In just five years, the platform has made a profit while supporting brick-and-mortar bookstores. Next up, taking on Amazon’s 76 percent of the e-book market.

BY CHRISTINE LAGORIO-CHAFKIN @LAGORIO

Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop. Photography by Nathan Bajar

Andy Hunter looked mostly satisfied, but there was some latent unease as we sat in his drafty home office in East Williamsburg. Hunter explained that his company, the e-commerce platform Bookshop, had recently accomplished a wildly unlikely thing as a startup: precisely what it had set out to do. 

The goals had been laid out in the company’s initial 2019 pitch deck. Hunter proposed an e-commerce platform for indie bookstores to help them recapture a convenience-shopping audience and fulfill shipping from a million-book catalog. This platform would result in a hockey-stick revenue projection that’d fit right in on Sand Hill Road. The deck promised that Bookshop would be so successful, with annual revenue that would top $31 million, it could give meaningful cash directly to indie sellers—a kind of UBI for America’s 2,500 independent bookstores. Perhaps most audaciously, the deck proposed that Bookshop would take a full 1 percent of Amazon’s share of the book market. 

When the company........

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