Bookshop.org launches game-changing ebook platform

 Bookshop.org launches game-changing ebook platform 

to support indie bookshops

●        For the first time ever, UK indies will be able to sell ebooks to their customers

●        The launch marks Bookshop.org’s fifth anniversary

●        Bookshops will make 100% profit on every ebook they sell

●        A much-awaited alternative to Amazon to buy ebooks, at no extra cost

●        Bookshop.org to launch audiobook sales next year

London, Wednesday 1 October 2025. Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that champions indie bookshops, is today introducing their new ebook platform, enabling UK bookshops to profit from ebook sales for the first time in history, and to go head-to-head with Amazon’s Kindle apps.

Launching just in time for Bookshop.org’s fifth anniversary this autumn, the new platform empowers bookshops to sell ebooks while earning 100% of the profits from those sales. It also offers readers a concrete alternative to Amazon to purchase their favourite ebooks, at the same price as other retail platforms.

Built to boost revenue streams for brick-and-mortar bookshops, Bookshop.org’s ebook platform is a monumental addition to its giveback model, and a significant move to enrich the publishing ecosystem. It will enable bookshops to access the growing ebook market in the UK – valued £298 million by a recent Publishers Association report.

A recent YouGov book study found that for 25% of readers, ebooks are their main way of reading. Ebook sales had a strong year in 2024, rebounding from the post-pandemic drop off (source: Nielsen BookData). The new ebook service from Bookshop.org will enable ebook-savvy readers to support their local bookshop even when they want to read books digitally.

The new platform, available online via any web browser and through the Bookshop.org apps

on Apple and Android, launches with a catalogue of over a million ebooks, including works from major publishers, providing something for every type of reader. The app also fosters community engagement by allowing readers to share their favorite book moments on social media.

Nic Bottomley, from Mr B’s Emporium, said: “We are absolutely thrilled that the good people of Bookshop.org have crafted a way for our customers to support Mr B’s (and all high street bookshops) whenever they want to buy a book in digital form. Our true love might be print, but ebooks are an important part of the lives of SO many readers and it’s going to be fantastic to be add into our mix a seamless ebook service, by working in collaboration with Bookshop.org.”

CP Hunter, from The Folkestone Bookshop, said: “As a reader who travels a lot, being able to access e-books from more platforms than just my local library is brilliant, and even more exciting that it's from the ethical platform that is Bookshop.org. As a bookseller, making books even more accessible while still supporting independent shops is nothing but great news! Bookshop.org are an incredible resource and a company that truly support indies so another way to work with them and share more books with our customers all over the country is really important.”

Erin Kelly, Author of He Said/She Said and The Poison Tree, said: “One of the best things about the eBook revolution has been the ability to reach readers who can’t access traditional books. I’m thrilled that the ultimate inclusive format is now available on Bookshop.org, and can contribute to the UK’s precious independent bookseller network.”

Cathy Bramley, Author of  The Lemon Tree Café, said: “I’m delighted that Bookshop.org will be offering ebooks. This is another great opportunity to support our fabulous indie bookshops and a really exciting addition to an already wonderful website. I love the feel of a paperback, but I’m a huge fan of ebooks. I travel a lot and as I invariably have my e-reader or iPad and even my phone with me, I’ve always got my current read at my fingertips. I’ll be signposting readers to my ebooks on Bookshop.org from now on!”

Andy Hunter, CEO and Founder of Bookshop.org, said: “When we launched Bookshop.org, the vision was to support local bookstores in their battle against Amazon and other online retailers. Our ebook launch furthers our commitment to help bookstores flourish in the digital age. After introducing our ebook platform in the US earlier this year, we are thrilled to see how ebook sales are going for bookshops. We are already a year ahead of our original plan, and ebooks make up 5% of our overall sales in the US. We are looking forward to ebooks expanding to the UK, empowering stores across the pond to be even more competitive.”

