“You are cordially invited to our Anti-Prime Sale, where every purchase will financially support bookstores, NOT billionaires,” reads the mock wedding invitation that Bookshop.org’s Bluesky account posted on Tuesday, July 8, the beginning date of Amazon’s four-day Prime Day sales juggernaut.

bookshop dot who?

Bookshop.org is a certified B Corporation online marketplace that launched in January 2020. Its business model lets people buy physical books from independent booksellers through an affiliate model.

And just in case you forgot this story, Bookshop.org launched its own e-book store earlier this year, so you can make sure your money for downloaded books goes toward indie stores, too.

Those of you who aren’t a million years old might not know that long before it was a place to buy merchandise with increasingly unpronounceable and indecipherable brand names, it was a bookstore.

Jeff Bezos began Amazon’s reign by shipping out books across the internet in 1995. That was back when Barnes & Noble, Borders, and Books-A-Million were busy strangling the independent bookstores out of existence, and the hate poured on them was strong enough to distract the distant threat to all their business models that Amazon posed.

Even though Amazon has long since become much more than an online bookseller, it still sells a lot of books every day. Independent bookstores continue to struggle in the face of its market dominance.

Bookshop.org was founded in the acknowledgment that the convenience of shopping online will inevitably appeal to a lot of buyers who don’t have the time or motivation to enter a physical store but who, nonetheless, recognize the importance of independent bookstores and are willing to put their money where their mouth is.

It’s a noble goal that I support wholeheartedly. Heart is a good word to describe bookstores. They’re some of the most blessed places on Earth, run by people not usually looking for riches but who do it for the love of good literature. Tell me you’ve never been in an indie bookstore that didn’t wear its heart on its sleeve.