth? 8:24 I think on that, on that- Yeah... same podcast you were... Yeah, you were saying how, like, you know, this makes people want to support small businesses. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, 8:33 I'd say about a third of our growth is because of a political moment. Um, you know, we've... 8:40 People like Robert Reich, who's doing podcasts right now, is always mentioning bookshop.org, because he doesn't want to send people to Amazon, 'cause Bezos and, uh, everybody is, like, kissing Trump's ring. Mm. 8:50 Well, that's just one example. There's just a ton of people who don't feel like rewarding big tech right now, especially because big tech has capitulated and cozied up to the administration. 9:00 Even companies that you wouldn't expect, like Apple. Mm. Um, even Bill Gates went to his summit. Like, the only person who wasn't at his summit was Elon Musk, because he's, like, been shit-canned by the administration. 9:12 But unfortunately he hasn't been shit-canned as much as I thought he was going to be. Mm. 9:18 When he's, like, Trump was on the exiting list, I figured those government contracts would end, but they apparently are still happening. 9:25 Um, but in, you know, people are seeing this alignment between Silicon Valley and authoritarianism, and they don't like it. 9:35 And I think before, what would've been the province of conspiracy theorists, like, you don't wanna give up your data and you don't wanna support the big tech 'cause it can turn against you, suddenly it feels more real. 9:48 And the idea of, like, supporting your local bookstore at your corner that you go to every day and you know the people there is, like, it becomes more vital because we're trying to preserve what we 10:03 cherish in the real world, as opposed to, like, this kind of scary future where we lose control and we lose things like that. Um, so I definitely think we are benefiting from that. 10:15 And, you know, I just hope it doesn't go away. The problem with benefiting from political movements is that people succumb and they give up. Like, the- Mm... 10:26 like, how much resistance lives were there the second time Trump won? Like, people just get fatigued, and places like Amazon have such a huge center of gravity that, that people just go back to old habits. 10:38 So, like, our task is to keep that going, not just for Bookshop, but I think politically in general. You said that publishing is down 3% on the year. H- where do those numbers come from? How are they quantified? 10:53 Is that BookScan? It's BookScan and the American Association of Publishers. Um, and so the American Association of Publishers is all the big major publishers. It doesn't contain self-publishing quadrant. 11:08 BookScan does contain self-publishing, but not everything that's sold through subscription services like Amazon's Kindle Unlimited. So there's, like, a lot of unknown, unknowns in publishing. 11:19 But generally, like, the trade publishers like Penguin, Random House, um- Mm... Hachette, et cetera, they're seeing soft... so, like, slightly softer market. 11:30 And- And they self-report their numbers to the Publishing Association? Yeah, exactly. Mm-hmm. Um- Um, do you know if there are any, like, genres that you guys do better in than maybe the publishing industry more broadly? 11:43 Oh, yeah, for sure. Our bestseller list is, like, nothing like Amazon's. Um, we sell a lot of literary fiction. We sell a lot of political, um, and, like, serious journalistic nonfiction. Mm. Um, 11:56 you know, we reflect the, the kind of books that sell well at indie bookstores. Um-We are weaker when it comes to things like romance and YA, but we're making a move for the middle. Like we- Mm-hmm... 12:10 we don't wanna just be like literary fiction and political nonfiction. We actually want romance readers to support the local bookstores too. So we're, we're trying to get all kinds of readers. 12:21 But for right now, we do s- skew also like, you know, East Coast, um, and West Coast, um, and more like college towns and educated, all that stuff. 12:34 So we're, we wanna move towards the middle, but we're not quite there yet. And you- And when you... Sorry, I was gonna say, like, when you make those moves, like how would you do that outreach? 12:44 Do you run more targeted social media ads to people that are, like, have a data trail of being a romance reader? Yeah, we'll do that. We will, um... I mean, we, we're pretty careful about how we use our customer data. 12:58 Also, maybe they like- Because like, I [laughs]... you know, if they like 831 Stories on Instagram- Yeah... you can use that as a proxy for their interest. Yeah. 13:05 And we s- we launched a romance newsletter this week or last week, um, so now we have a dedicated newsletter for romance readers, um, things like that, and trying to engage the authors, do pre-order campaigns, um, just 13:21 have good curation and good involvement in the community. Like with, with all these things, like you just wanna be, feel like they're part of your world and you're part of their world. You don't... 13:33 And so we wanna hire people that actually love those books, you know, that can make good recommendations and talk about them online in an authentic way, all that kind of stuff. How big is your team? 47 people. Wow. Wow. 13:47 Which is tiny. Um, it's tiny for what kind of revenue we have, and, um, our whole, the entire operation runs at about 12% of our overall revenue, so all of our costs. 14:01 Um, and that's because we try to be as lean as possible because we are actually trying to give as much money as we can to bookstores. So- Mm. So yeah, we're, we're very, very scrappy. 14:13 The company is, like, a- about six years old now, right? How big was it, like when did, when did you hit 10 people? When did you hit 20, 30? Like, what was the trajectory of the team growth? 14:22 Yeah, well, six years ago it was just me, and then it was me and David Rose. Um, and then it was that, just two people for, um, until five years ago, and then we had four people. 14:34 And then, and then when the pandemic hit, we suddenly had to hire like a ton of people. Mm. So, um, because everybody started using Bookshop to support local bookstores that were closed during the pandemic. 14:43 That was when we really grew from five people to about 30. Oh, wow. And then since then we've been growing incrementally since. 14:51 Do you think the, if the pandemic hadn't happened, it would've been much harder for you guys? For sure. I mean, I, I still like to think we would succeed. 15:00 I mean, we're not in pandemic right now and we're succeeding, so I don't think that... 15:04 Like some, some people suggested that if the pandemic hadn't happened, like we wouldn't have succeeded at all, and we were certainly worried about that 'cause we had no money. Mm. 15:13 Um, you know, when we launched we had about $200,000 in the bank, which isn't a lot to run a business that's gonna try to take on Amazon. Um, but, but I do think we would've succeeded anyway. 15:24 We would've just had different kinds of stress, like instead of the stress of trying to support all the orders in the 1,200 bookstores that onboarded after COVID- Mm... 15:35 we would've had the stress of, like, how can we make people pay attention to us? Um, but that's what I've done before. 