Microprocessing
Two Book Startups Compete Where Amazon Won’t
Bookshop and Libro.fm hope to change your shopping habits. Will it last after the pandemic?
In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today to give you a better tomorrow.
If there’s one silver lining from the pandemic — at least where our online lives are concerned — it’s the emergence of viable small competitors to corporate giants that many of us have become accustomed to. Zoom triumphed over Facebook and Google; now that it, too, is a kind of monolith that’s driving some people to exhaustion, quirky startups are providing fun video chat alternatives. And Amazon, no longer able to fulfill two-day Prime shipping guarantees, is facing some meaningful competition of its own.
Though they may not unseat the retail giant (it’s hard to imagine what would), these companies give consumers interesting — and more ethically comfortable — alternatives at a pivotal time. Suddenly, people are discovering new portals to online commerce that may change their digital habits for good. Two startups in particular are edging in on Amazon’s original turf: books. The companies are…
