Bookshop.org links go to search, why?

When I first launched Shepherd, I tried to make direct links to the book using the ISBN for bookshop.org in the USA and UK. The problem is that it didn't work well, and often people would get an error due to the differences between the ISBNs of different book editions and ISBN differences in the USA and UK.

Fixing that system was going to be incredibly time-consuming and expensive. And this isn't something we can do yet. 

So, we changed it so that we link to a search at Bookshop.org for the book and author. That way, I know it will work and not show a 404 error. This means that the Bookshop.org link will always show up for a book, even if the book isn't in stock there. 

Long term, I will come back and improve these links to make them smarter. So that if your book is in Bookshop.org, it shows the link, and if it is not, it doesn't. And it links directly to your book. But for now, this was the easiest solution to ensure it worked better and didn't show 404 errors. 

Building a complex solution to this problem would take a lot of money and time. We just finished building the concept of "book editions" in December 2022. And we would have to figure out what ISBNs are American versus the UK, and then we would have to check if the book is in stock at bookshop.org, which is hard to do. We don't have the financial resources or time to do this right now.

I'll update this page in 2024 as I know more about the above two projects. 

P.S. Would you like to help us build features like this faster?

I launched a membership program for founding members at the urging of authors and readers. 100% of the money goes toward developing new features and my goal of hiring a full-time developer in 2023 (currently, we only have one part-time developer).