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2025-02-03 16:14:46 ·

Kepler Interactive says it's still worth betting on bold, interesting games

www.gamedeveloper.com

Every week since mid-2023, the game industry has been given brutal reminder after brutal reminder that the video game marketplace is very tough right now for developers of all shapes and sizes. Even as games like Fortnite dominate the market, Epic Games still laid off workers. And teams like Surgent Studios have learned the hard way that you can release a game like Tales of Kenzara to positive reviews, and still not earn enough money to keep your team employed.These and other challenges have sent many publishers scrambling for new audiences in the world of UGC games like Roblox, ripening field of browser-based games built on WebGPU, or the growing PC market emerging in China. "Why," they might ask "should we take big bets on the saturated PC and console markets?"Well some still arelike Kepler Interactive, the British publisher whose portfolio ranges from driving survival game Pacific Drive, to soccer sim Rematch, to the colorful Metroid-inspired Ultros to the upcoming French-inspired fantasy game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It's an eccentric portfolio for the publisher that started out with the martial arts action title Sifu, one only united by the idea that somewhere out there, there is an audience of interested players out there in the deeply-stuffed marketplace.Related:Kepler Interactive senior portfolio manager Matthew Handrahan (a former comrade in the world of B2B games journalism) has looked at the market numbers, and admits they paint a "pretty frightening picture." But he argues the focus on high interest in older games obscures a key fact driving his work: "The relatively small percentage of people that buy new games, I do think actually buy quite a lot of new games each year," he said in a recent chat with Game Developer.That audience might not be purchasing all of Kepler's games. But the publisher's bet, he said, is that there are different pockets of players with different interests who make those purchasing decisions. He thinks developers should know that even in hard times, those audiences are worth chasing, especially if you have a unique game worth making.In search of "real specificity"According to Handrahan, Kepler Interactive's overall publishing strategy runs on something of a "gut feeling" approach. The strategy, he said, is to look for games that folks inside the publisher are excited about and will advocate for. While the team still considers traditional publisher needs like budgets and production viability, there's a sense that if someone at Kepler is really passionate about the game, there will be an audience out there who will feel as equally excited and will want to play it. Having staffers with different tastes helps the team cast a wide net and diversify its portfolio.Devs wanting to catch the attention of Handrahan and his peers should know that they're looking for what he calls "a real specificity." "Take Sifu for example," he said. "Sifu could very easily be a 2D side-scrolling pixel art game, right? It has a similar structure to many of those games...but what Sloclap really [wanted] to do there was to emulate a certain style of Hong Kong action cinema. Not just the martial arts moves, but also the way the camera moves and the editing."Calling that vision "specific," he said it's the main reason the game stood out from similar titles on the market.He nodded to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and Pacific Drive as two other games with "specific" visions. "It's a case of starting with an experience they wanted to create and then working [their] way to the gameplay that's going to deliver that. I see a lot of pitches each year, and I get the impression that a lot of pitches go the other way around. They start in a genre and work towards the theme and you just end up in a place that that's quite simple.""We want our games to genuinely situate themselves more broadly in culture, not just video games."Image via Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive.If you're the data-driven type who bristles at the gut-feeling approach Handrahand decidesthat's fair. "It does sound simplistic," he admitted. "But actually I feel like any other approach is just as easy to pick apart." He nodded to market-driven publishing strategies that encourage developers to iterate on popular genres. "What is the market going to be in two years time or three years time? I think there is a danger in looking at what's there today and then signing a game on the basis of that because you 20 other companies might have done exactly the same thing, and by the time you come to market, everything's saturated."Devs do still need a sense of realismHandrahand still hedged some bets about Kepler's "gut feel" strategy, seeming to acknowledge that the realities of the market still can trump an incredible vision. He namechecked three genresMetroidvanias, first-person narrative games, and 2.5 sidescrollersas spaces so saturated that developers could only bet on success with low budgets and small teams.It's a message he sometimes has to deliver to developers with great pitches he runs into when out at events. He seemed a bit sheepishsaying he's not a "blunt" person and that it can be hard to give that kind of feedback.But he's trying to be more comfortable communicating that difficulty, and encouraging developers to explore if their vision can be adjusted to match the market. He said it's worth doing because "if it's something you can see they're really passionate about, then try to steer them towards something you legitimately feel could [be] more interesting to publishers at large."Image via Ironwood Studios/Kepler Interactive.And if you're pitching Kepler right now, you'd do well to come with one hell of a pitch deck and first playable. The team still believes in visions, but with the "buyer's market" for publishers at the moment, the bar for what developers are bringing to the table is higher than ever. Kepler's advice differed from the likes we've heard from Finji CEO Bekah Saltsman, so be sure to practice due diligence on what the folks you're talking to are looking for in a pitch deck.Handrahand said he looks for dense pitch decks alongside a first playable that lays out high level game ideas, and works through core aspects of a game like progression, systems, and narrative (if those are key pillars in your game). Calling himself a "freak," he said he doesn't like the idea that developers aren't supposed to overwhelm publishers with long slide decks. "That might just be because I'm a [former] journalist, and I'm used to reading lots of things, but I think...you don't want to leave too many question marks, because you shouldn't assume you'll get the opportunity for those questions to be answered at any point."That said, you don't need to open your pitch with the 20 page long lore document explaining the unique game world you're in. He suggested developers producing lean decks produce appendices and supplemental documents they can hand over to interested parties.Those documents should have some kind of sense of the game's budget, partly because Handrahand and his colleagues need to know if it's the kind of budget Kepler can even support. It's unfortunately a bit of a goldilocks situationyour budget can't be too big or too small, but somehow just right.Searching for video game starsThe fact Kepler still sees fertile ground in the traditional PC an console markets isn't a panacea for all of the game industry's woes. The company can only publish so many games, and while similar outfits like Raw Fury, Fellow Traveler, and Hooded Horse are equally focused on the market, there just isn't enough cash to go aroundand not every game these groups publish will find its audience.But Kepler's business bet (that's already paid dividends) is that those audiences are, in one way or another, out there. That attitude is a quiet pushback against some of the emerging wisdom around the video game industry contraction of the last few years. It's getting tiring going on LinkedIn and reading a random executive slagging the conventional games market and insisting developers start crunching on games for Roblox.There is wisdom in looking for fresh playersbut with the right strategy, publishers and developers alike can find those players where they already are.