15:41 I've had other businesses that succeeded where I'm like, "Nobody cares," so how do you make people care? Um, so we've had both problems. I care, Andy. Thanks. I... 15:52 Okay, have you ever taken investment, and would you take investment today? Yeah, well, we took investment, but only from individuals who- Mm-hmm... really supported our cause. 16:04 I have met with investors, I've talked to a lot, but the reason that we have hesitated to take investors from any kind of professional investment place is that they want a 10X or 100X return, which means there has to be an exit, and an exit usually means a sale, and a sale to a company that's gonna keep our mission, it seems pretty unlikely. 16:28 Um- Mm... and you see all these companies like GrubHub, for example. Mm-hmm. Um, GrubHub started, was a huge boon to local restaurants. They loved it. 16:37 They were so happy to have GrubHub and, and their, the other kind of restaurant delivery services, and the fees were reasonable. Now, the fees are like 30%. Restaurants feel trapped. 16:48 They don't, can't survive without them, but they kind of feel extorted by them because these services make themselves necessary and then, then they extract more value from the market, and that's what an investor would try to do with Bookshop, and we don't want that to happen. 17:02 So, you know, if, if somebody who was very, very aligned, like maybe like a, a really famous wealthy author or something like that- Mm... was like, "I want you guys to conquer the world. 17:15 Here's $10 million," I would take it. But if, um, you know, a, a VC firm comes to us, like Anderson Horowitz or whatever, and says, "Here's $10 million. 17:25 I want you to conquer the world," I, I think we'd have to give up too much. It's a business that can only take patronage, not really investment as it were. Yeah. 17:33 Well, I mean, we do, like I do want the investors to like not lose their money and to feel like they got something out of it, but- You would multiply it, but- Yeah... 17:42 it might not be at a venture scale multiplier, which is- Exactly. Venture speed. Mm-hmm... No- And-... a lot of that's unrealistic to begin with. Yeah. 17:49 For sure, and the pressure that comes along with it is just a huge distraction from what we're trying to do. Yeah. You can kind of just ignore the pressure if you control your board. 17:58 [laughs] If you can't, if you don't control your board- Yeah... you can't ignore the pressure, unfortunately. I, um, I was curious, so, and I, I don't remember the name of the company. 18:08 So around maybe-A year and a half, two years ago, one of the companies that was storing books for a lot of the self-publishing presses and small presses went under with- Yeah, S-SPD... SPD, yeah. Right. 18:25 So there's a question of, like, what is gonna happen to everyone's inventory, and then also, like, how are we going to find a new place to store it. 18:31 And then my impression was, like, Asterism stepped in to store a lot of those books and handle inventory for a lot of people. When I have... 18:41 Recently, when I always go to Bookshop first to find a book, some of the books I've wanted have not been on Bookshop, but they have been on Asterism. 18:49 I assume they're listed there because Asterism can store it and has its own site. Have you thought about becoming, um, basically the storage and inventory provider as well? 19:03 Well, no, because I don't wanna be a logistics company. Like, I don't have- Yeah... warehouses and warehouse staff and worry about that. Yeah. But I am gonna onboard Asterism. 19:13 So right now, the only Asterism books that we have are Asterism books that are either carried by Bookscene or Ingram, which are the two wholesalers that we're currently integrated with. Yeah. 19:22 Um, and so I just had a call with Asterism a week ago about getting them on board, so we're gonna directly integrate with them, and that way we can sell all their books, and that's how we'll approach it. 19:34 I mean- I think that's a good move because I link to them in Dirt, and I'm like, every... I, I can't see if people are buying those books or get my little kickback. [laughs] Yeah. 19:42 Yeah, no, I think it'll be great, and also, it's, like, completely within our etha-ethos. Like, to- Yeah... support independent authors, independent presses. Yeah. 19:50 Um, one, one question I had about these two things that have scaled over time, so I th- I, I think if it, it was in, uh, this big Wired profile of you from a couple of years ago or whatever it was, there was, uh, a couple quotes about a couple, I think it was a bookshop in Chicago that r- ha- had received a lot of money through your profit-sharing program. 20:07 And I think the two ways the program works is there's... If you just buy from Bookshop without selecting a, a local store, the, um, the, the lo- local s- it go... Like, 10% of the profit goes into a, um, 20:22 a pool that's then shared across all the local stores participating. But if a local store sets up a storefront, they get 30% of the profit. Correct? Actually, they get 100% of the profit. Mm. 20:32 But that's 30% of the cover price. Okay, yes. Um, so, so my question here is, like, was there an inflection point where a bunch of... So, like, early on there's only a few bookstores. 20:44 I know it's scaled pretty quickly, but a few bookstores participating. So they're getting, um, by default, a larger share of that 10% pool, right? 20:52 Uh, and then as more join, maybe they're getting a smaller share of that pool because there's more in there, but of course, sales are increasing at the same time. 21:00 Um, how has it been, like, scaling these two different things? 21:04 Have there been any inflection points where it was like you were almost worried where, like, the, the sales volume wasn't high enough to support the number of bookstores that had joined- Oh, yeah... 21:13 or something like that? Yeah, for sure. I mean, when we first... Our first profit pool, which was July of 2020- 'Cause you do it every six months, right? Yeah, every six months. 21:21 Um, and that's just, like, arb- I just made up these arbitrary rules 'cause I'm like, how hard is it gonna be? It's gonna be really hard to do the profit pool distribution. Well, let's only do it twice a year. 21:29 Um, but when we did our first one, we had grown so fast that there were a lot of bookstores who were, like, skeptical. They were like, "What is Bookshop? Is it really gonna be good for us? Is it gonna be bad for us? 21:39 Um, are they really who they say they are?" 21:41 And then we were able to give them all this huge chunk of cash, um, and they were all really happy, and then suddenly even stores who had been kind of skeptical on Twitter DM'd me being like, "Wow, I did not expect it to be this much." 21:53 And that was great. And then they... You know, that word spreads around, and suddenly by now we have 90% of the bookstores in the American Booksellers Association are members, and they're all getting pool payments. 22:04 So that did go down. At one point it went down to something like 780 bucks. That was, like, our low point, um, in 2023 when we, we weren't making as much money. We had stopped growing. 22:17 Um, and yeah, of course that scared me, and it scared me for a lot of reasons. The, like, the pool goes up when we're doing better. 22:25 We had a ton of onboarding, and we were splitting the same amount of money or a little le- less money among twice as many people. 