Salon: “Bookshop.org founder and CEO Andy Hunter joked that the e-books question has been the bane of his business’ social media manager’s existence for a while now. “Every day she has people ask her, ‘When are e-books coming? When are e-books coming?’” Now Bookshop has an answer. On Tuesday, it launched a new digital platform enabling your favorite independently owned bookstores to sell digital books, granting them a foothold in a marketplace long dominated by Amazon. At launch, Bookshop’s platform offers a catalog of more than three million e-books available online via any web browser and through its apps on Apple and Android. It is not yet available for Kindle users, but Hunter says that’s the company’s next step – a necessary one given that Amazon’s e-reader is the preferred device of three-quarters of digital bibliophiles. For the time being, indie bookstore customers still have a compelling reason to switch to buying their e-books through Bookshop’s platform. One hundred percent of the profits generated by sales through those brick-and-mortar stores funnel directly back to them. Customers who don’t specify a store to support when purchasing e-books on Bookshop.org support indie shops anyway, since a third of the profit from those sales goes into a profit-sharing pool benefiting all of Bookshop’s partners. (Salon.com is a Bookshop.org affiliate.) “I think around 15 years ago, when e-books first came into the scene, many bookstores were anti-e-book. They were threatened by it, and didn’t want e-books to take over the publishing industry,” Hunter told Salon in a recent interview. “But now e-books have stayed at about 20% of book sales for 15 years. They’re not going to undermine physical books, so there’s no reason for independent local bookstore customers not to be able to buy them from their local bookstore. We’re just making that possible.”

The goal is to unlock new income streams for authors and booksellers that partner with Bookshop along with its central mission of providing an alternative to corporations that have long-threatened local bookstores’ existence — primarily Amazon…”