The Associated Press

Andy Hunter, founder of a new online sales outlet for independent booksellers, had seen a crisis building well before the coronavirus pandemic shut down many of the country’s stores.

“Between 2015 and 2018, I saw this big jump in the percentage of weekly sales for physical books that were going to Amazon.com,” Hunter says. “And it seemed like independent bookstores needed to do something to adapt, because the writing was on the wall.”

In January, Hunter launched Bookshop.org, which offers everything from the new Hilary Mantel novel to such classics as Boccaccio’s “The Decameron,” and shares proceeds with independent stores. Hunter says weekly sales at first were around $30,000, but jumped to more than $450,000 by mid-March, as the virus spread and readers no longer could visit their favorite local stores.

On Tuesday, Simon & Schuster became the first of the major publishers to launch a formal partnership with Bookshop.org. Simon & Schuster is adding buy buttons for Bookshop.org to all of its websites and promoting Bookshop through emails and elsewhere online. It also has enlisted numerous authors, among them Stephen King, Susan Orlean and Jason Reynolds, to get the word out about Bookshop on social media and elsewhere.

“Independent bookstores are the lifeline of the intellect,” King said in a statement. “They have to remain strong, especially in difficult times like these.”

“Indie booksellers have consistently served as bonding agents for our communities,” Reynolds said in a statement. “They work tirelessly to make sure we not only have books, but also a base, a place to come and simply be. They are, quite literally, the cover that protects the pages of who we are. And now, it’s time for us to protect them.”

Hunter, who previously founded the digital publisher Electric Literature and helped create the online publication Literary Hub, sees Bookshop.org as serving a niche within a niche in independent selling. While stores such as Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon, and the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Massachusetts, have built effective presences online, many have lacked the resources and/or the desire to do the same.