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@TheVerge shared a link

2025-02-03 16:14:53 ·

Bookshop CEO Andy Hunter&#8217;s crusade to save books from Amazon

www.theverge.com

Today, Im talking with Andy Hunter, the CEO of Bookshop.org. Bookshop, at its core, is a website that lets local bookshops all over the country and in a few other countries sell their books online. If you want a book, you go to Bookshop and click buy its just as easy as Amazon, except a local bookstore gets some of the money.Just recently, Bookshop launched ebooks to compete with Amazons giant Kindle business a simple idea with some fun and complicated Decoder problems just under the surface.Andy started Bookshop in January 2020 after years of frustration with Amazon. It was a bad time for the world, as covid-19 pandemic lockdowns were about to begin, but it was a great time to launch a website that let people support their local stores without going outside. And so the pandemic propelled Bookshop through some very quick early growth.Bookshop is a mission-driven company with a strong philosophy, and that growth has paid a lot of money out to bookstores. Right there at the top of Bookshops website is a big counter telling you how much money its raised for local booksellers. Right now, that number is more than $35 million. So I wanted to know: how does that money work, and how can Andy afford to keep the lights on with so much of Bookshops profit going back to local bookstores? And I also wanted to know how hes making enough money to expand, because that expansion into ebooks is a big one.Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verges Nilay Patel about big ideas and other problems. Subscribe here!There are plenty of interesting, alternative e-readers out there the Kobo has a following, and many folks here at The Verge are fans of the Boox Palma. But the Kindle handily leads the marketplace. And Amazon has a big chokehold not just on the Kindle content, but also on the hardware itself, which really doesnt read other kinds of books. So, for Andy and Bookshop to get what they want, theyre probably going to have to gear up for a big fight against Amazon to make sure the Kindle can read their files. Thats absolute pure Decoder bait. Youve got antitrust, closed app stores, file formats, and DRM we really got into it. The interesting comparisons in my mind are the antitrust cases Epic Games filed against Apple and Google, and youll hear us talk in depth about those. Andys also willing to pick some other fights, as needed. Books, after all, are speech. Theyre one of the oldest ways we have of sharing and communicating ideas, and the political environment in the United States right now is very hostile to some ideas. Books that discuss race, gender, and sexuality are being banned across the country, and those bans are ramping up as the Trump administration goes to war against whatever it thinks DEI is, using a pretty self-serving view of free speech. As you can imagine, someone like Andy, who fundamentally wants books to thrive, has pretty strong feelings about all of that ones that go far beyond partisan politics.One note before we start: youll hear Andy say that Bookshop is a B Corp. Thats a special certification from an organization called B Lab, which says a company is structured in specific ways that dont just benefit shareholders. Its an interesting idea with a complicated history and even a little controversy in the mix well link an explainer in the show notes.Okay, Bookshop.org CEO Andy Hunter. Here we go.Andy Hunter, youre the CEO and founder of Bookshop.org. Welcome to Decoder.Thank you, thanks for having me.Im excited to talk to you, theres a lot going on. Bookshop is five, and you just launched ebooks. It sounds like theres a brewing fight with Amazon that Im eager to talk about. Lets start at the start. Bookshop is five. Tell us what it is, how it works, how you kicked it off.I was working in the publishing industry for about 15 years. I started some companies, Electric Literature and Literary Hub, and some small presses, Catapult, and worked as publisher for Counterpoint and Soft Skull Press. During this time, I was watching as independent bookstores tried to fight off Amazon, and I watched as about half of the independent bookstores in the country went out of business, as Amazons market share grew to about 60 percent of all the books sold. And I knew that to have a future with independent bookstores was going to require some kind of e-commerce solution, so that independent bookstores could sell books online and compete with Amazon for those sales, or else it was just going to be a global extinction event for these stores. But I also knew, as a publisher, how important independent bookstores are to having a diverse culture around reading and books. And so I knew that they were worth saving.So I launched Bookshop.org in 2020 to allow independent bookstores to easily sell books online and allow people who were buying books online to easily support their local independent bookstore. And right after it launched, the pandemic hit and then suddenly we onboarded millions of customers and millions of bookstores, and its been a wild ride ever since.Bookshop.org is a website. You can go to it, you can browse books. I actually just bought a book today on Bookshop.org. I bought a bunch during the pandemic, like you said, and then I was like, I should go check this out again. You go, and then youre supporting local bookstores when you actually purchase the book, but you dont hold the inventory, youre not shipping, theyre doing all that work. How does that play out?Its a funny story, but actually, the kind of lightbulb went off over my head when I was reading an article about Kardashians cosmetics where I read that they were a company with only six employees, but they were selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of products because they didnt do any of the fulfillment. They just were running an Instagram channel. And Im like, oh, I think a books wholesaler could do the same thing for books, because bookstores have really limited inventory and they have very limited credit, and they have very limited staff and tech know-how and all of that. So, the idea that bookstores could ever compete with Amazon that has millions of books in inventory is like, no way.But there are book wholesalers that do have millions of books in inventory that have the capacity to ship a book directly to a customer. So by partnering with wholesalers, were able to do direct-to-consumer sales with a very lean team, and the bookstores can sell hundreds of thousands of books without ever having to touch a book, without ever having to do the customer service, without ever having to worry about returns and damages and all that stuff. So it makes it super easy for them, and its really worked great so far.Tell me how the incentives line up there; Im very curious about this. So theres your company, theres the wholesaler. Why do you need the bookstore in the middle to take a cut?Because if we werent supporting bookstores, nobody would buy from us, really. I mean, the whole reason that we have customers in the first place is because people are like, You know what? I want to keep my money in my community, I want to support my local bookstore. Jeff Bezos doesnt need my money, I want to opt out of the Amazon ecosystem. And so thats our rationale, and thats also our mission. Were a B Corporation and a benefit corporation, so we put our mission above financial