Why does Forewords default to Bookshop.org instead of Amazon?

Every book in Forewords has Buy buttons. If the book exists on Bookshop — and you are in the UK or US — then the Bookshop link will be active. If not, the Bookshop buy link will be disabled.

For Amazon, we provide the book title in the search URL so you land on a listing page.

It isn’t an anti-Amazon stance. Forewords’s pitch isn’t “leave Amazon”. Many readers live in Amazon’s ecosystem — Kindle, Audible, Prime, existing reviews on Goodreads — and Forewords isn’t trying to push them out of it.

It also isn’t a guarantee that Bookshop’s prices or delivery times beat Amazon’s — they sometimes don’t. Forewords is choosing the affiliate-revenue path that funnels back to indie bookstores when it has the option, not making a price claim. Amazon just serves a lot more countries and has a larger catalogue.

Long-term, Forewords is supposed to fund itself entirely through affiliate book purchases. The economics: if a reader buys a handful of books through Forewords’s Buy links each year, the affiliate revenue covers the inference cost of their AI recommendations and the running cost of their account. If that model lands at scale, the Plus subscription tier goes away entirely and Forewords becomes free for everyone.

That’s the bet, anyway. It depends on (a) enough readers actually using the Buy links and (b) enough of those purchases converting at the retailer. Both are still being validated. In the meantime, the Plus tier exists as a safeguard against runaway AI costs.