22:32 But now it's a different story, 'cause, like, our last July was actually, um, more money than we've distributed since 2020- Wow... in the middle of the pandemic. So, 22:42 like, the s- solution is just to grow to support all those stores. Mm. And right now that's working, so hopefully it'll continue that way. If you have 90% of bookstores 22:54 on the platform, obviously your first client is bookstores, so starting off Bookshop's total addressable market was the number of bookstores in the United States. 23:04 At a certain point, you will have onboarded everyone you could possibly onboard, and then, you know, does your focus turn to increasing the number of readers in the Sta- United States? 23:13 Like, at a certain point something flips, right, and your client becomes the reader and increasing the number of people buying books in general, right? Yeah, but it's... 23:23 Well, of course I wanna do that, and, and I do think that bookstores and just discussion about books and everything that we do adds to... It keeps literature a part of popular culture, and that's what I care about. 23:33 Also for Lit Hub and Electric Lit, which I also do. Of course. We should get into that too. [laughs] We, we gotta... Like, books have to be... 23:39 remain part of the dialogue, and people have to be reminded of them and excited about them and talking about them online and, um, to be at the tip of everyone's consciousness at all times. 23:49 So in that sense, yeah, we wanna keep people reading or make more readers. Um, but short-term, day-to-day, what I'm trying to do is get people to switch from Amazon to Bookshop. Mm. 24:01 So, like, there's still 50 Amazon customers buying trade books for every one person that's decided to support local bookstores from buying on Bookshop or buying at their local bookstore online, um, if their bookstore has a website. 24:16 So-Let's turn that from 1 in 50 to 1 in 10, and then we're really... 24:23 That would just be completely transformative, 'cause that would be a five times increase, and I think it's really possible, especially with these political- Mm-hmm... the political moment. And we know that only... 24:34 Like, the last time we did a survey of, of book readers, which was two years ago, only 30% of people had heard of Bookshop. Yeah. So now I think it's probably more like 40, 45%. 24:45 But still, that's like a lot of people that just by getting them to hear about us- Mm-hmm... will get us halfway to where we wanna be. So yeah, it's about, it's about getting people to 24:55 leave Amazon, support their local bookstores with their book purchases. That's, that's the main drive now that we've onboarded all the stores, just kind of going after the big one. 25:05 Which tactics have worked best historically to move people over? 25:09 Because in my experience, and this is a little bit different, but, you know, I have to think about messaging, how you get somebody to pay for a subscription? Um, in your... 25:20 in this case, like the book isn't gonna cost more with you, but maybe they think that there's gonna be some sort of time or convenience cost, which I think for a lot of people, 25:30 once they have achieved a certain amount of financial comfort, all of the decisions become about friction, not about the difference between $10 and $12. You know what I mean? Yeah. 25:40 So I found with subscriptions, or I believe with subscriptions, shaming does not work. Like shame-based messaging doesn't work. But obviously, like, 25:50 people, if people are reacting to the political moment, there is some sort of like value alignment that you could appeal to. Um, I'm just curious, like from a messaging perspective or just from a, like, 26:04 s- perspective of like how you're reaching people, whether it's ads or newsletters, like what works best to move people over? Yeah. Well, I mean, the first thing is like just peer endorsement or word-of-mouth. Mm. 26:16 Like that's, that's what is most effective. Um, and so that... And that's kind of like peer pressure. 26:22 Um, and that can also be an author like, um, John Green saying like, "Hey, use Bookshop," or Robert Reich saying, "Use Bookshop." That makes a big, big difference. Mm. And we just try to encourage that. 26:33 Like obviously we can't completely control it, but we can try to encourage authors and agents of authors and publishers to say like, "Please, um, say something." And most of them don't. 26:44 Like, most of them don't 'cause they wanna s- have like the high Amazon ranking. Mm-hmm. Um, which sucks, but the ones that do make a big difference. In terms of messaging, 26:55 I don't know if it's quite shaming, but we do effectively say like, "Amazon doesn't want your money," or, "Support booksellers, not billionaires." Mm. Like that, that does work. Um, it's... 27:06 And on social media, like on Facebook, saying like, "Break up with Amazon" gets a lot of engagement. Mm. And sometimes the people are mad, like, they're like- [laughs]... 27:15 "You know, I use Amazon for blah, blah, blah," or, "I like Amazon." 27:19 Um, but it creates a lot of engagement 'cause it's more controversial than a message like, "Support your local businesses," which is like the positive version of it. It's good to have an enemy, essentially. Yeah. 27:31 And so... And the increased engagement increases visibility, as we all know. Like, that's what the whole media sphere is doing right now and encouraging radical opinions and, um, stirring people up. 27:42 So, so that does work, but we do try to make it... Like we don't say like, "People who shop on Amazon are bad. Stop being bad." [laughs] So there's not like shaming. But we do say like, "Stand up to- Mm. Mm... 27:55 like stand up to the billionaires and support local businesses." You say vote with your dollar. Yeah. You don't say you're bad because you vote this way. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Have you been impacted by tariffs at all? 28:06 Not too much. Yeah. Um, we, we will be if we create an e-reader, which I want to. Um, and we're in the planning stages of creating our own, like, like the anti-Kindle. What's on your hardware wish list for this? 28:20 Because I actually... We had, um, Reggie James on the podcast, and he put out a book called, like, Hardware 2024, which was like a snapshot of teenage engineering- Daylight... and Daylight, which was the... 28:33 It, they don't use E Ink. E Ink is technically like a- It's some new ink... proprietary term. Yeah. Yeah. E Ink adjacent thing, tablet. 28:39 So I've talked to, uh, the CEO of that company, and he, he was in Dirt and then included in this hardware book. 28:47 Like Dirt is, we're really interested in the hardware renaissance, and I pay more attention to hardware than I ever have in the past. So obviously like, 28:59 you know, Kindle, you know, there's a value misalignment with parent company- Mm... so, you know, it's, it's enough to put out a competitor, but like how would you improve on it from a hardware experience perspective? 29:10 Well, first of all, just kind of using the best possible technology. So we're- Yeah... we're planning to use stuff that's not even out yet. Um, so making sure that when it comes out, it's like the best 29:23 e-reader on the market. Is it gonna look cool, Andy? Is it gonna look like a book? It'll look kind of cool. [laughs] And it's still an e- it's still an e-reader. Yeah. 29:30 Um, and I don't wanna pay like a industrial designer $100,000 to do it. If there is a industrial designer that wants to work for $5,000, they can call me up. Mm. But, um, so we're, we're trying to... 29:42 We're very DIY, um, but it will have a great, very responsive, very fast full color screen that is using new technology. And you're funding this out of Bookshop profits, you're funding the hardware? 