Judging a Book by Its Impact, Not Its Cover
Imagine building an online bookstore with 2 million books. Maybe you could do it. Now imagine building an online bookstore with 2 million books that aims to teach the world to read while saving the planet. That’s a pretty formidable task.
For the people at Better World Books, they’re happily taking on the challenge. And as VP of Marketing John Ujda explains, the social impact piece isn’t a burden, it’s just the business itself. They’re not the kind of company that donates money at the end of the year or does something socially responsible to avoid criticism. Doing good is literally baked into their business model. And that makes for a pretty good recipe.
Check out our interview below.
How does Better World Books make the world better?
By teaching the world to read, and helping save the environment.
Here’s how we do it: First, Better World Books takes “unwanted” books that would otherwise have ended up in landfill and finds new homes for them. We do this through library discards and donations, campus collections, and community book drives—so far we’ve diverted over 26 million books from landfills.
Then, when we sell the books a portion of every sale benefits our nonprofit literacy partners who use the funds for scholarships, to build schools, and to get books to people who need them. So far we’ve raised over $6.5 million for our nonprofit literacy partners.
How closely do you work with your nonprofit partners?
We work very closely with our nonprofit literacy partners. For example, we regularly send college textbooks to Africa through Books for Africa in addition to funding much of their operation.
We recently worked with NCFL to develop a grant program—the BWB/NCFL Libraries and Families Award—that will make 3 awards a year of $10,000 to libraries. And of course, Invisible Children and Better World Books ran the biggest book drive in history last year, bringing in 1.9 million books.
But the greatest indicator of our commitment to our nonprofit partners is our new initiative to grant stock options to several of them. So now as Better World Books grows, our nonprofit partners stand to benefit.
Better World Books doesn’t just give money to charity—it has integrated social values into so many aspects of its business. I’m interested to know what drives that commitment to being so responsible.
People want to be socially responsible—it shows in our employees who are passionate about their work making a difference, and it shows in our customers who choose us over other alternatives because of our social mission.
What’s been lacking is a model where people can apply these principles to their daily work while not being divorced from the capitalist engine that forms our society. Triple bottom line companies, for-profit social enterprises, b-corporations—these are all part of a movement to change the way business is done to benefit all stakeholders, not just shareholders.
So ultimately, the commitment comes from the desire to have what we’re spending our time on matter in a profound way in the world.
We’re noticing technology play an increasingly important role in social enterprises. Tell me how technology is making your business possible.
We’ve grown from nothing to $31 million in sales in 5 years, and it is technology that has enabled us to scale effectively. Under the hood, we are actually a very sophisticated technology and analytics company.
For example, we constantly benchmark millions of prices across the web, and we measure supply and demand to arrive at fair, competitive prices. We list our books on 21 different Internet marketplaces, again facilitated by technology. And we use our technology combined with our logistics expertise to enable free shipping in the U.S. and low cost shipping around the world.
So what is it about your business model that you think other businesses can adopt?
It’s hard to generalize from a specific business instance, but I think there are a couple of principles that small businesses can think about.
First, we take an unwanted resource—used books destined for landfill—and we turn it into a valuable product. There is something to say for thinking of society’s waste streams as a valuable opportunity not only through re-cycling, but through “up-cycling” or re-using first.
Second, the way we create that value is by leveraging the Internet. It provides us a potential customer base of something like a billion people, and our business is all about getting “unwanted” books where people can find them, which suddenly makes them very wanted indeed.
Finally, when you find the right way to build social benefit into your business, it isn’t a burden—it is the business. That’s a tall order, but there are a lot of very smart, creative entrepreneurs out there who can figure out how it applies and help fast-forward the social enterprise movement.
