Rewind: Bookshop CEO's crusade to save books from Amazon

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28:15Welcome back. I'm talking with Andy Hunter, CEO of bookshop.org. Before the break, we talked for a minute about what people are reading, or at least buying. And that leads us to one of the oldest challenges books face, their speech. And sometimes their speech powerful people don't like. There's like a big question in America, maybe broadly the world right now about who distributes what, where the limits of platforms and free speech are. Bookstores traditionally just stay out of it, right? They sell everything. Yeah. And that's the idea. Do you feel that pressure as your audience or your customer gets more politicized?

28:52to not do kinds of things? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the American Bookseller Association always had a commitment to free expression as part of their mandate. And we, our mission is to support local independent bookstores. Well, guess what? There are Christian local independent bookstores. And so we're not going to say no to them. So we have a very high standard for removing books. We do get pressure all the time. And we get pressure from both sides of the political equation. You know, there was actually like a Wall Street Journal editorial that was angry about us once and the books that we were featuring.

29:27But we also get angry comments from people on the far left. And I think if you're committed to books, you're committed to discourse and freedom of ideas and educating people and promoting critical thinking that allows them to parse the ideas that are in these books. And so absolute hate speech or lies is a threshold that we will certainly pull something or something that is stolen or plagiarized. But if it's civil discourse, like we're going to let people discover for themselves what they think about it. Yeah, I always think I always think that's so interesting because the book community is old, right?

30:14Like the norms there have withstood much more pressure in many more kinds of ways over time. And you bring that into the modern world and platform dynamics and how people think social platforms should moderate it. It does seem like there's a real tension there between, boy, we're committed to free expression. Also, people are going to yell at us because these Harry Potter books are front and center. Does that actually play out for you at your scale? It seems like Amazon is so big they can ignore it. It seems like the local bookstore, you can physically yell at those people. But you're right in the middle of that scale.

30:48How does that play out for you? It's like social media flack and emails. But it has never become a lawsuit or something like that. And we're pretty strong about what we believe, you know, so it doesn't cause me a ton of stress. I guess it causes me the most stress when it's somebody who I agree with ideologically, who feels like somewhat betrayed by the fact that we maybe are featuring a book or that we accepted an ad for a book that they disagree with. And it doesn't have to be political. Like we could have an ad for a book that's about fitness that somebody finds offensive. And, you know, we just have to try to stand our ground because if booksellers are going to start engaging in deciding what books are OK or not OK for people to read, then we're really screwed.

31:36Like, it's bad enough that the government's trying to decide that. We need to be committed to letting people have access to information. Do you see that coming with the Trump administration? It seems like book bans and public libraries and school libraries are on the table. Yeah. The next thing that happens is we yell at our local bookstores, right? That's the history. It happened in the 80s. It's going to happen again now, right? Yeah. So they tried to pass a bill in Texas that said if you sell a book to a minor, it's not appropriate. Or if you sell a book to a library and that gets a minor access to it, then you're responsible and you're liable.

32:10And that would have destroyed independent bookselling in Texas. But thankfully, it was overturned by a judge. And so that is no longer a threat. Now, Trump administration, I think yesterday or the day before, said that there is no such thing as book bans. There's no book ban epidemic in the country. And it's a hoax. And what they're saying is that, like, if you're in a library and you remove all the books about trans people or, like, gay rights or civil rights, that's not a book ban. That's just taking books that shouldn't be available to 18-year-olds and putting them behind the counter or getting them out of the library, but people can access them some other way.

32:50So they're arguing about what the definition of a book ban is. For us, it's like if you don't have access to the book, if you are taking access away from people, it's censorship and it's a book ban. And it should not be allowed, even if it's possible for that person to still be able to get a book somewhere else. And honestly, I think it's disingenuous because I think that if they did manage to scrub every book of genderqueer out of the libraries, they would probably go after bookstores next. Like, I don't think that they want people reading these books in general. I think it's going to be a fight, but it's definitely a fight that we're committed to win.