29:52 Well, we don't really have enough Bookshop profits, but the ebook thing is going well, so- Yeah... we will have some, and then I'm probably gonna do a Kickstarter. Mm, that makes sense. 30:03 And when I do the Kickstarter, that will also be a judge of how much people want this. And if people want it, the Kickstarter will do well, that'll help fund it. I might have to ask investors for money. I'm not sure. 30:14 It just kinda depends. We, we could afford to buy, you know, 20,000 of them without going bankrupt.But I wanna sell 50,000 or 100,000, and so we might have to raise money for it. I... 30:26 Are you enjoying that design process? I kind of got shivers when you told me that, 'cause I was like, dang, that must be so cool. Um- Yeah, yeah, I definitely love it. Um, I want it. 30:35 Like, I'm not sure I can do everything I want, but the... Like, it's- it should be running the most recent version of Android that an E Ink device can have. 30:43 I wanna have the ability for a user to decide if they wanna unlock it or not. 30:48 So right now people are, like, on Reddit jailbreaking their E Ink devices so that they can just download whatever Android App Store thing, and hardware sellers don't really like that because then it can create all these problems, so then your customer service ends up answering questions for people who have jailbroken their device and screwed things up. 31:07 But I want people to just have the option. I want them to have the flexibility to either, like, have a pristine thing that works great or jailbreak it and do whatever they want with it. 31:17 It should tr- The pages will turn, like, 35% faster without the kind of flicker. Um, it'll, it'll look great. 31:25 It'll support audio too, so if you wanted your eBooks read to you or if you wanna listen to audiobooks on it, it'll have Bluetooth, um, all that stuff. I'm, like... 31:35 When I say I bought something for my Kindle, what I really mean is I'm using the Kindle app on my iPad that I only use to read on. Yeah. So I'm, like, kind of, like... 31:44 [laughs] I'm, I'm doing, like, the unoptimized version of everything. 31:48 I also am fascinated, and I don't know if you know more about what happened here, but when Kindle switched over to Kindle Classic, but in such a way that they couldn't just, like, update the software and now there's two apps, Kindle and Kindle Classic, that blew my mind. 32:04 Because I was like, I now have two things on my device, Kindle and Kindle Classic, and it reminded me of, like, um... You know, I'm sure that they had a good reason for that, but it just seemed, like, so, kind of like 32:17 not something that should be happening in, in contemporary times. It was very, like, with cryptocurrency when they had to, like, s- fork off a cryptocurrency- Yeah... and then you end up with, like, Eth and Eth Classic. 32:29 [laughs] I, I'd never heard of Kindle Classic until this moment. That's how good a job I have done at cutting Amazon. Well, go down the rabbit, go down the rabbit hole with me, because I thought that was very bizarre. 32:38 [laughs] Is there, is there, like, an a- like, a native iPhone eReader? Well, there, there is Apple Books. Oh, that's one thing. 'Cause I've... That's the... 32:46 I've only ever read one eBook, and I think it was using that, not the Kindle app or anything. It was, uh, The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel Delany. 32:54 I had to read it for, for c- in, in a college class, and, uh, and no bookstore around me had it, and I had neglected to buy it, um, which is all just to say, yeah, I've, I have no experience with eBooks. 33:04 [laughs] Here's another funny thing about a Kindle. I don't know how you would address this with your eReader, Andy. Um, when I get galleys, I ask for a PDF- Mm... and then I email it to my Kindle. 33:14 Um, and then my Kindle is like, "Is this really you?" And I have to verify. Yeah. 33:20 But I have for a long time thought it would be really cool to figure out other people's Kindle email addresses so that I can send them things, maybe books, maybe messages. Um, can't be that hard, but I think we... 33:35 Fortunately, like, I'm not getting those spam job texts to my Kindle yet. [laughs] But I, I feel like the time is coming, 'cause, like, my Kindle address is not that hard to figure out. 33:45 Even worse, you could get spam, uh, AI novel galleys. Well- Man... I would like to get a spam AI novel romance galley about two people that met and fell in love in a group job spam text- Mm-hmm... thread. 33:59 Because sometimes if it, they hit me in the right mood, I'm like, I'm gonna start some jokes in here and see who stays. [laughs] Um, Andy, I wanna ask a question about, about used books. 34:07 So you guys don't sell used books, right? Secondhand books. Um, I buy a lot of secondhand books online, usually from Thrift Books. Um, for a long time I was buying from AbeBooks. I didn't know they were owned by Amazon. 34:17 Sometimes on eBay. Um, but Thrift Books is the one major one, right, that's still independent. Do you have any interest for that? I just found out just now from you that AbeBooks is owned by Amazon. Really, oh. 34:26 That is very sneaky. Mm-hmm. They don't brand it. Yeah. Dishonest Abe. [laughs] Yeah, it's one of the worst things. It's, uh, one of the annoying things is that when you... 34:36 people on the internet are like, "What are Amazon alternatives?" And there's always somebody in there who says, "Use AbeBooks, they're great." Mm-hmm. Wow. Andy, are you a keyboard warrior? 34:44 Do you get on Reddit and debunk that? No. Um, although there is a thread on Reddit about whether Bookshop.org is the next Amazon, which I've been very tempted to, to dive into, but- No, no. I'll do it. I'll do it. 34:57 I- I have some burners. [laughs] I, I, I did find... 35:00 I mean, when I was preparing for this yesterday too, I did find mostly from 2023 a few articles saying, you know, Bookshop isn't what they say they are, isn't as good as they are, um, which I think the, the clear argument against that- That was in 2020. 35:11 That's the New Statesman. Oh, well, there, there was some sub- substacks and stuff- Yeah... I found from 2023. Yeah. But I mean, the clear argument there is like... 35:17 And y- you said this, I think, um, [laughs] I'm gonna paraphrase you, uh, that the number one thing to do is go to your local bookstore in person, buy a book. Number two, if they have a website, go buy it. 35:27 Number three, buy it on Bookshop, because otherwise people are just gonna buy it on Amazon. So it's like you're not taking sales from- Yeah... local bookshops. 35:36 You're, you're an option that stops people from buying, buying from Amazon, which I think to me was so obvious, and it's like, like, reading that now I was thinking of just kind of general, like, like, AI skepticism and such, in that sometimes it seems like people refuse to acknowledge that, oh, these things are happening and are being implemented, and, like, 35:58 yes, you can, you can refuse to use them at all, but, like, it's best to... [laughs] I, I- Yeah... I'm losing the plane here a little bit. No, I understand. 