gain.So yeah, we would make a ton more money if we didnt include the bookstores, but also people would have no reason to shop with us. We give over 80 percent of our profit to independent bookstores. Its been $35 million, actually maybe today is going to be $36 million to local bookstores in the US and $40 million to local bookstores worldwide. So, our whole reason for being is supporting the stores.So when the bookstore owners decide to come to you and sign up, do they get to negotiate their rate? Do you just tell them, This is how much youre going to get, we just need your brand? What do they have to do and how much, and how do they fight for a better deal?Well, they dont have to fight for a better deal because we give them the full profit of all their sales. So, the deal is about as good as it can get without us going out of business. We allow people to onboard, it takes about a half an hour. That was really important during the pandemic because they all went into lockdown and suddenly these thousands of stores were like, Oh, one day Ill get around to getting a website. Were like, Oh, we have to start selling online immediately. So, it only takes about a half an hour for a bookstore to set up on Bookshop and start selling books to their customers, which is really critical to its success. And thats part of how; making it easy was the only way to make it work.And every bookstore, if they sell a book directly, they get the entire profit off the book sale. And if we sell a book through an affiliate, like weve got affiliate programs with The New York Times, The Atlantic, then we give booksellers a third of the profit, a third of the profit goes to support Bookshop, and a third of the profit goes to the affiliate. And then weve got some customers that just dive into Bookshop, buy a book directly without selecting a bookstore to support. In those cases, we split the profit between Bookshop and the profit pool, which goes to all the bookstores, and thats what kind of pays our bills.Which of those slices of the pie is the biggest?Its actually exactly 50/50. So, direct sales and bookstore and affiliate sales are each 50 percent of the revenue, pretty much consistently since 2021. In the beginning because bookstores were closed, 70 to 80 percent of the sales were bookstore sales, but once they reopened and their customers came back into the stores, that dropped.Do you see that shifting over time, or is 50/50 pretty stable?We try to keep it stable. We try to make sure that customers affiliate with bookstores because we have our bottom line that were trying to hit, but we dont want to convert more customers to direct or obfuscate in any way the ability to choose a bookstore, because were mission based and we want as much money going to the bookstores as possible. So were going to hopefully keep it there.How do you think about growth in that scenario? Were going to talk about a new initiative. You launched ebooks, youve got to obviously spend money to launch a new thing. But if youve got 50 percent of the total revenue going out to bookshops, youve got to grow somehow to do new things, right?You grow by increasing the overall size of the pie, right? If last year, around $25 million was associated with bookstores, and then next year if we can keep As long as we make enough to pay our bills, the bookstore portion could go up to $50 million or $100 million. Theres so much money that Amazon is making selling books every year, billions, that right now were at about 1 percent of Amazons market share, and 75 percent of our customers used to shop with Amazon. So all we have to do is get another 1 percent of Amazons customers to switch, and then Bookshop and bookstores are going to both be making twice as much money. So, thats our plan. Our plan is to go after Amazon customers, especially at this cultural moment where people are like, Im not comfortable with Bezos kissing Trumps ring, and I want to be out of that whole ecosystem. I want to keep my money in my local community. Then this is a perfect time to switch and start supporting independent local bookstores when you buy your books.I want to talk about that in depth, but I just want to stay on the basics for a minute. Are you profitable now?Last year we werent, but thats because weve been putting most of our expenses into building out this ebook platform. We were profitable for the first three years, when we have been not profitable for two years, and then were projecting a profit this year.How is Bookshop.org structured? How many people do you have? How are they organized?Weve got about 40 people. We have a sales team, a marketing team, a dev team, and an operations team, and a customer service team. And we try to stay really lean. We have over $1 million in revenue for every single employee, and by staying lean, were able to accomplish our mission, which is to give the revenue back to the local bookstores.And then inside of those groups, which one has the most people? Is it engineering, is it onboarding?Its engineering. No, sorry, its customer service, and then engineering is a little bigger than the rest. Yeah, because were trying to create the best possible experience for internet shoppers who are interested in buying books. So, we want to be the best store to buy books online, period, and that means we have to build out our technical infrastructure and weve got to really invest in that. So, thats where our focus is over the next five years. We want, like if youre going to buy a book online, this is the best place to do it. You feel at home here, you love it, its got a lot of personality, which meshes with your personality as a person who loves books, all that. And so that requires a lot of development, a lot of user experience work.And are you expressed as a website? Is there an app? Im asking about the app because selling ebooks and digital goods on mobile phones is pretty tricky.Yeah, we launched the app yesterday, and we do not support purchasing in the app. And the reason for that is publishers say that resellers can get 30 percent margins when you sell an ebook. So the publisher gets 70 percent, you as a retailer get 30 percent. Now, if you sell it on the App Store, Apple says we get 30 percent. So that leaves 30 percent for Apple, 70 percent for the publisher. Now thats 100 percent, so that leaves 0 percent for the bookstore. So you cannot sell ebooks in the app and make even a penny, its impossible. So theres no choice but to circumvent the App Store purchasing and force customers to go to the website to buy the books, which is unfortunate because customers dont understand that. They just think, You built this dumb app and I cant buy ebooks in it, why not? So youve got to try to explain it to them.Id say what would be rational is if you were a reseller of a digital good that you would pay Apple 30 percent of the profit margin. Thirty percent of the margin would be reasonable, but by saying its a flat 30 percent whether or not youre a reseller, it makes no sense because if your margins on the product are 30 percent and they take 30 percent, then its suddenly impossible to have an ebook app, which is why Kindle, you cant buy the ebooks in the app either, why you cant buy audiobooks on Spotifys app, all of that.I want to come to that because it seems like the legal and regulatory piece of the puzzle is an important part of how you might grow. But the reason I asked about that specifically is that those are big decisions, right? Those are existential business questions. Can