33:28And, you know, hopefully cooler heads prevail because the thing about banning opposing points of view, it doesn't usually work out for the people who are trying to ban those points of view. You know, it's never really a good idea. And, you know, then the people who come next can just flip it around and do the same thing to your point of view. I'm just thinking about the history of this. And I want to I promise you I'll bring this to e-books because everything gets bigger once it's digital. Right. The problems magnify in certain ways. But just thinking about the history of book bans or putting explicit lyric labels on CDs, the pressure was always on the retailers like in the 80s and the 90s and the early 2000s.

34:08Like we don't want B. Dalton booksellers to have these books in the mall that kids go to. So we'll pressure the retailers. We'll pressure Walmart to not sell certain music and that means the music is just broadly not available. You represent the independent bookstores. If the government comes and pressures the bookstore, the bookstore doesn't have the resources to fight back. If they come and pressure you, you have a coalition of bookstores. You might have the resources to fight back. Do you see that as part of your role here? It's primarily the role of the American Bookselling Association, who we are very closely aligned with.

34:42But we will certainly – But you've got 90 percent of the bookstores. That's kind of why I'm asking, right? The pressure will come to you. We will fight. If we have to, we will fight. I'd rather not because we don't have a lot of money. But if we have to, we'll fight. And I will say that it's so hypocritical. It's just such nonsense because every one of these people who are screaming about somebody, some kid reading, seriously, Anne Frank. Like Anne Frank is one of the books that they're concerned about because she talks about sexuality when she's 13 years old. And so they're concerned about books like The Diary of Anne Frank.

35:16Meanwhile, like the Internet is filled with porn and the most screwed up, horrible things available. Like any 13-year-old with Google can find the most horrible thing that they can think of in an instant. And they're all online. They're either on Discord or 4chan or whatever. They are not going to be corrupted by a book. If you're lucky, they're reading The Diary of Anne Frank. Like you have to be really lucky if your kid wants to read books in the first place. and nobody's going to have their worldview rocked and corrupted by any of the books that they're trying to ban. It's a complete charade.

35:56There is so much worse material available to every kid and they've all seen it on the internet every single day. The book ban thing is just, speaking of a hoax, like they say it's a hoax because it's not really happening. I think it's a farce because the people who are involved are only doing it for political clout, leverage, fundraising. It's not actually about protecting kids. If they wanted to protect kids from certain disturbing images or points of view, then they would be looking at the World Wide Web. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about taking this project and making it digital, right? Because one, it does seem like you have the stomach for a fight, even if you don't want to have the fight.

36:37But once you make everything digital, once you allow other people to publish e-books, which is a huge part of the e-book phenomenon in the background that I want to get to, once you have distribution that puts you in a fight with the app stores and their fees, you're in a lot more fights in a lot of different ways. So tell me why even start ebooks? Why open the door to this level of conflict in order to sell a product that Amazon essentially dominates the market for? Yeah, well, I think it starts with readers. One out of every six books sold in the country is an e-book and I can't buy it from my local bookstore.

37:15I took a trip with my kids to Europe. My kids wanted to read e-books. They had to buy them through Kindle or, you know, if you're very educated, you can find something like Kobo, which is an alternative platform. But basically there's no way to buy e-books from your local bookstore. That in itself doesn't make sense. Something is like 15 to 20 % of the market, local bookstores should be part of that. And people that want to support local bookstores should be able to do that when they buy e-books. So that is about also taking the corporate control out of e-books. Like one mega retailer is determining how e-books are sold, what e-books get marketed, what e-books get exposed to readers, how the commerce works and how the authors are promoted.

38:03And that retailer has its own self-interest in mind. That is not good for the whole culture around books. It's not good for authors. It's not good for readers. It's not good for publishers. So we need to diversify the e-book landscape and we need to give people who want to support their local bookstores a way that they can buy e-books and support their local bookstore at the same time. That was so important. And additionally, it's a new revenue stream for bookstores. Bookstores are always hanging on by their fingernails. You know, we have more bookstores opening now than we've had in the past 15 years, but they were like one downturn from disappearing.