36:05 A lot of people think they hate business when they actually hate capitalism. Yeah. And I have had to leave those people behind. [laughs] You could... You... It's, it's that, that classic joke, uh, 36:16 how can you critique society when you live in it or whatever. Yeah, exactly. And there's also... There's a lot of play in just, like, "Oh, this thing that everybody says is great, it's actually terrible." 36:25 [laughs] Like, that's a great way to get clicks and- Yes, it is... um, and engagement online. But the fact- That, those articles certainly ranked in the SEO, so. Yeah. 36:32 So, but 90% of bookstores are on the platform now.Like when, when we go to bookseller conferences now, they are so happy. 36:40 Their sales on their websites are up 300% since when we launched, because our message is always like, "Support local bookstores, support local bookstores." Mm. Altogether, 36:51 independent bookstores are selling six times as many books online right now than they did before we launched. Whoa. S- and that's on their websites and on Bookshop. Mm. 37:01 As a, as a whole, like, there's so much momentum that we're driving that even the people who were really skeptical, I haven't heard anything from them in two years. I mean- Not a peep from the haters. 37:12 I hope- That's right... I hope, I hope that they wanna hear this podcast and be like, "Wait, I- I've been neglecting my hater duties." [laughs] "I've gotta get back online." 37:19 But yeah, it's been a couple years since I heard any critiques like that. Andy, question. Um, are you having to think about... 37:27 Now, obviously you wanna show up in SEO above Amazon when people are looking for books, and I've known from talking to you in the past that you guys have spent some on Google to do that. 37:36 Like, now you have to think about being visible in these LLMs when somebody asks ChatGPT, "What should I read?" Mm. You want them to send people to Bookshop. How are you navigating that? Yeah. 37:47 Well, we've had some calls with consultants, so I've just been doing reading. Mm. 37:50 I- it's not, it's not a major market force yet, and it'll be really interesting to see if ChatGPT does add a shopping cart, which is something. 37:57 You know, they have hired a products person who says that they wanted a shopping cart. Mm. In which case, it would be really essential to be present there and allow people to buy through it. 38:08 I think that a lot of what the LLMs are doing are doing things like scraping Google and scraping conversations- Mm... and I think we'll do pretty well in that sense. Like, the, the advice I've read is, like, 38:19 be mentioned on Reddit and all that stuff. Mm. Well, that's already happening with us. Like, we, we have in... We have the real version of what people are trying to game. Um, so hopefully we'll be okay, but we do... 38:32 Like, it is really, really serious, because it's already 10% of all search engine queries have moved over, and Google's AI summaries are also killing traffic to websites everywhere. So, um, 38:46 being on top of it is really important, but we don't have... We're not actually, like, spending money on, on it yet, 'cause it's changing so much and, and there's not that much we can do right now. 38:57 We already try to foster conversation about us online, which is what all the LLMs are scraping. 39:01 It would be a pretty genius PR move, uh, by the OpenAI team to, uh, to make sure that all mentions of books are, are Bookshop links. I think it would be a good rebuke against, you know- Yeah... yeah. 39:12 Your mouth to- Yeah... Saint Paul's ears. Exactly. Good, good rebuke against AI- Yeah... AI-generated books flooding the market and such. Absolutely. Have you thought about using AI? 39:22 I mean, I'm sure you already have some internal algorithms to the Bookshop platform, but refining your ability to recommend people's next read through the platform. Mm. I mean, yeah, but I don't think... 39:34 Like, I think our consumer is somebody that probably is AI skeptical or AI hostile, and, like, booksellers don't want computers giving bookseller recommendations. Like, right now- Yeah... we have all human book se- Mm... 39:47 book recommendations. Everything is recommended by people. If there's a way that we can match people better using AI to a human recommendation, that's cool, but we don't want an AI doing the recommendation itself. 40:00 Mm-hmm. Do you wanna replicate the, the employee picks shelf- Yeah... of the bookstore? But if we can find the right employee for you through AI, we could do that. 40:09 Um, but that's more of a connecting thing than writing, but- But if I check out and it's like, "More books like these that you might like," that- that's not 100% human. 40:18 Um, no, but it, it has to do with- That's more like tagging, right? Yeah. It's tagging and sales and popularity. Mm-hmm. 40:26 But all the book lists are humans and, um, things like Shelf Talkers and our emails and stuff like that are all humans. I have experimented with, um... 40:34 I keep a list of every book that I've read, and I've experimented with feeding it into ChatGPT to see, like, what it tells me to read next. Hmm. Um, but- Have you listened? I don't think so. I'm trying to remember. 40:45 I think it did tell me to read Perfection, but at that point, like, five people I know had recommended it to me, so it's not like it ranked that highly. 40:53 Um- I mean, my fr- my fear about that is that it'll be like, um, when Madeleine McIntosh was review- was interviewed in The New York Times a few years ago when she was still the head of Penguin Random House, and she was talking about Amazon and bestsellers, and she said, "Bestsellers are bestsellers because they're bestsellers." 41:10 [laughs] In other words, like, the books become bestsellers because they're bestsellers, and then they're recommended- Yeah... to more people. Yeah. 41:15 And so where the crawdads sings ends up being, like, the number one book- Self-fulfilling prophecy... for three years. 41:20 Um, AI is looking at, like, who's talking about these books the most, and what are the books that are most talked about by people with your interests? And so the, the great thing about a, a bookstore 41:31 employee who's a curator who cares about putting the right book in your hands is, like, they might unearth something that nobody's ever heard of. Mm. AI is never gonna do that, because it's all- Mm... 41:40 gonna be looking at, what are the most recommended books? 41:42 And so then you're gonna have a more of a narrowing of the book market, less diversity, and more of, like, this kind of blockbuster phenomenon that's already taken over the book market, where the midlist has been hollowed out, and, like, either a book is huge or it sells fewer than 1,000 copies. 41:58 I don't wanna reinforce those mechanisms. I wanna figure out other ways to, to get around them, but, but AI might have a place in that. 42:07 Um, but in general, I feel like people who are shopping at Bookshop are probably the same people who don't love AI, because they're creatives. 42:16 Um, they're people that value human contact and human society, and so they're not too excited about, um, these AI changes. I... 42:24 Well, if you followed my trajectory with ChatGPT on this podcast, I, [laughs] um, am very bothered by the low EQ of the ChatGPT interface, which is, I realize, not, not talking to anything, but the interface itself, very low EQ.It's useless for so many things. 