we put this button in this app? Can we have any kind of business if this button is here, even if the user experience is degraded in some way? You also had to make other kinds of decisions, to be a B Corp which has been in fashion and out of fashion and comes back into fashion to position yourself against Amazon specifically. How do you make decisions? Whats your framework?Well, I mean, the first is alignment with the mission. So, were very close to the booksellers. Everybody at this company got into this because we wanted to build an alternative ecosystem to the Amazon ecosystem, that was kind of controlled by readers, writers, publishers, people who are really invested in book culture. So that we dont just kind of cede the whole territory of this incredibly culturally important product to a single mega retailer. So, we all want that more than anything.And so for us, success is building out this network of a sustainable, independent ecosystem for bookselling and book lovers that cant be controlled by Amazon or any other retailer. Thats number one. So, everything has to be everything on the roadmap supports that end goal. And we try to follow the best ethical rules that we can as a company, because we know that people are shopping for us for ethical reasons. So we have salary transparency. The B Corp company that certifies companies said that we were in the top 5 percent of all the B Corps, according to our internal policies and also the good we do in the world. So we got their Best for the World designation, which were really proud of.So we basically try to walk the walk in every way. And one reason for that is the booksellers are very vocal and very independent people. And if we strayed from the path and it seemed like a money grab or a bait and switch where we were going to become predatory, the booksellers would freak out immediately. So we have to be very transparent. Weve got to get this whole community of independent booksellers on board. And its very hard to get a group of independent booksellers all aligned to the same project, but now we have 90 percent of the bookstores in the country participating in this project. We never thought we would get to 90 percent, and thats a testimony of how much buy-in there is, and that buy-in comes from the transparency and how we make decisions and how we govern ourselves.A couple of years ago, I had James Daunt, whos the CEO of Barnes and Noble, on the show, and he was making a similar kind of pitch that Barnes and Noble had the scale to go compete with Amazon. And the way that he would do it is he would sort of give indie bookstores access to his scale, his wholesaler relationships. Basically, become like the AWS of bookstores, but for buying and selling books in that way. I dont know if thats worked out, its worked out for Barnes and Noble, but it sounds like youve been able to outcompete them with the indie bookstores, right? Theyre not as reliant on the Barnes and Noble distribution system, theyre coming to you to do e-commerce.Definitely.How did you win there?I dont know if that was really a priority for B&N. I think B&N did a good job of doing that with their internal, company-owned stores. But how we won, we went to all the bookseller conferences. Theres regional conferences, theres national conferences. We put members of the American Booksellers Association on our board of directors. Our board of directors actually is majority independent booksellers. We put in our shareholder agreement, we put that we could never sell to Amazon or any other major US retailer. So the bookstores didnt have to worry about us becoming big, then becoming reliant on us, and then boom, Amazon buys us, we all get rich and theyre left out in the cold. So there were so many things that we did to prove ourselves, but I think forbidding the sale of the company to Amazon, putting independent booksellers on our board, and really servicing booksellers first is what made the difference.You talked about that cultural moment that were in right now. Theres a lot of pushback against the various billionaires being onstage at Donald Trumps inauguration, at this perception that in particular Jeff Bezos is kissing the ring, because he owns The Washington Post and he wouldnt let them endorse Kamala Harris. Theres a lot of that going around. Have you seen an increase in sales that you can attribute to people leaving Amazon?I know that probably the listeners are all over the political spectrum. I can say that I personally am worried about the Trump administration. And so, its weird for me that every time something that I consider bad happens, Bookshop benefits. COVID happened, it was terrible, and Bookshop boomed. As soon as Trump won the election, we saw sales start to go up. And then on Trumps inauguration day and since, weve been up 75 to 100 percent year over year. So, weve seen a massive amount of customers who are switching from Amazon to Bookshop for these reasons.Is that the bookstores doing outbound marketing? Is that you sending messages? Is it just people realizing they dont want to use Amazon and finding you? Wheres that growth coming from?Its almost all word of mouth. The thing about being a direct-to-consumer e-commerce retailer that sends all of your profits somewhere else, is that you dont have any money for digital marketing. So, our digital marketing budget is 1 percent of our revenue. And even if we tried to put all these ads out, saying, Support booksellers, not billionaires, we wouldnt have the reach. So, we rely on word of mouth. And its almost all word of mouth. There are people on Bluesky, people on Threads, people on Twitter who are all saying, How do I get out of Amazon? What alternatives are there? And Bookshop.org always comes up in those conversations.Now, to some extent its also bookstores and to some extent its also us, so all three of them combined and affiliates. Weve got podcasts, newspapers, magazines, literary organizations, and influencers. Theyre all Bookshop affiliates, so they let their people know, too. Bookshops kind of trick the way that we got enough customers to compete with Amazon in the first place was by reaching out to small communities. So, we didnt try to say, Okay, we want to have 3 million customers. Were going to go big. We were like, We want to have 3 million customers. Were going to get 3,000 groups of businesses or organizations that each can bring 1,000 customers. And thats how weve managed it so far. So, theyre all telling the same story and telling people about us.Im curious, you said when bad things happen, you see growth. Obviously, theres the inauguration. Some of our audience thinks it was great. Youre right, some of our audience thinks it was horrible. Can you see in the books how the mood is?Yeah, absolutely.Are people buying a lot of books about fascism or whatever?On Tyranny is always a top seller. There are also books like Braiding Sweetgrass that are kind of more like how to live well and how to live with wisdom. I think a lot of people are kind of just, The world is crazy and I need to find some kind of inner balance, or I need to turn off the world and find a way to live well in this environment. And then you also have all the escapism. So, theres a ton of fantasy, romance, and sci-fi being sold, because people just want to opt out and go into a different world.Theres a big question in America, maybe broadly in the world right now about who distributes what, where the limits of platforms and free speech are. Bookstores traditionally just stay out of it. They sell everything. Thats the idea. Do you feel that pressure as your audience or your customer base gets more politicized to not do kinds of things?Absolutely. The American Booksellers Association always had a commitment to free expression as part of their mandate. And our mission is to support local independent bookstores. Well, guess what? There are Christian local independent bookstores, and so were 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 equation. There was actually a Wall Street Journal editorial that was angry about us once in the books that we were featuring, but we also get angry comments from people on the far left.And I think if you are committed to books, youre 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 its civil discourse, were going to let people discover for themselves what they think about it.I always think thats so interesting, because the book community is old. 