38:38And so if we can open up a new revenue stream, if they can get 5 % to 10 % of their revenue from eBooks, that's going to be a total game changer for them. It'll make them so much more secure in their communities and help all of their outreach and all their programs that make them so valuable. So it really accomplishes a lot of positive things all at once. And I think that I have a little moral indignation about the fact that there is a fight. It shouldn't be a fight. These should be open systems where every retailer can support the same kind of products and every device can read the same kind of products the way that music works.

39:15So what's interesting about the music industry is that got digitized first through Napster, which had no business model and everyone was stealing everything. Then the iPod. And there was a fight over DRM. And Steve Jobs famously won the DRM fight with the iPod. And they said, just publish MP3s. DRM is never going to work. And the music labels capitulated. Then we moved to Spotify and we brought DRM back. And now everybody has a streaming service that streams DRM music. So it goes. With video, broadly, DRM just won from the beginning. Everything was always DRM from the start. Books could go either way.

39:49Like a book is a PDF. I get a lot of galleys from authors who come on Decoder and I just get PDFs with watermarks. And I'm like, why don't books just work like this? But the publishers obviously want DRM. The Kindle file format is DRM to hell and back and no one else can even read it. There's other formats. The most decoder question of all is like you're in a format war with like a very late 90s DRM problem embedded in the heart of it. How do you think about that problem? Is it we need a new format? Is it the publishers need to give up on DRM because the people want to pay regardless of the existence of piracy?

40:25What is the shape of that conversation in 2025? Yeah. Well, I have a slightly more nuanced view. I think that if you go out on the internet, there's like 80 % of readers don't notice or care. and 20 % of them are adamantly and virulently against DRM. And then publishers, of course, are terrified of the Napster days happening to their industry. They don't want it to all be piracy because the recording industry saw 80 % of their revenue disappear when music went digital and they brought it back now with Spotify and streaming. And so now they've recovered. But it was a big blow. Publishers obviously don't want that to happen.

41:01I think that if there's a system that allows people to own their books, e-books, so they're not leasing them, but they actually own them, they don't have to worry about a device taking them away from them or a retailer taking their books away or making changes to their books after they've purchased them, which we've seen with e-books. So they should own them, they should have control of the content, and they should be portable. They should be able to put them on whatever device they want. I think that there should be a way to do that and still keep authors paid because completely removing every restriction and just being like, okay, we're going to release the new Harry Potter book as a PDF and hope that people pay for it.

41:42I think that they would suffer a massive loss of revenue. And I particularly am concerned about authors even more than I care about publishing companies. Authors should get paid for their work. Artists should get paid for their work, period. And so there should be a system for artists to be paid for the work of writing books. And that needs to be preserved. But DRM was implemented based on Amazon's designs and publishers working with Amazon to prevent piracy. And that happened in 2005, 2006, 2007. It's been a long time. There's new technologies out there. We can find a way to create portable, flexible e-books that are owned that still make sure that the publishers and authors get paid.

42:30So that's, I guess, my holy grail. And that's not going to happen right away. But in five or ten years, I would love to have the kind of clout that Steve Jobs had in saying, like, this has to end or this has to change. The thing is, before you get that kind of clout, you actually have to have some customers. You have to have some readers so that the market will listen to you. So what kind of files are you selling today? They are almost all DRM protected using LCP DRM, which is a new standard, which is a great standard. But that's because major publishers require it. And then we have a small selection of DRM-free e-books that people will be able to buy and download and use on whatever device they want.