42:43 But during the times when I've been able to get it to do a bullshit job, David Graeber style for me, that hits like the best drug. [laughs] Um, but it's so... You have to be in such a specific position where, like, 43:01 the other person is not expecting much of an output from you, and you're not expecting much of an output from yourself, which is, like, kind of the definition of busy work. 43:10 And I've really tried to optimize my life to never be in a position where the person I'm talking to doesn't expect my best work and I don't expect my best work of myself. 43:20 Every once in a while that does happen though, and, um, I will say, like, it's, it's lovely to not have to use my brain for that. But I would like t- my brain to be, like, flexible and, um, effective for a long time. So 43:34 I don't know. I think it's gonna create more busy work. 43:36 I saw a Twitter, I think a tweet today that was, like, part of the problem in hiring right now downstream of what's actually happening with the economy is you have, um, people sending in AI-generated cover letters and resumes being read and filtered by AI. 43:53 Right. Yeah. So- And this-... robots talking to robots... happening in schools too and, and it happens- Yeah... 43:58 in marketing emails and the people really, like, they use AI to generate emails, and then they use AI to summarize it into a full few bullet points. 44:06 But, like, there is that concern that people are, like, offloading their thinking and going to get stupider, and that might happen. 44:13 But in your case, I think what you're talking about is taking stuff that is actually quite mundane and, and onerous, and hopefully will free you up to, like, use your brain in other things. 44:23 'Cause when you're doing this kind of low stakes work, you're not really use- exercising your brain too much in the first place. I guess where, where I fall with AI, 44:34 sometimes I feel like, oh, this actually is going to, like, ruin humanity, whereas my whole life I've been more of like a, technology isn't so bad. Like- Mm-hmm... 44:43 we're gonna use technology to support the culture and values that we have. So, like, use technology to- I mean, you've always worked in books, right? Y- yeah, literature. 44:52 And then I'm like, well, maybe AI is, like, the technology, like, the endgame technology that is gonna really not be good for people. 45:01 Um, but then I also feel like human beings are very adaptable, and that in a way, like, we, we act like organisms that have to take a t- a moment to form antibodies and reject or adapt to a change in our environment, and we just haven't made those adaptations yet to cell phones or AI or all these things that currently seem destructive, like adolescents having spiking anxiety and all this stuff, uh, or, like, AI ruining education. 45:33 I feel like it's just the moment that, like, a virus takes over your body before your body has time to respond in a few years, unless we have, like, a civilizational collapse because of super intelligence. 45:44 We'll adapt, and AI will form, find a place, and it'll probably be okay, probably. But I'm still more AI skeptic than I have been, like, skeptical of the internet. 45:57 I feel like millennials have forced, have been forced to be, like, a generational antibody buffer- [laughs] Yeah... between, like, a generation that... Well, not Gen X. I think 46:09 Gen X knows how to use the internet, but, like, people who don't know how to use the internet and people who only know how to use the internet are sort of, like, in the middle as sort of, like, this very thin barrier, and I don't think it's going well for us. 46:22 I heard we're, like, a lot of us are dying early. I think it's a death of despair. [laughs] Not me. I'm planning to stick around, but I'm not happy about it. 46:31 I think it's more like there was a golden age where people didn't have to die of despair. For most of human history, we are all dying of despair, and now we're just going back to the norm. Mm-hmm. You're so right. 46:41 It's our version to the mean. One thing you said in that same Wired profile from a couple of years ago, near the end, you know, one of these kind of lofty vision near the end type of statements, um, 46:51 it said that you maybe someday wanna take the Bookshop model beyond bookstores to hardware stores, toy stores, um, and I'm, I'm gonna quote the article here, "To be another everything store of sorts, but one built around preserving small businesses instead of competing with them." 47:07 Um, do you... Is that something you still think about, or is it, is it... Are you so just in the Bookshop problem right now, and that's so far down the road? I think about it all the time. 47:16 I try to make sure that when we build new things, we're building them in such a way that they would be flexible and adaptable. 47:22 I feel like Bookshop, we need to do more, or we need to have more functionality before we could be toy shop. 47:29 But yes, I still wanna be toy shop, and I wanna help arts and crafts stores, and I wanna help bike stores and beauty shops and everybody that is being squeezed by, 47:40 well, like Walmart, Amazon, um, just huge e-commerce marketplace growing that do, do home delivery that e- end up potentially hollowing out our downtowns. And, you know- Mm... 47:54 the importance of civic spaces, um, and where people can meet are, is just so critical. 48:00 Like, yeah, we should defend that, and we should build structures that help those compete with these giant e-commerce, um, monopolies for sure. 48:08 And if Bookshop could do that, like, that would be my ultimate, like, I would die happy- Yeah... um, if that happened. 48:15 If there was like, we stopped all these towns from being hollowed out and downtowns from, like, being vacant storefronts, et cetera. We're a long way from there, but not that long. 48:24 I'd say, like, within six years I hope to be there- Yeah... where we have this product that is supporting all these different industries. Yeah. And you don't wanna touch logistics. So but what about, like... 48:35 I mean, I always joke Amazon's actually a storage company- Yeah... 'cause AWS is the big pro- uh, product. 48:41 So what is your AWS?Well, it would be sort of like if you have an iPad and you wanna run a small business, like you can do POS, you can do a website- Mm-hmm... you can do everything you want. Um, and it's really easy. 48:54 It's kind of like Shopify, but more- Yeah... more than Shopify also because it's this umbrella that makes it really easy for a consumer to find you, um, and support you. Um, and there's kind of a collective support 49:10 as well as individual stores. But like where, like the logistics thing, if we could have warehouses full of books and ship to people, like that would be wonderful, but it's kinda... That would be like 100 million bucks. 49:22 Yeah. And I could potentially raise that. Like right now we're growing so fast that like we're growing as fast as companies that are getting valuations of a billion dollars on, from Silicon Valley. 49:34 I don't think I fit the profile. I, honestly, no VC I think even wants to invest with me once they hear me talking like 20, 20 minutes. [laughs] But, um- Well, we'll know after this podcast-... but if we do take $100-... 