A buy-back scheme for used books has been launched by Bookshop.org, the online retailer launched in 2020 with the view of being an ethical alternative to Amazon.

The scheme, Bookloop by Bookshop.org, allows customers to trade books they own for credit to use on the website. Readers can register books through the online valuation system and then either leave them at a DPD drop-off point or have them picked up from home.

The used books will not be sold on Bookshop.org, which continues to only stock new titles, but traded on other online marketplaces by Zeercle, a company that also operates the WH Smith buy-back scheme launched late last year.

Unlike the WH Smith service, books traded via Bookshop.org will not be sold on Amazon-owned websites, and accumulated royalties will be distributed to authors via a shared author fund through an arrangement with the Society of Authors (SoA) and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. This fund, the Drusilla Harvey Access Fund, offers grants to authors to cover a variety of support needs, from travel costs to childcare.

Readers must donate at least £5 worth of books to participate in the scheme. The valuation system currently shows paperback copies of Paul Lynch’s 2023 Booker prize winning novel Prophet Song being worth £1.91, while hardback copies of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare are valued at £3.24.

Some titles – such as Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club or a 2015 Penguin Classics edition of Jane Austen’s Persuasion – are rejected by the valuation system. This is because the book’s “value is too low on the second-hand book market or because we already have too many copies of it”, according to a message on the system.

Bookshop.org’s business model is based on independent bookshops creating their own virtual shopfronts on its website, and those shops receiving the full profit margin from each sale. Mark Thornton, senior partnerships manager for the site, said that he sees Bookloop as sitting within the site’s “overarching positive loop, positive cycle of economic activity”.

“We’re always saying the best way to support bookshops is in person,” he said. “But on the other side of that, the inexorable rise of online book purchases means we have to find new ways of looping all of these things together, so that we’re all in this shared endeavour of supporting a really positive reading culture, with independent bookshops at its heart.”

However, secondhand booksellers have voiced doubt over how many books will actually be sold on to readers through the Bookloop scheme. “Of all the secondhand books we are offered less than 50% are worth purchasing,” said Patrick Kelly, owner of Bookmongers in Brixton. “Most secondhand books should be recycled. They are either no longer relevant, overly produced or are left in bad condition.” He said that Bookloop “sounds like a well-meaning scheme thought up by someone with too much time on their hands”.

Though Zeercle “makes sure that books get back out to readers”, said Thornton, “there does come a point” where the market for a particular book “may just be saturated”. Bookshop.org trusts Zeercle to have a “robust system” in place to “process that and to do it in an environmentally responsible way”, he added.