43:09And we're going to be growing that DRM-free selection so that we end up with hopefully a catalog that is diverse and has like maybe half DRM-free and half publisher-supported DRM. The Kindle model works because Amazon sells the Kindle hardware at a loss or breakeven maybe. And then they obviously assume that you're going to buy tons of books because it's all a closed ecosystem. You don't have any hardware yet. A lot of people like having hardware. Does your model support you selling cheap hardware? Yeah, I think it does. If we go that route, we're going to do it first through crowdfunding, like an indie alternative to the Kindle where you can support your local bookstore.

43:53And we haven't decided whether we're going to try that or not. We're going to make that decision in a few months. But we already know it works on devices like Books, which is BOOX, which is an Android e-reading device that is quite popular. and our Android app works great on that. We're going to work with Kobo to make sure that people who buy eBooks from their local bookstores can read it on Kobo. And we're going to just try to create as much flexibility as possible. You know, when we launched, like a lot of people want us to solve every single problem with eBooks on launch day, but that's not possible.

44:27Like we're small. We raised$2 million to do this whole thing. Fable, this is another eBook company, they raised$40 million to do this. Scribd has raised$200 million. to do eBooks. Like we are small. We have a hundredth of the resources that our competitors have. In the case of Amazon, we have probably a one ten thousandth of the resources that they have. But we do think that we will be able to create the best environment and platform for e-reading. It's just going to take a few years before we can really do everything we can. And we want people to be able to buy a eBook from their local bookstore and read it on their Kindle too.

45:04But we need Amazon to give us permission to allow us to say, send this to your Kindle and have that sync with the user's Kindle account, which hopefully they'll give to us. But it's going to take time for us to negotiate that. Yeah. I want to come to that because that seems like the big upcoming fight. But let's just stay with the other readers for a second. There's basically in the world, there's the Kobo, which a lot of people like. There's the Nook, which still exists, the Barnes & Noble Nook. I don't know if that is very popular on your radar, but it's out there and exists. And then there is the Books Palma and sort of the ecosystem of basically Android devices with e-ink screens.

45:43The Verge team loves the Books Palma. We talk about this bizarre little thing all the time. There's a difference there, right? The Books Palma and that ecosystem, they're Android devices. You can put your app on there, and that's the support. That's all the more help you need from them, right? They're running the Google Play Store. Your app's in the store. You can support your own DRM standard. You can do whatever you want to do. The Kobos of the world are sort of less like that, right? They're more integrated in some way. You've got to work directly with them to support your standard and your DRM.

46:12That's right. That might implicate their business model, right? Because they're probably planning on purchases on their device. Yeah. How do those negotiations look? Well, with books, it works pretty simply. I send them emails all the time. They never write me back. Yeah, right, because your app is just in the store, right? Like to whatever extent mobile devices are open, they're open, right? But with Kobo, they're closed. Yeah, so books, like it works on books. I love it. I wish I could talk to them because I think that we could work together more. And so if anybody from books listens to this podcast, write me back.

46:48But for Kobo, they want to support us, and we want to support Kobo readers. So we will build a tool to be able to send, to buy an e-book from your local bookstore and read on your Kobo. Now, there is a danger to bookshop in that Kobo also sells e-books. And so if people are buying Kobos because they want to read bookshop e-books, they could switch and just out of laziness or lack of knowledge, just end up buying e-books from Kobo. And that wouldn't be great. But, you know, we try to enter into these agreements with good faith. And I think that the Kobo team has a lot of respect. I know that their CEO has a great reputation.

47:28So I'm kind of thinking if our customers want it and Kobo wants to support it, we're going to trust them to not try to steal over all our customers. And we're going to support Kobo. Do they have to do anything special to support your DRM or your file format? Yeah, I think they will. Not a huge engineering lift, but they'll have to spend a few weeks off integration. Yeah. And then, you know, when I think about other platforms that are sort of similar, Roku comes to mind, right? Roku is pretty open. They'll take any app that wants to play, but then they take a cut of the advertising that appears across all the apps.