49:43 for sure. [laughs] If we do take $100 million, then they're gonna want, they're gonna want us to turn into Amazon and- Yeah... that's gonna screw everything up. So it's better to work with wholesalers. 49:52 There's wholesalers in the toy industry, there's wholesalers in the book industry. More and more wholesalers have the ability to ship directly to consumers. So we are a layer. Even- Mm-hmm... 50:02 even like Kylie Cosmetics or whatever, like they're... All these Instagram businesses, they're not doing their own. They're not owning their warehouses either. Like they're- No... subcontracting all that stuff. 50:12 Celebrity wrapped drop shipping. [laughs] Yeah. 50:14 There's a, there's a world in l- in which what you're doing and like expanding this model to other industries is like something the government should be doing, should have done as like a public institution guarding against, as you were saying, you know, the gutting of, of small towns, right? 50:26 Like obv- I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon, but there's- No... like maybe a, you know, a sci-fi world in which, in which this was like the government's answer to tech companies gutting small towns. 50:38 Well, in a perfect world, people like Andy would be getting public goods funding, but- That's what I mean, really. Yeah. Yeah. Or like the SBA could at least talk to me, like reach out to me. Like, nobody ever... 50:48 Like, there's... Even in Brook- there's like startup... There's like fostering startups in New York, like Build NYC. Like, I'm a Brooklyn-based business. 50:57 We're, like, changing a whole industry, or we're doing really well, but nobody talks to me. 51:02 Like, nobody has ever reached out [laughs] from any government agency whatsoever, and I don't even think their policies are particularly friendly. No. Like, at the very least- Yeah... 51:09 you don't wanna be hostile to small business, and even that isn't really true. So I, I would love it, but- Being ignored is sometimes the highest signal of success, Andy, I've found- Yeah. [laughs]... in my experience. 51:19 It's actually interesting. So we had Sarah Leonard from LUXE magazine on the podcast, and she was telling us that they actually had to build their own fulfillment 51:28 system software because n- nothing else was working for them. And me being like, you know, having business brain, I was like, "Oh, you should license that to other magazines." [laughs] Yeah. 51:38 But, like, they should license that to other magazines. Um, so yeah, it's like when you're building things that are useful for yourself too, you have to assume it'd be useful to other people. Mm-hmm. 51:48 And, like, Andy, Francis, I don't know that you know this, Andy and I had coffee, and I was telling him about Clam before I even wrote- Oh. Mm-hmm... 51:54 my essay sort of talking about my philosophy of micropayments and AI and, um, you were very receptive to at least listening to me- Yeah... 'cause I think you and I kinda think about things in the same way. Yeah. 52:08 Well, I like... I mean, you asked about used books earlier. Mm-hmm. We do sometimes sell used books if we're completely out of stock of something. Mm-hmm. We partner with a company called Biblio. 52:17 Um, but my hesitation with used books has always been, like, I want authors to be paid. Yeah. I don't wanna sell a used book for, like, a new book. 52:27 Like, then it's $26, and then there's a used version for $8, and then the publisher, who's probably our partner, and the author, who might be my friend, doesn't get paid. 52:37 Um, so I don't love that, but- That's a great problem with used books... the one thing that I like about blockchain is that it does kind of have a potential to allow micropayments for things like the sale of used books. 52:49 Like, I really believe, like, I believe artists should get a cut of the resale at auction. I believe- Mm-hmm... 52:53 that authors, if somebody's making money off of the sale of a used book, like the author should get even a penny- Mm-hmm... would add up, you know? So, so I'm not... 53:03 Like, blockchain is, like AI is, like the kind of thing that some people have like an instinctual like, like get away from me- [laughs]... 53:12 reaction towards because what if the M- NFT, like, and crypto scammers and, and froth, but I think that there is a place for it. And I, like micropayments, I really like that idea. I think the idea of, of creators 53:28 being integrated into micropayments and being able to get paid, like, wherever their digital goods are sold is, or even physical goods eventually, is a good thing, and that's why I'm excited about it. 53:39 Um, what about, like, rare books? I've seen some articles about- Mm... millennials and younger people getting into antiquarian stuff. 53:47 I think the valuing of the uniqueness of a physical good that just can't be replicated feels like the opposite of digital slop. 53:56 And I know, like, I agree that there's used books in a sense undercut the primary market for contemporary books, but what about, like, a sort of $300 first edition of something that somebody wants to give as a gift? 54:10 Yeah, I mean, I think... Well, I would say I, I'm not even shaming people that buy and sell used books. I'm, like, there's a million reasons to do it, and it's better than them ending up in a landfill. 54:19 It's just personally, it's not a priority for me to start selling them. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I'm, I like things like that because I think physical objects matter. I think also books are, like, a good technology. 54:35 Like, I remember that was a big subject of controversy when e-books first came out is like, oh, is, are books gonna go away the way that physical media for records went away and, and CDs and all of that. 54:46 And the, the thing about books is, like, you have the Library of Alexandria that was destroyed, and we lost so much knowledge, and meanwhile there's books that were around then 3,000, 2,000 years ago that are still readable. 54:58 Like, that's-Really critical and amazing. So like first editions or antique books, like, I'm all for them. Are we gonna start selling them? I mean, possibly. It would, it would be like 55:12 whether our bookstores, um, whether that was important to our bookstores and our customers, I guess. 55:17 If we felt like we were losing a ton of customers to Amazon because we weren't selling them, that would be a motivation. 55:22 If our bookstores were like, "I really wanna be able to sell these books on, on your site, and I can't right now," that would be a motivation. Um, 55:31 in general, like, I like stuff like that, but there's gotta be like a real... We've got such a long list of things that we wanna do, that we would have to have a good reason to start doing that. Mm. 55:42 You know, and the book is a physical object, like, we do have a lot of success with things like this one has painted edges and a special embossed cover, and it's a special collector's edition. 55:50 And, and generally bookstores do really well with that kind of stuff. Or, like, signed editions and, um, special editions. 55:57 And so that's a big part of why somebody would switch to A- from Amazon to a local bookstore is because they wanna get something special. Mm-hmm. What's your favorite local bookstore that, that you go to in person? 