Amazon’s new service, Your Company Bookshelf, offers U.S. organizations a simple way to purchase and distribute books. Organizations select books, allocate budget, and invite recipients to choose books from their curated bookshelf. Recipients can pick their preferred format, whether Kindle eBook, paperback or hardcover book.
Over the last year, Amazon partnered with organizations across education, health care, finance, and technology sectors to learn more about their pain points when it comes to bulk book purchasing—the enormous overhead of selecting, managing, and distributing books.
“Your Company Bookshelf removes the inconveniences typically involved in the process of purchasing and distributing books,” said Prasanna Somasundaram, director of specialty reading at Amazon Books. “Through this new service, organizations on Amazon Business can set up a Bookshelf and invite recipients to redeem books in just minutes, all from one dashboard.”
Companies can tailor each Bookshelf for a specific purpose with any of the millions of print books and Kindle eBooks available on Amazon—whether that’s to offer professional development resources, facilitate trainings, or distribute books to support diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
"The Amazon Bookshelf has significantly streamlined our efforts to get valuable books into the hands of our employees in the U.S. It has made the process simple and easy as for both the administrator of our related programs and for our recipients," said Samantha Young, Human Resources Program Manager at F5. "Since implementing, we haven’t had a single employee report difficulty with the feature—a great win!"
Businesses have full control over the books included in their bookshelf, who can access the bookshelf, and the budget for how much recipients can spend on a book. This makes it quick and easy for recipients to access all the books and materials they need to learn and develop their skills.
“The uptake and enthusiasm about this service from our first participants makes us excited to bring this product to more businesses everywhere,” said Somasundaram.
How Your Company Bookshelf works:
- Login in: Log in or create your free Amazon Business account.
- Choose books: Search and select books for your bookshelf from Amazon’s expansive selection.
- Allocate budget: Determine how much each recipient has to spend and set voucher validity period.
- Upload recipient emails: Amazon will send recipients a personalized invite to join the bookshelf.
- Recipient joins the bookshelf and selects book: Once the recipient accepts the invitation, they can browse and select a book in their preferred format from the bookshelf, and complete the order using the pre-paid voucher.