48:01And sometimes we hear about some friction in those relationships. Did Kobo ask for a cut of your revenue to appear on their service to do that work? They have not yet. No, I think that they will, I imagine that they just want to sell more Kobos and that's their motivation. So that's the alignment, right? And I kind of want to drill on this a little bit too. You guys are aligned because you want to take market share away from Amazon. Yeah. So you'd like to just sell some books that Amazon isn't selling. That's pretty zero sum. I think Kobo would like to say, our device is more flexible than the Kindle.

48:31Look at this huge list of supported partners. That's not going to be – like it feels like whatever you learn from Kobo is not going to be applicable to the fight you have with Amazon. No, it's not going to really be the same. we have to take another short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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51:51Welcome back. I'm talking with Bookshop.org CEO Andy Hunter about the big thing he's been doing for the last five years and ready to keep doing, picking fights with Amazon. Let's talk about Amazon then. I can see the broader ecosystem. There's an argument that you should just let Amazon and the Kindle be whatever it is. and you should draw people away to this alternative ecosystem and say, look at how bad that is. It's locked you in. Look at how open the world of the Kobo and the books. I have not one, but two e-readers. Innovation is happening here. And then there's the argument that says you should just go fight Amazon and say, let me sell books on your hardware.

52:28It seems like you're going to go pick the fight. Why are you picking the fight? Well, you know, unfortunately I spent the past five years bad-mouthing Amazon. So asking nicely probably won't work. But I will say, the first thing we're going to do is ask nicely, because it doesn't make sense for you to have to buy an e-book from Amazon in order to read it on your Kindle. And we know that they did an integration with Libby to allow people who take out library books to read them on their Kindle. So we know it's possible. We know that took a couple of years for Amazon to agree to it and to facilitate it.

53:07So this isn't going to be a quick fight. But I think our first tack is going to be to go to Amazon and say like, hey, you know, independent bookstores are in trouble. A lot of independent bookstore customers have Kindles. They want to use them. They want to buy their e-books from local bookstores. Be the better company. Do the right thing. Let people read these on their Kindles. If Amazon says yes, then we're going to announce that people can read e-books on their Kindle they bought from the local bookstores, and then we're done. If Amazon says no, then it's an antitrust issue because you can't have a device that has like 85 % of the market for e-readers and say, actually, you've got to buy everything on this device.

53:45You've got to buy it from us. And that's equivalent to like if Apple said on the iPhone, you can only buy music from Apple Music. You're not allowed to have Spotify or any other platform, title, whatever. No other music is allowed on the iPhone. You have to buy it from Apple Music because of piracy. And you also can't watch Netflix on your iPad anymore. No, you've got to go through Apple TV. And you've got to download all of your movies from Apple TV as well because we're worried about piracy. So we can't allow Hulu or Netflix or whatever. Obviously, nobody would stand for that. It would be insane.

54:18And, you know, back in the 80s when Microsoft was selling every copy of Windows and they were like, you have to use Microsoft Internet Explorer. That was an antitrust issue, too. And Netscape successfully sued them and Microsoft had to open it up. When you have complete control of a market and you're shutting out all of these content sellers based on your ownership of the hardware, you have an antitrust risk. And so I think that we have a strong case that as a hardware manufacturer, they have a very popular piece of hardware that's great. They can't control where people buy things in order to use it on the hardware.

55:01I hate to be pedantic, but I feel like the CEO of a bookstore company is the right person to be pedantic with. The Justice Department sued Microsoft. Oh, yeah. Tried to break them up, started with Clinton, went to Bush. They eventually settled. Microsoft didn't win or lose. They just ended up under a consent decree that Microsoft will tell you distracted them for years and allowed Netscape and whoever else to thrive. It's much more complicated than Netscape, just one. But that's the shape of it. That's also the shape of a lot of things that are happening now in the antitrust world, right? Google is being sued and the government would like to break off Chrome from Google.