Nicole Vanderbilt, Managing Director of Bookshop.org UK, said: “We’re beyond excited to be adding this revolutionary offering to our platform. Digital readers don’t depend on Amazon’s monopoly anymore, now that they can find ebooks at the same price on Bookshop.org. Meanwhile, bookshops now have an additional tool in their fight against Amazon, in line with our mission of helping them succeed in the age of ecommerce. We trust authors, organisations, and influencers will embrace this launch with open arms, as a milestone for the UK book industry: we’re finally making it possible to buy books digitally whilst helping indie bookshops and their communities to thrive.”

Digitally-inclined readers can directly support the bookshop of their choosing on Bookshop.org, either selecting themby visiting ‘Choose a Bookshop’ or buying ebooks through a bookshop’s own link. This will ensure the full profit goes to supporting that chosen shop. Alternatively, profits from orders without a specified bookshop go to the shared profit pool, which is distributed among all participating bookshops on the platform, further benefitting the literary community.

Bookshop.org is planning to enrich its digital offering by launching audiobook sales in 2026. More information will be announced in due course. 

For the latest developments, subscribe to Bookshop.org’s newsletter and follow them on social media at @bookshop_org_uk.

 

New name in digital publishing is launched - Blasted Heath

Al Guthrie who is best known to the crime fiction world as the author of the excellent debut novel Two Way Split and a literary agent with his own list at Jenny Brown Agency (Scotland) is diversifying again! A long-time supporter of e-books, Al Guthrie along with Kyle MacRae has moved into the world of digital publishing. The company will be officially launched on 1 November and aim to publish around 30 books a year. Whilst they will not solely be publishing crime books, there will be a large number of crime books published by them. The full press release can be seen below -

PRESS RELEASE

Edinburgh, UK – 11th October 2011

Announcing Blasted Heath, a new name in digital publishing

Award-winning novelist and literary agent, Allan Guthrie, has joined forces with serial entrepreneur and social media expert, Kyle MacRae, to create a new digital-only publishing company, Blasted Heath (http://blastedheath.com/). The Scottish company will launch on November 1st with five titles and will publish around 30 books per year, available in various ebook formats.

The opening line-up of Blasted Heath titles includes three crime novels by critically acclaimed writers, Ray Banks, Douglas Lindsay and Anthony Neil Smith, and two debut novels: a cyberthriller by Gary Carson and a novel for film lovers by movie critic Brian Pendreigh. (See below for more info on the books)

Co-founder Allan Guthrie's self-published digital edition of a novella, Bye Bye Baby, outsold his entire print backlist in only four months, becoming an Amazon top ten bestseller and opening his eyes to the possibilities of digital publishing.

Guthrie says: "There's a fierce amount of talent on display and there's a lot more to come. I firmly believe there's never been a more exciting time to be a reader, a writer or a publisher. With the publishing industry becoming increasingly risk-averse, the rapid expansion of the ebook market is a wonderful opportunity for a creative and innovative publisher to break new ground. Blasted Heath combines my publishing experience with Kyle's marketing background to create a new model of digital publisher that connects readers with writers and gets books in front of readers in exciting new ways."

Alongside digital downloads, Blasted Heath is launching with the Blasted Box set, a physical product for the gift market that offers readers the five launch novels on a branded USB stick in a presentation pack.

Contact: Allan Guthrie Blasted Heath allan@blastedheath.com 07738 704292

###

NOTES FOR EDITORS

Blasted Heath is launching on November 1st, 2011. Until then, the website is protected by a holding page with a promotional video.

Blasted Heath intro video from Blether Video on Vimeo.

Review copies of the books and a sample of the Blasted Box set are available on request. The launch titles are: All The Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith, Dead Money by Ray Banks, Phase Four by Gary Carson, The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay, and The Man in the Seventh Row by Brian Pendreigh.

Allan Guthrie and Kyle MacRae are available for interview.

All Blasted Heath ebooks are supplied in three file formats to ensure compatibility with all current ebook readers: PRC (for the Kindle), EPUB (for virtually all other ebook readers, including the Nook, Kobo, Sony etc), and PDF (compatible with virtually all smartphones and computers).

All Blasted Heath titles are free from digital rights management (DRM).

