Remember when, in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, there were glimmers of a different world? Birds sang louder, or so we thought. Global carbon emissions declined. People wanted to "reckon" with racism. It took widespread lockdowns and sky-high death tolls, but many people began to see that there are other ways of being in the world. What's become of those 2020 revelations? One thing, at least, that's stuck around is the bookselling startup Bookshop.org. Its founder and CEO Andy Hunter had the idea for his company before the pandemic, but it has nevertheless been deeply shaped by that period of time. The company operates with some of that early pandemic ethos: It provides easy ecommerce solutions for indies that couldn't otherwise afford it; it shares its revenue with them; its stockholder agreement forbids a sale to "any retailer then-presently ranked among the top 10 largest retailers." As Kate Knibbs writes, Bookshop was "the sourdough of ecommerce. It rose with surprising velocity." In her remarkable profile of Hunter and his company, Knibbs takes readers inside Bookshop.org—Hunter's answer to Amazon's domination of ecommerce—and shows us how it got started and where it's headed. "He wants to show business owners how to scale up without selling out—without needing to kill the competition." — Matthew McKnight | Features Editor | 
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