55:37That rhymes with the Microsoft case. Apple is being sued by the Justice Department. We'll see how that goes. Epic Games famously has sued Apple and Google. That feels like the most direct comparison to what you're saying about Amazon. Epic sued Google. They won because Google has to pressure its partners. It has to pressure Samsung and Motorola and whoever else to keep control of the phones when they run Android. And so there's a lot of deal-making and contracts and evidence that Google exerts this pressure on its partners. And so Epic won because they were able to show that pressure. They more or less lost against Apple because Apple doesn't have to exert pressure on anyone.

56:18They don't have to behave anti-competitively when it's their own phone in their own store. And that's kind of what you're up against here with the Kindle, right? It's Amazon's device. It's their store. They have the Apple precedent that's going to say, well, you own the whole thing tip to tail. You're not doing anything anti-competitively because there's no one else in the mix. And you're going to have to show, well, this is harming consumers. It's raising prices. How are you thinking about that fight, given that context? Yeah. Well, Apple has Android to point to saying, we don't control this market.

56:52Yeah. Right? So the phone market is very diverse compared to the e-reader, e-ink device market, where Amazon has a very, very locked down control of it. And all books and Kobo are just tiny fractions of the market compared to Amazon's control. So I think that there's a much stronger argument that there isn't another place to go. If you're an independent bookstore and you want to sell e-books to your customer, they've almost all got Kindles. And asking them to buy a different device is onerous. How is it harming consumers? I think that that argument will have to be more like, how is this harming small businesses?

57:36it definitely harms small businesses because it makes it impossible for them to sell ebooks to their customers and the more that you have market control definitely like in terms of discounts daily deals sales that kind of thing like independent bookstores can't create their own ecosystem right so maybe an author would be like okay i love my local bookstore so i'm going to do a special deal where for my local bookstores they can sell my ebook for 199 for the next six weeks. They can't do that right now because of Amazon's control of the market. So if we have a more diverse market, then there's competition between them and then possibly consumers will benefit.

58:18I've asked a handful of questions about Epic. They've been at the vanguard of fighting the App Store antitrust fights. Have you talked to Tim Sweeney? Does he have any tips for you? No, I would love to. But I think Bookshop is just becoming big enough that we would be on people like that's radar. We were an underdog with almost no funding, and we didn't exist five years ago. And now we're becoming big enough that people are noticing us. And so I'm hoping to have those kind of conversations now. The other antitrust case that I think about in this context is actually a books case. The Justice Department, I believe, sued Apple because it wanted to create new kinds of contracts to compete with Amazon to put books on the iPad at the beginning.

59:01Some very complicated dynamics around pricing and who would get to price what and how and most favored nation trading agreements. And in the end, Apple lost and it feels like they also stopped carrying out books at all. They're not a competitor. We have barely even mentioned them in this context. And Amazon still dominates the marketplace. Have you looked to that case at all? Is there anything to learn from that? Because I think most people would tell you that one was a failure. It didn't achieve its goals, even though they won? Yeah, I don't know what the Justice Department were thinking. That was like a big priority for them.

59:36It was a big gift to Amazon. I mean, what I learned from that is like, be very, very careful not to collude with anybody. Like be very careful talking about discounts, talking about strategic plans with publisher partners, etc. So, you know, we don't do that. I mean, I'm very open about what our ambitions are. I'll talk on a podcast about them, but I don't go into any back rooms because I think that's what really screwed over Apple and the publishers is that they were, you know, kind of plotting, like, how do we rest the e-book market from Amazon and create a more diverse ecosystem? Like Bookshop, it's like, we're trying to do the same thing.

1:00:14We want to create a diverse ecosystem around e-books too. But we're not like smoking cigars in the back room of Penguin Random House trying to figure out how to do it. We're just openly operating and trying to just negotiate contracts with people and work within existing frameworks. I will say the only thing I truly remember about the Apple e-books case was that there was some evidence that there were back rooms. Yeah. And E.Q. was in the back rooms, like drinking wine and making deals. And to me as a baby reporter, my eyes are open. I was like, there are back rooms. Exactly. It's very good. Isn't Apple the bigger problem here or Google the bigger problem here that you can't just straightforwardly sell digital products in your app?