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 theres a real tension there between, Boy, were 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 youre right in the middle of that scale. How does that play out for you?I mean, its like social media flak and emails, but it has never become a lawsuit or something like that. And we are pretty strong about what we believe, so it doesnt cause me a ton of stress. I guess it causes me the most stress when its somebody who I agree with ideologically, who feels 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 doesnt have to be political. We could have an ad for a book thats about fitness that somebody finds offensive. And we just have to try to stand our ground, because if booksellers are going to start engaging in deciding what books are okay or not okay for people to read, then were really screwed. Its bad enough that the governments 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. The next thing that happens is we yell at our local bookstores Well, they try.Thats the history. It happened in the 80s, its going to happen again now.They tried to pass a bill in Texas that said if you sell a book to a minor, its not appropriate. Or if you sell a book to a library and that gets a minor access to it, then youre responsible and youre liable. And that wouldve destroyed independent bookselling in Texas. But thankfully, it was overturned by a judge, and so that is no longer a threat. Now, the Trump administration, I think yesterday or the day before, said that there is no such thing as book bans. Theres no book ban epidemic in the country and that its a hoax. And what theyre saying is that if youre in a library and you remove all the books about trans people or gay rights or civil rights, thats not a book ban. Thats just taking books that shouldnt 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.So, theyre arguing about what the definition of a book ban is. For us, its like, if you dont have access to the book, if you are taking access away from people, its censorship and its a book ban. And it should not be allowed, even if its possible for that person to still be able to get a book somewhere else. And honestly, I think its 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. I dont think that they want people reading these books in general.So, I think its going to be a fight, but its definitely a fight that were committed to win. And hopefully, cooler heads prevail, because the thing about banning opposing points of view, it doesnt usually work out for the people who are trying to ban those points of view. Its never really a good idea. And then the people who come next can just flip it around and do the same thing to your point of view.Im just thinking about the history of this. And I promise you Ill bring this to ebooks, because everything gets bigger once its digital. 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. In the 80s and 90s and in the early 2000s, we didnt want B. Dalton Booksellers to have these books in the mall that kids go to, so well pressure the retailers. Well pressure Walmart to not sell certain music, and that means the music is broadly not available. You represent the independent bookstores. If the government comes and pressures the bookstore, the bookstore doesnt 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?Its primarily the role of the American Booksellers Association, who we are very closely aligned with.But youve got 90 percent of the bookstores. Thats kind of why Im asking. The pressure will come to you.We will fight. If we have to, we will fight. Id rather not because we dont have a lot of money. But if we have to, well fight. And I will say that its so hypocritical. Its just such nonsense because every one of these people who are screaming about some kid reading, seriously, Anne Frank. Anne Frank is one of the books that theyre concerned about because she talks about sexuality when shes 13 years old. And so, theyre concerned about books like Anne Franks The Diary of a Young Girl. Meanwhile, the internet is filled with porn and the most screwed up, horrible things available. Any 13-year-old with Google can find the most horrible thing that they can think of in an instant. And theyre all online. Theyre either on Discord or 4chan or whatever. They are not going to be corrupted by a book.If youre lucky, theyre reading Anne Franks The Diary of a Young Girl. You have to be really lucky if your kid wants to read books in the first place. And nobodys going to have their worldview rocked and corrupted by any of the books that theyre trying to ban. Its a complete charade. There is so much worse material available to every kid, and theyve all seen it on the internet every single day. The book ban thing is just Speaking of a hoax, they say its a hoax, because its not really happening. I think its a farce because the people who are involved are only doing it for political clout, leverage, fundraising. Its 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.Lets talk about taking this project and making it digital. Because one, it does seem like you have the stomach for a fight, even if you dont want to have the fight. But once you make everything digital, once you allow other people to publish ebooks which is a huge part of the ebook 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, youre 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?Well, I think it starts with readers. One out of every six books sold in the country is an ebook, and I cant buy it from my local bookstore. I took a trip with my kids to Europe. My kids wanted to read ebooks; they had to buy them through Kindle. Or if youre very educated, you can find something like Kobo, which is an alternative platform. But basically, theres no way to buy ebooks from your local bookstore. That in itself doesnt make sense. Something is like 15 to 20 percent 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 ebooks. So, that is about also taking the corporate control out of ebooks.If one mega retailer is determining how ebooks are sold, what ebooks get marketed, what ebooks get exposed to readers, how the commerce works, and how the authors are promoted, and that retailer has its own self-interest in mind, that is not good for the whole culture around books. Its not good for authors, its not good for readers, its not good for publishers. So, we need to diversify the ebook landscape. And we need to give people who want to support their local bookstores a way that they can buy ebooks and support their local bookstore at the same time. That was so important. And additionally, its a new revenue stream for bookstores.Bookstores are always hanging on by their fingernails. We have more bookstores opening now than weve had in the past 15 years, but they were one downturn from disappearing. And so, if we can open up a new revenue stream, if they can get 5 to 10 percent of their revenue from ebooks, thats going to be a total game changer for them. Itll 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, that it shouldnt 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.Whats interesting about the music industry is that it got digitized first through Napster, which had no business model, and everyone was stealing everything. Then the iPod, and there was a fight over [digital rights management]. 