The Molecular Ecologist is a scholarly blog, and we’ve had books and book reviews as one of our focuses for as long as I’ve been managing things here. For almost as long, we’ve been set up as an Amazon affiliate, to receive commissions from purchases that our readers make as a result of those reviews — but Amazon is (and has been for some time) not a book-lover’s choice for book purchasing. Amazon’s business model undermines local independent bookstores, and the company squeezes authors and publishers with its market power, endangering the people who write, edit, and produce new books.
That’s why I’m very happy to announce that TME has finally officially established “affiliate” status with Bookshop.org, the online bookstore that supports local brick-and-mortar independent bookstores. Bookshop works with independent stores to fulfill purchases, and returns the profits from those purchases to the stores. Our application was accepted yesterday, and I’ve spent this morning poring through our archive to update links — now, when you click a link to a book title on this site, you’ll often be taken directly to the book’s page on Bookshop, and a portion of your purchase will go to support this blog, as well as independent booksellers who work with the site. I’ve also cleaned up and refreshed formatting on some of those old review posts, and added a standardized disclaimer to clearly specify that we receive a commission from purchases made via affiliate links in a given post. (This is a practice we instituted a while ago for the old Amazon links, but it hadn’t been applied consistently.)
We’ve got an affiliate page on Bookshop, where we can offer curated lists of titles. Right now, that’s simply a list of books we’ve reviewed, but it may be there’s some other forms of curation we can do in that venue. Check it out, and happy reading!