1:00:58Like wouldn't that let you compete against the Kindle much more than just head up fighting Amazon? It would. And that's another big part of it. So, as I think I said in the beginning of the podcast, if Apple wants us 30%, that's fine, but it should be 30 % of the available profit margin, not 30 % of the cover price. Because the cover price does not reflect what the profit is for us as a retailer. If Apple was like, we're going to take 30 % of all of your book sales after you pay the publishers, we would be selling tons of e-books on Apple. And, you know, maybe that's a rational perspective and we could get them to do it.

1:01:38I think that the reason that they wouldn't do it is not because it doesn't make sense. I think they wouldn't do it because they don't want to lose any leverage. They're trying to stern very firm against things like gaming companies, etc. And so to make anything that would look like a concession, even if it made sense, I don't know if they would do it. but we'll try for sure. Cause we don't want customers to have to jump through hoops. I mean, literally I had an employee's mom try to buy an ebook yesterday and be like, Oh, I don't understand this app. Like, I'm very excited about you guys doing this, but I can't buy an ebook.

1:02:12I can only add it to a digital wishlist. And like, she just think we're bad at our jobs. She thinks she doesn't understand though. There's actually an economic reason for this. So it's a better, it'll benefit consumers. It'll benefit everybody if the app stores change, but also it's really important for e-ink devices to change because most people who read e-ink, who read e-books, they want to read it on an e-ink device. And Kindle is by far the most popular. So like, I'm glad that books exist. I have also reached, I reached out to remarkable. I've been reaching out to all these e-ink companies.

1:02:43None of them, none of them write me back. It's very sad, but one day they will. Maybe now that we've been in the New York times about this, and now that I'm on this podcast, they'll start writing me back. And we can really start pushing their products because we have over 3 million customers. We have over 2 ,200 retail locations. There's a lot of opportunity for other e-ink companies to go in and use e-reading as a way in to become a much more popular device. And so I'm looking for people to partner with on that. The underlying user experience that makes all this work is really just about seamlessness, right?

1:03:20You buy one of those devices and maybe you bought some books from Bookshop and maybe you bought some books from the native Kobo experience and maybe you've bought some Kindle books. You're kind of right. I keep making the comparison of Roku, but you're kind of right where people are with streaming video now, which is I have a million different pieces of content across a million services and no one has built a UI that harmonizes at all. And it's kind of even weirder with books because it's just text files. Like, it's crazy that the DRM can silo text files in that way. Is there any push to letting other apps read the files you're selling?

1:03:53Or alternatively, letting your app read the Kindle files? Because that's what you really want is a unified library. Yeah, I would love it. I think all digital content should be portable. And you know, I'm not a big blockchain person. I think a lot of it has been hype and smoke and mirrors. But blockchain makes sense for me in that regard. Like there should be some kind of portable ownership of digital goods that is verifiable, that can control piracy, but also allows people to say, this is my ebook, this is my movie. I'm getting a new device. I'm switching from Apple to Samsung or whatever. I'm going to take my library with me.

1:04:31That's like basic. Everybody would agree with that. So like it's going to take a long time for that to happen. But I think the next five to 10 years is possible. I feel like I can hear Decoder listeners with Kindles. They've been yelling at us the whole time because the send a Kindle button exists for like EPUB files or whatever. It's been there for a minute. Would you, is that an acceptable ad? Is that something you can let people just do from the Bookshop app? We can do it for DRM free titles. Now of the major US publishers, there's only one imprint that supports DRM, which is Tor, which is a great science fiction publisher.

1:05:06I love them. and Tor Books would be possible. And any publisher or author, indie authors especially, that don't require DRM, you could use that for it. But there is no way to buy a DRM encrypted book, which means there's no way to buy a book from Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the country, and read it on your Kindle without buying it from Amazon. So if you want to read almost any book on the New York Times for sale list on your Kindle, you have to buy it from Amazon right now because those publishers require encryption. That is like changing that whole landscape either by giving Amazon permission or whether Amazon giving us permission or enabling sideloading somehow or send a Kindle.