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. 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. 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 Im like, Why dont 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 are other formats, but youre at the most Decoder question of all: youre in a format war with a very late 90s DRM problem embedded in the heart of it. How do you think about that problem? Is it that we need a new format? Is it that the publishers need to give up on DRM because the people want to pay regardless of the existence of piracy? What is the shape of that conversation in 2025?I have a slightly more nuanced view. I think that if you go out into the internet, about 80 percent of readers dont notice or care. And 20 percent of them are adamantly and virulently against DRM. And then publishers, of course, are terrified of the Napster days happening to their industry. They dont want it to all be piracy because the recording industry saw 80 percent of their revenue disappear when music went digital, and theyve brought it back now with Spotify and streaming, and so now theyve recovered. But it was a big blow. Publishers obviously dont want that to happen.I think that if theres a system that allows people to own their books, ebooks, so theyre not leasing them but they actually own them. They dont have to worry about a device taking them away from them or retailers taking their books away or making changes to their books after theyve purchased them, which weve seen with ebooks. 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, were going to release the new Harry Potter book as a PDF and hope that people pay for it. I 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 Amazons designs and publishers working with Amazon to prevent piracy. And that happened in 2005, 2006, 2007. Its been a long time. Theres new technologies out there. We can find a way to create portable, flexible ebooks that are owned that still make sure that the publishers and authors get paid.Thats, I guess, my Holy Grail, and thats not going to happen right away. But in five or 10 years, I would love to have the kind of clout that Steve Jobs had in saying, 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 thats because major publishers require it. And then we have a small selection of DRM-free ebooks that people will be able to buy and download and use on whatever device they want. And were going to be growing that DRM-free selection so that we end up with hopefully a catalog that is diverse and has maybe half DRM-free and half publisher-supported DRM.The Kindle model works because Amazon sells the Kindle hardware at a loss or break even maybe, and then they obviously assume that youre going to buy tons of books because its all a closed ecosystem. You dont have any hardware yet. A lot of people like having hardware. Does your model support you selling cheap hardware?I think it does. If we go that route, were going to do it first through crowdfunding, like an indie alternative to the Kindle where you can support your local bookstore. And we havent decided whether were going to try that or not. Were going to make that decision in a few months. But we already know it works on devices like Boox, which is an Android e-reading device that is quite popular and our Android app works great on that. Were going to work with Kobo to make sure that people who buy ebooks from their local bookstores can read it on Kobo, and were going to just try to create as much flexibility as possible.When we launched, a lot of people wanted us to solve every single problem with ebooks on launch day, but thats not possible. Were small. We raised $2 million to do this whole thing. Fable, which is another ebook company, raised $40 million to do this. Scribd has raised $200 million to do ebooks. We are small. We have a hundredth of the resources that our competitors have. In the case of Amazon, we have probably one 10,000th 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. Its just going to take a few years before we can really do everything we can. And we want people to be able to buy an ebook from their local bookstore and read it on their Kindle, too. But we need Amazon to give us permission, to allow us to say, Send this to your Kindle, and have that sync with a users Kindle account. Which hopefully theyll give to us, but its going to take time for us to negotiate that.I want to come to that, because that seems like the big upcoming fight, but lets just stay with the other readers for a second. Basically in the world theres the Kobo, which a lot of people like. Theres the Nook, which still exists, the Barnes and Noble Nook. I dont know if that is very popular on your radar, but its out there and exists. And then there is the Boox Palma and the ecosystem of basically Android devices with E Ink screens. The Verge team loves the Boox Palma. We talk about this bizarre little thing all the time.Theres a difference there. The Boox Palma and that ecosystem, theyre Android devices. You can put your app on there and thats the support. Thats all the more help you need from them. Theyre running the Google Play Store, your apps in the store, you can support your own DRM standard, you can do whatever you want to do. The Kobos of the world are less like that. Theyre more integrated in some way. Youve got to work directly with them to support your standard and your DRM.Thats right.That might implicate their business model because theyre probably planning on purchases on their device. How do those negotiations look?Well, with Boox its pretty simple. I send them emails all the time, and they never write me back.Because your app is just in the store, right?Yeah.To whatever extent mobile devices are open, theyre open. But with Kobo, theyre closed.Yeah. So Boox, it works on Boox. I love it. I wish I could talk to them because I think that we could work together more. And so if anybody from Boox listens to this podcast, write me back. But 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 ebook from your local bookstore and read it on your Kobo.Now, there is a danger to Bookshop in that Kobo also sells ebooks. And so if people are buying Kobos because they want to read Bookshop ebooks, they could switch and just out of laziness or lack of knowledge, just end up buying ebooks from Kobo, and that wouldnt be great. But 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. So Im thinking if our customers want it and Kobo wants to support it, were going to trust them to not try to steal up all our customers and were 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 theyll have to spend a few weeks on integration.And then when I think about other platforms that are sort of similar, Roku comes