Allan Guthrie won the Theakston's Crime Novel of the Year in 2007 with his debut novel, Two Way Spilt, and has published a further four crime novels, most recently Slammer, described by the Scotsman as "a book as inventive and groundbreaking as it is magnificently written.” He also has his own client list at Jenny Brown Associates, the largest literary agency in Scotland, and is a former commissioning editor for cult US crime publisher, PointBlank Press.

Kyle MacRae, a former journalist and technical author, launched Scoopt, the world's first citizen journalism picture agency, in 2005 and sold it to Getty Images in 2007. He went on to create and run Blether Media, a dedicated social media marketing agency based in Glasgow.

Info about books -

Dead Money by Ray Banks - Double-glazing salesman Alan Slater is in trouble. He hasn’t had a good sales lead in months. His wife rightly suspects him of playing around. His best mate Les Beale has turned into a bigoted, boozed-up headcase. And that is the least of it. When a rigged poker game has fatal consequences, Alan finds himself not only responsible for the clean-up, but also for Beale’s escalating debt to a man who won’t take “broke” for an answer. As Beale’s life spirals out of control, he becomes ever more desperately reliant on Alan to save his skin.

But Alan isn’t about to be dragged into the gutter by anyone, least of all his bad-beat, dead money former mate. After all, there’s no such thing as a compassionate double-glazing salesman.

All The Young Warriors by Anthony Neil Smith
When two of the Twin Cities’ “Lost Boys” – young Somali men drafted to fight for terrorists back in the homeland – kill a pair of cops on his home turf, detective Ray Bleeker is left devastated. One of the dead cops was his girlfriend. The investigation grinds to a halt when he discovers that the young murderers have fled to Somalia to fight in the real rebel army. He’s at his wits’ end when the father of one of the boys, an ex-gang leader named Mustafa comes looking for answers, wanting to clear his son’s name and refusing to take no for an answer.

Bleeker and Mustafa form an uneasy alliance, teaming up to help bring the boys back home to stand trial. But little do they know what Somalia has in store for them.

Murder, warfare, piracy, love, betrayal and revenge. All the Young Warriors is an epic thriller that will have you white-knuckling your eReader all through the night.

The Man in the Seventh Row by Brian Pendreigh - What happened that turned one man’s world inside out?

Roy is a film fan. He loves the cinema. Maybe he loves the cinema a little too much. Lately things have been going wrong. He settles into his favourite seat to watch an old movie, but he is not seeing what he expects to see. No matter the film – The Graduate, Brief Encounter, The Magnificent Seven – he finds himself sucked from his seventh-row seat into the heart of the action on the big screen.

Roy’s everywhere. Playing lead rolls in dozens of classic movies. A fantasy come true? Or a living nightmare?

The Long Midnight of Barney Thomson by Douglas Lindsay

Barney Thomson – awkward, diffident, Glasgow barber – lives a life of desperate mediocrity. Shunned at work and at home, unable to break out of a twenty-year rut, each dull day blends seamlessly into the next.

However, there is no life so tedious that it cannot be spiced up by inadvertent murder, a deranged psychopath, and a freezer full of neatly packaged meat. Barney Thomson’s uninteresting life is about to go from 0 to 60 in five seconds, as he enters the grotesque and comically absurd world of the serial killer ….

Phase Four by Gary Carson - On a remote desert highway in Nevada, a classified military convoy transporting nerve gas for incineration is hijacked by a group of Middle Eastern terrorists. In San Francisco, Homeland Security investigator Matthew Drake is assigned to put one of the suspects under surveillance. But when the gas is released inside a luxury high-rise hotel in an apparent attempt to assassinate the President, Drake realises – too late – that the hijackers weren’t terrorists, the convoy wasn’t carrying nerve gas and that something is very wrong in Washington D.C.

Now mobs are rioting in the Bay Area – fighting amongst themselves, jumping out of windows, creating utter chaos. And it’s spreading across California at a frightening speed, threatening to engulf the entire country.