56:10 I, I don't think I can say that. I can say my, my local bookstore is Word in Brooklyn. Yeah. But I don't, I can't say any bookstore is my favorite. I suppose that'd be a little too political- Yeah... as well. 56:21 I'm a, I, I live in, in Ridgewood, so my, my local I go to is, is Topos, which is on Bookshop. Yeah. Great. 56:29 But my, my childhood local, when I first started using Bookshop and I didn't live in this neighborhood, um, my childhood local in small town California, they're for some reason not on there, which I, I'm... 56:39 Every time I go on and I try to set it to them, I'm always bummed 'cause I wanna, I wanna s- I, I go and I try to buy a book there every time I go visit my family. Yeah. Well, just tell them, tell them to join. 56:48 Like- Absolutely... the thing about joining, like, if they'll join, they'll just get $3,000. Like, even if they join and don't do any work, and joining- Mm-hmm... takes 20 minutes, they'll get $3,000 just for joining. 57:00 Wow. Even for being part of a bookstore. Oh, I'm about to start a fake bookstore, Andy. [laughs] Get my cut. Just kidding. PVP scam fake Bookshop. [laughs] Yeah. 57:07 I'm thinking about, like, as we're talking, like, should Bookshop sell magazines? My, my local back, they all... All the ones I know do. 57:13 Or not, maybe Topos doesn't, but, uh, I go to Spoonbill in Sugartown, in Williamsburg. They sell magazines. Yeah. Northtown. We've talked about it a lot, and we've met- Yeah... with some companies. Like, I'm for that. 57:24 I- Yeah... used to work in magazines. Like, that's where I first, my first media jobs were in magazines. So I would love to sell magazines. Yeah. So yes. The answer is yes, Bookshop should sell magazines. 57:33 Well, let me know- What's the biggest barrier?... if you decide, and give me the exclusive, 'cause that's- Okay. I would be very excited in my world. Um, what are you reading right now? Last question. 57:43 [laughs] You know, I'm reading Barbarians at the Gate, which is this [laughs] weird business book that my brother-in-law had. I mean, it's not weird. 57:50 It's an amazing, gripping business book from like the, about the leveraged takeover of, um- Mm... RJR Nabisco. 58:00 But it, it's, it's like a really interesting, um, book about Wall Street and kind of the, when Wall Street started being openly greedy and, like, all about the money and excess, um, a huge shift from, like, the old kind of corporate responsibility days to the days of, like, raiders and profiteers. 58:18 And it's, it's a very interesting kind of social history of that time period through the story of R.J. Reynolds and Nabisco's hostile takeover. Um, and it's super good. I love it. 58:28 Um, and I'm also reading the new Don DeLillo, which I got from- Mm... Penguin Random House, which I'm excited about. 58:34 And, and I just finished, um, Audition, which I'm sure everybody is, everybody is reading, because it's probably, probably gonna be one of the top three books of the year, I'd say. Yeah. I, uh, I really enjoyed it. 58:47 I'm still waiting for somebody to explain it to me, but... [laughs] Yeah, yeah. It's one of those books that I- Maybe you and I could connect offline. 58:53 [laughs] I'm like, I've gotta read what people are saying about this online to understand it. Well, I still think she was dead at the end of The Guest, so I might not be the best person to, like, offer my theories. 59:02 [laughs] Daisy, what are you reading? Um, Empire of the Elite. I, I, I think... Uh, maybe I should read Barbarians at the Gate. I needed to read something about the media business to... 59:15 I mean, it just came out, so it's timely. 59:17 But every once in a while, like, I also will read, like, a business book or something a lot more business-y because that's, like, I start to, like, notice things that should've been obvious to me that I should be doing that I'm not doing, um, just because, like, it's so easy to get into day-to-day mode, or you have a lot of discussions about your business, but you don't have a lot of discussions about business in general, other than, like, seeing threads on Twitter about best practices in business that are really just ways for people to brag about what they're doing. 59:53 And so actually reading, like, about historical shifts in the business is so helpful because most, most things just haven't changed and don't change about what it takes to build something lasting. 1:00:08 It's just our conversations have gotten a lot more shallow. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's super interesting for me, and w- with the caveat that there's tons of bad business books. Like, there's so many bad ones. 1:00:18 [laughs] That's true. 1:00:19 Um, but I remember when I was in my early 20s, I started my first magazine, and my dad, who had been an entrepreneur, was like, "Okay, let's, let's do a business plan, and let's figure out how you're gonna make money." 1:00:31 And, uh, I'm like, "Dad, this is, like, this isn't a business. This is about creativity, period. Like, leave me alone." [laughs] Um, but now, like 25 years later, I'm like, 1:00:45 sustainability is what keeps, like, this difference between something that exists for two years and, I guess, a lasting impact on things. And so- You're like-headed... 1:00:52 understanding, like, even if you have great creative aspirations and you're supporting all these creative people, like you are when you're doing a media business-Like having a sense of business understanding is like really, really important, and, and a really good business book can give you that for sure. 1:01:08 Yeah. Have you read Never Split the Difference? [chuckles] No. I think it's like, uh, if I remember correctly, it's like negotiation tips from a former, like, hostage negotiator- [chuckles]... that worked for like- Oh... 1:01:20 the CIA or something. Never Split the Difference. I will read it. I can't say, I can't say it's served me particularly well. Um, I'm really not- But-... the best negotiator. I just get frustrated and walk away. 1:01:31 I'm like, "If you follow me down the street, you can follow me down the street, but I'm gone." [laughs] Yeah. I, I read a book called Bargaining for Advantage, which I- Hmm... 1:01:40 that was like the first business book I actually intentionally read 'cause I knew I had to negotiate, and I wanted to read something about it, and I learned so much. 1:01:47 The most important thing I learned is that people assume that you are like they are. So if there's somebody- Hmm... if it's somebody that's gonna cheat you or that- Hmm... 1:01:54 wants to like have the biggest advantage, then they're gonna assume that you're trying to do the same thing. 1:02:00 If, if it's somebody that like wants a collaborative outcome, like we both end up better off at the end of the deal, they're gonna think that you're the same way. Mm-hmm. They're like... 1:02:07 And, and understanding that one thing that like people are going to think that you think the way they, they do, like it actually really is a great way to understand all kinds of human behavior and how people are treating you and whether, whether they trust your motives and things like that. 1:02:21 And that, that book, that was a business book that I benefited from, Bargaining for Advantage. Andy, you, um, you might have just helped me out with something there. [laughs] On that note, guys, this has been Tasteland. 1:02:33 Thank you so much. This is Tasteland. Thank you. We'll see you next week. 1:02:40 [outro music]