to mind, right? Roku is pretty open, theyll take any app that wants to play, but then they take a cut of the advertising that appears across all the apps. And sometimes we hear about some friction in those relationships. Does 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 and thats their motivation.So thats 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, thats right.So youd like to just sell some books that Amazon isnt selling. Thats pretty zero-sum. I think Kobo would like to say, Our device is more flexible than the Kindle. Look at this huge list of supported partners. It feels like whatever you learn from Kobo is not going to be applicable to the fight you have with Amazon.No, its not going to really be the same.Lets talk about Amazon then. I can see the broader ecosystem. Theres 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. Its locked you in. Look at how open the world of the Kobo and the Boox Palma is. I have not one but two e-readers. Innovation is happening here. And then theres the argument that says you should just go fight Amazon and say, Let me sell books on your hardware. It seems like youre going to go pick the fight. Why are you picking the fight?Well, unfortunately, I spent the past five years bad-mouthing Amazon, so asking nicely probably wont work. But I will say the first thing were going to do is ask nicely because it doesnt make sense for you to have to buy an ebook 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 its possible. We know that it took a couple of years for Amazon to agree to it and to facilitate it, so this isnt going to be a quick fight.But I think our first tack is going to be to go to Amazon and say, Hey, independent bookstores are in trouble. A lot of independent bookstore customers have Kindles. They want to use them. They want to buy their ebooks from local bookstores. Be the better company. Do the right thing. Let people read these on their Kindles. If Amazon says yes, then were going to announce that people can read ebooks on their Kindle they bought from the local bookstores, then were done.If Amazon says no, then its an antitrust issue because you cant have a device that has 85 percent of the market for e-readers and say, Actually, youve got to buy everything on this device. Youve got to buy it from us. Thats equivalent to if Apple said on the iPhone, you can only buy music from Apple Music. Youre 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 cant watch Netflix on your iPad anymore. No, youve got to go through Apple TV and you have to download all of your movies from Apple TV as well because were worried about piracy, so we cant allow Hulu or Netflix or whatever. Obviously, nobody would stand for that. It would be insane.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 youre 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. Thats great. They cant control where people buy things in order to use it on the hardware.I 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 and tried to break them up. That started with Clinton, went to Bush, and they eventually settled. Microsoft didnt 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. Its much more complicated than Netscape, but thats the shape of it.Thats also the shape of a lot of things that are happening now in the antitrust world. Google is being sued and the government would like to break off Chrome from Google. That rhymes with the Microsoft case. Apple is being sued by the Justice Department and well see how that goes. Epic Games famously has sued Apple and Google. That feels like the most direct comparison to what youre 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 theres 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 doesnt have to exert pressure on anyone. They dont have to behave anticompetitively when its their own phone in their own store. And thats what youre up against here with the Kindle, right? Its Amazons device, its their store. They have the Apple precedent thats going to say, Well, you own the whole thing, tip to tail. Youre not doing anything anticompetitively because theres no one else in the mix. And youre going to have to show, Well, this is harming consumers. Its raising prices. How are you thinking about that fight given that context?Apple has Android to point to saying, We dont control this market. 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 Amazons control. So I think that theres a much stronger argument that there isnt another place to go.If youre an independent bookstore and you want to sell books, ebooks to your customer, theyve 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? It 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 in terms of discounts, daily deals, sales, that kind of thing, independent bookstores cant create their own ecosystem.So maybe an author would be like, Okay, I love my local bookstores, so Im going to do a special deal where for my local bookstores they can sell my ebook for $1.99 for the next six weeks. They cant do that right now because of Amazons control of the market. So if we have a more diverse market, then theres competition between them and then possibly consumers will benefit.Ive asked a handful of questions about Epic. Theyve been at the vanguard of fighting the App Store, antitrust fights. Have you talked to [Epic CEO] 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 thats radar. We were an underdog with almost no funding and we didnt exist five years ago. And now were becoming big enough that people are noticing us, and so Im hoping to have those kinds 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. There were some 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 caring about books at all. Theyre 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 didnt achieve its goals, even though they won.I dont know what the Justice Department was thinking, but that was a big priority for them and it was a big gift to Amazon. I mean, what I learned from that is be very, very careful not to collude with anybody. Be very careful talking about discounts, talking about strategic plans with publisher partners, et cetera. So we dont do that. I mean, Im very open about what our ambitions are.Ill talk on a podcast about them, but I dont go into any back rooms because I think thats what really screwed over Apple and the publishers, is that they were kind of plotting how do we arrest the ebook market from Amazon and create a more diverse ecosystem like Bookshop? Its like were trying to do the same thing. We want to create a diverse ecosystem around ebooks, too, but were not like smoking cigars in the back room of Penguin Random House trying to figure out how to do it. We were 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 ebooks case was that there was some evidence that there were back rooms and Eddy Cue was in the back rooms drinking wine and making deals. And to me as a baby reporter, my eyes are open, I was like, There are back rooms?Exactly.Its very good. Isnt Apple the bigger problem here or Google the bigger problem here, that you cant just straightforwardly sell digital products in your app? Wouldnt that let you compete against the Kindle much more than just head up fighting Amazon?It would, and thats another big part of it. So as I think I said in the beginning of the podcast, if Apple wants this 30 percent, thats fine. But it should be 30 percent of the available profit margin, not 30 percent of the cover price because the cover price does not reflect what the