LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Now to another art form evolving with the times - books.
A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
Yeah. Is this the time where we confess to all the listeners that we have pretty messy stacks of books in our offices?
FADEL: Everywhere. But you can make room for your Flash collection with e-books.
MARTÍNEZ: How dare you, Leila. The Flash collection goes nowhere.
FADEL: (Laughter) I know. I'm giving you space. So people have been obviously reading on their Kindles and e-readers for years, but as of today, readers can shop for e-books through an online retailer called bookshop.org.
MARTÍNEZ: OK, there are already a lot of online retailers for e-books. I mean, millions of them are sold every year. So why are we focusing on this one?
FADEL: Well, this one exclusively supports local bookstores, and that's because e-books are a difficult format for smaller booksellers to keep up with, according to Bookshop's CEO, Andy Hunter.
ANDY HUNTER: Because the publisher requirements are so strict, it requires a huge amount of technical effort to deliver an e-book securely so it can't be hacked and it can't be pirated around the web. And that is too much for any individual local bookstore to deal with.
MARTÍNEZ: All right, so that makes sense. So what do indie bookstores think?
FADEL: We checked in with a few owners like Pete Mulvihill of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and he told us his stores will take all the help they can get.
PETE MULVIHILL: We survive by kind of (laughter) scraping and clawing where we can to find efficiencies or make a little extra income. And this is another significant, if small, stream of income for us. So it's truly helpful.
FADEL: Tiffany Phillips, the owner of Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin, Indiana, says she wanted to offer e-books for a while now.
TIFFANY PHILLIPS: There are a lot of readers who prefer the digital format because you can enlarge the fonts if you have any kind of visual impairment. And also, like, my sister has rheumatoid arthritis. So for her, holding a big, like, "Outlander" for long periods of time is difficult.
FADEL: She told us she's not worried about missing out on foot traffic.
PHILLIPS: We also see people who read a lot of books on e-readers, but then they come in to purchase from us the actual tangible page because they want their book trophies for their shelves or to lend to friends.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So I'm going to have to borrow that line from Tiffany. I don't have book piles all over the place. I have book trophies.
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