Hunted by professional killers who seem to be working for his own employers, Drake finds himself on the run with disgraced CIA surveillance technician Gena Hahn, but he’s not sure which side she’s on. Locked up in a FEMA camp as the United States descends into madness, held prisoner in a secret Continuity of Government facility miles under the Utah desert, they struggle to survive a conspiracy gone wrong – a sinister plan to achieve total control over the human mind.

The 2010 “Notables” in Publishing

PW has issued its 2010 ‘Notables List’ and is certainly interesting as it mentions The IPAD as one 2010’s notables –

It may seem surprising to name a device among our publishing people of the year, but this has been a surprising year, especially where devices and their impact on publishing are concerned. The iPad has had a colossal impact on the book business in 2010, both in terms of what's already happened because of it, and the promise it holds for the future of books. Everybody wants to be on the iPad, and, for the most part, everybody is: the iPad lets users read books from not just iBooks but from all the e-book stores—Kindle, Kobo, Nook, and, soon, Sony—via each company's apps. And then there's the App Store itself, which is brimming with stand-alone enhanced e-book apps as well as games and utilities based on books. Plus, all kinds of straight-to-iPad publications are debuting all the time: we can only assume we'll see more and more built-for-tablet books. And with Google in the e-book game, forget about it—it'll be all about the iPad.Of course, iPad won't be the only tablet in town come 2011, but it has set the bar: every other tablet that hits the streets will be an iPad competitor, though almost certainly not an iPad killer. Whether or not E-Ink e-readers survive the tablet revolution remains to be seen, but you hardly hear anyone talking about the Kindle these days without comparing it to the iPad.

Read More

While Sonny Mehta of Random House US has benefited from spotting the potential of Stieg Larsson Trilogy making him once again listed as a 2010 ‘notable’ at PW -

Today Random House is predicting that Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy, launched with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, will sell 15 million copies in all formats in 2010 alone. Larsson has become an American publishing phenomenon, and it's largely thanks to Sonny Mehta.Mehta, who's been at Knopf since 1987, is certainly no stranger to big authors, big books, and big deals. Although Larsson came to U.S. shores with a track record—when I spoke to Mehta in 2008 Knopf said Larsson had sold over two million copies in his native Sweden alone—there's no telling what would have happened if his books had landed in the hands of a different publisher. For Mehta, it was all about Larsson's punk hacker-with-a-heart, Lisbeth Salander. "I knew [the books'] potential success rested squarely on Lisbeth's shoulders and was banking on American readers being as captivated by her as I was," Mehta says in an e-mail last week. (In a letter by Mehta inserted in ARCs for Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, he called Salander "one of the most original heroines to come along in years.")

Incidentally, the Larsson novels are the most downloaded ebooks currently, and were the first to break the 1,000,000 download barrier.



Christopher Fowler’s Paperboy Recognized

One of my favourite horror / thriller writers is Christopher Fowler, now renowned for his surreal Bryant and May Detective series. So I was delighted to learn that his superb memoir has won the Green Carnation Award –

The Guardian reports –

Fowler's memoir recounts the tale of a suburban London boy who divides his time between the cinema and the library, devouring stories and taking refuge from a tense family environment in the world of words. The prize panel called the book "beautifully written", and "a rich and astute evocation of a time and a place", recalling a childhood "at once eccentric and endearingly ordinary." Chair of the judges, novelist Paul Magrs, said Paperboy was "about the forming of a gay sensibility – but more than that, it's about the growth of a reader and a wonderfully generous and inventive writer".

Magrs, who is also a lecturer on the Manchester Metropolitan University's creative writing MA, helped set up the Green Carnation prize earlier this year after realising there was no literary award for gay men's books in the UK. He described the lack of such a prize as "scandalous", saying: "There ought to be something that celebrates and publicises the breadth and variety of their work. Writing by gay men can be funny, exciting, harrowing, uplifting and challenging – and it can range right across the genres. It can also be created by men from all classes and races."

Read more from The Guardian Here and from Chris Fowler’s Blog Here while here’s a short clip of Chris Fowler speaking at Frightfest 4 about ‘Paperboy’