1:05:52I'd say that that's phase two. Phase three is looking at the whole way that e-books are sold and owned and transcending the kind of leasing model where people don't actually own e-books, they're all on lease, and figuring out a better way to do it where consumers can buy e-books and have a library that's portable and that they can own for 100 years, that they can give to their grandkids. When you think about that, that's like a user experience. Does the technology to do that exist today outside of maybe some blockchain hype? Yeah, not really. No. That's why I'm saying a 10-year horizon on it. Yeah.

1:06:38There's the 10-year horizon and there's just the reality of today. And I kind of want to end here because it's more or less where we started. The Biden administration, the Lena Kahn, FTC, they were probably broadly supportive of these ideas, right? I haven't asked any of them, but we should make things more interoperable and the big companies should be smaller. Broadly speaking, that was what the Biden administration thought. The Trump administration is like, do more mergers. We're getting rid of our antitrust enforcement. Like, how do you see all these fights playing out now that the landscape has shifted so dramatically?

1:07:16I think it's really dangerous. I think that people mistakenly think that, oh, this is capitalism. But it's really monopolism. So capitalism and free market can be fine. But if you try to allow companies to become monopolies and let them control the market so they can ensure profitability and stifle competition, that's no longer what's good about capitalism. And so, like, while the Trump administration might pretend that they're unleashing business, what they're really doing is just allowing for more consolidation and more control. And if you have other control, like if Musk buys TikTok, which they're floating, then you've got one person in charge of two major social media companies that then creates more possibilities of bias.

1:08:03And it seems like there's going to be very little antitrust enforcement under this administration. And then you look at what happened just now with OpenAI and the Chinese AI company, and you see what can happen to markets that are so reliant on capital that they have this great consolidation. They can actually get disrupted pretty in the end by a free market that is much more loose and distributed. So I think it's too, like the Trump administration and the big business people that think that they're going to hit the jackpot by removing all regulation are in for a rude awakening because they're not going to be helping themselves in the end.

1:08:47Unless they can reach complete control, in which case we're all screwed, they're going to end up being too big to fail and then being disrupted and failing. But let me just bring that back to the specifics of we've launched ebooks. And there's a fight against Apple to let you sell ebooks in your app and a fight against Amazon to let you read ebooks on their device. The dynamic, like even just in the past six weeks, the dynamics of the regulatory environment that would let you win or lose that, those fights have changed. Has it changed your appetite for those fights? No, not at all. Time goes on.

1:09:22All those fights would take five years anyway. Like that's why diplomacy is our first option. I'm going to try to reach these through diplomacy, and I'm also going to try to build really robust alternative systems that will make this less important. So we do a lot of different things at once, and then some of them will succeed and some of them will go nowhere. But the ultimate goal is we're going to have the best ecosystem and reading experience for people who buy e-books. And we're going to use that platform to support local businesses, keep money in people's communities, support the kind of activism and endorsement of books and literary culture that small bookstores perform every day in their communities.

1:10:03And so it's all going to be good. And it's not going to be owned by a giant monopolist. So that's going to be good, too. And it's going to preserve book culture. And I personally feel like my life would have been totally empty without books. I really am one of these people who say, like, books changed my life or saved my life. And so giving back to that, preserving that culture, making sure that it's sustainable and thrives in the next 10, 20, 30 years is, like, completely worth the fight. Yeah. Well, I can't think of a better place to end it. Andy, thank you so much for joining Decoder. Yeah, thank you.

1:10:40I'd like to thank Andy Hunter for joining me on Decoder today. And thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at decoderattheverge.com. We really do read all the emails. You can also hit me up directly on Threads or Blue Sky, and we have a TikTok for 60-some more days, I think. Check it out. It's at decoderpod. It's a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

1:11:07Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Xander Adams. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time. Thank you.