I’ve spent less time in bookshops in 2020 than at any time in my adult life. I have, though, ordered online from shops I’ve lingered in in pre-Covid times, including No Alibis in Belfast and Sam Read in Grasmere, in the Lake District. I’ve been making a point on Deskbound Traveller of encouraging readers to support independent shops, and that support has never been more needed than it is now, with new restrictions forcing shops to close for a second time in the run-up to Christmas. 

  Doing your bit has got much easier thanks to the launch this week of Bookshop.org. If you want to support a bookshop near where you live, you can search for it on the site by entering your postcode, and see whether it has signed up as a partner to Bookshop.org. If it has, and you go on to make your order, that shop will receive the full profit. Otherwise, you can buy through the main part of the site and your order will contribute to an earnings pool shared among all the independent bookshops that have signed up. There’s more about how it all works in a piece that appeared this week in The Guardian.

  I’m signing up as an affiliate to the site, so if you buy a book as a result of a link from Deskbound Traveller to Bookshop.org, I may earn a commission.