profit is for us as a retailer. And if Apple was like, Were going to take 30 percent of all of your book sales after you pay the publishers, we would be selling tons of ebooks on Apple. And maybe thats a rational perspective and we could get them to do it. I think that the reason that they wouldnt do it is not because it doesnt make sense. I think they wouldnt do it because they dont want to lose any leverage. Theyre trying to stand very firmly against things like gaming companies, et cetera.And so to make anything that would look like a concession, even if it made sense, I dont know if they would do it, but well try for sure, because we dont want customers to have to jump through hoops. Literally, I had an employees mom try to buy an ebook yesterday and be like, Oh, I dont understand this app. Im very excited about you guys doing this, but I cant buy an ebook. I can only add it to a digital wish list. And she just thinks were bad at our jobs. She doesnt understand, no, theres actually an economic reason for this.Itll benefit consumers, itll benefit everybody if the app stores change, but also its really important for E Ink devices to change because most people who read ebooks, they want to read it on an E Ink device, and Kindle is by far the most popular. So, Im glad that books exist. I have also reached out to reMarkable. Ive been reaching out to all these E Ink companies, none of them write me back. Its very sad. But one day they will. Maybe now that weve been in The New York Times about this and now that Im on this podcast, theyll 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. Theres 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 Im looking for people to partner with on that.The underlying user experience that makes all this work is really just about seamlessness. Right? You 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 youve bought some Kindle books. Youre kind of right. I keep making the comparison of Roku, but youre 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 it all.Yeah.Its even weirder with books because its just text files. Its crazy that the DRM can silo text files in that way. Is there any push to letting other apps read the files youre selling or alternatively letting your app read the Kindle files? Because thats what you really want, is a unified library.I would love it. I think all digital content should be portable, and Im 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. 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. Im getting a new device. Im switching from Apple to Samsung or whatever. Im going to take my library with me. Thats basic, everybody would agree with that. So its going to take a long time for that to happen, but I think in the next five or 10 years, its possible.I feel like I can hear Decoder listeners with Kindles. Theyve been yelling at us the whole time because the send to Kindle button exists for EPUB files or whatever. Its been there for a minute. Is that an acceptable add? 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, theres only one imprint that supports DRM, which is Tor, which is a great science fiction publisher. I love them. And Tor books would be possible, and any publisher or author, indie authors especially that dont require DRM, you could use that for it. But there is no way to buy a DRM encrypted book, which means theres 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 bestseller list on your Kindle, you have to buy it from Amazon right now because those publishers require encryption.Changing that whole landscape either by giving Amazon permission or whether Amazon giving us permission or enabling sideloading somehow or send to Kindle, Id say that thats phase two. Phase three is looking at the whole way that ebooks are sold and owned and transcending the kind of leasing model where people dont actually own ebooks, theyre all on lease. And figuring out a better way to do it where consumers can buy ebooks and have a library thats portable and that they can own for 100 years, that they can give to their grandkids.When you think about that, thats like a user experience. Does the technology to do that exist today outside of maybe some blockchain hype?Yeah, not really, no. Thats why Im saying a 10-year horizon on it.Theres the 10-year horizon and then theres just the reality of today. And I kind of want to end here because its more or less where we started. The Biden administration, the Lina Khan FTC, were probably broadly supportive of these ideas. Right?I havent 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. Were getting rid of our antitrust enforcement. How do you see all these fights playing out now that the landscape has shifted so dramatically?I think its really dangerous, and I think that people mistakenly think that, Oh, this is capitalism, but its really monopolism. So capitalism and the 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, thats no longer whats good about capitalism. And so while the Trump administration might pretend that theyre unleashing business, what theyre really doing is just allowing for more consolidation and more control.And if you have other control, like if Musk buys TikTok, which theyre floating, then youve got one person in charge of two major social media companies that then creates more possibilities of bias, and it seems like theres 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 in the end by a free market that is much more loose and distributed. So I think the Trump administration and the big business people that think that theyre going to hit the jackpot by removing all regulation are in for a rude awakening because theyre not going to be helping themselves in the end. Unless they can reach complete control, in which case were all screwed, theyre going to end up being too big to fail and then being disrupted and failing.Let me just bring that back to the specifics of, Weve launched ebooks and theres a fight against Apple to let you sell ebooks on your app and a fight against Amazon to let you read ebooks on their device. Even just in the past six weeks, the dynamics of the regulatory environment that would let you win or lose those fights have changed. Has it changed your appetite for those fights?No, not at all. Time goes on. All those fights would take five years anyway. Thats why diplomacy is our first option. Im going to try to reach these through diplomacy, and Im 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 were going to have the best ecosystem and reading experience for people who buy ebooks, and were going to use that platform to support local businesses, keep money in peoples communities, support the kind of activism and endorsement of books and literary culture that small bookstores perform every day in their communities.And so its all going to be good, and its not going to be owned by a giant monopolist. So thats going to be good, too. And its going to preserve book culture. And I personally feel like my life wouldve been totally empty without books. I really am one of these people who say books changed my life or saved my life. And so giving back to that, preserving that culture, making sure that its sustainable and thrives in the next 10, 20, 30 years is completely worth the fight.I cant think of a better place to end it. Andy, thank you so much for joining Decoder.Thank you!Decoder with Nilay PatelA podcast from The Verge about big ideas and other problems.SUBSCRIBE NOW!See More:

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