Who we are

We’ve always wanted to own a bookstore. And we love reading in local cafes. This way, we can partner with local businesses while doing what we love — shopping for books. With backgrounds in ecommerce and AI, we know how to build a model, and we use that experience to predict which books will best suit your patron’s taste.

Where we operate

We are based in New York City, and currently place cafebooks machines in Manhattan and Brooklyn—this enables us to restock machines quickly, and regularly visit our partner cafés for a cortado.

How we partner

  1. We’ll come in and discuss the opportunity, and work with you to find the best placement for the machine, do some color- and font-matching to prepare a vinyl wrap, and discuss genre options you think your patrons will love.

  2. Within a few weeks we’ll have the machine ready and work together to find a time to install and do the initial stocking.

  3. We’ll work with you to find the right time to in regularly re-stock, and at the end of each month we’ll send you your share of the profits.

The machine

We use AMS’s SlimGem model, which is one of the narrowest machines on the market, and provides reliability and ease of use. These compact machines measure <30” wide, and are 72” tall. We default to accepting credit cards only, but if you are a cash-based business we can do the same!

We’ll work with you to identify your primary & secondary colors, the font you use, and any additional graphics that would make the machine best fit your cafe’s aesthetic. Then we’ll do a vinyl wrap before installation.

 FAQs

  • Free! We take on the initial investment of purchasing, vinyl wrapping, and stocking the machine, and all it costs you is < 3x3 ft of space in your store.

  • Initially, we give you 10% of profits until our initial investment is re-couped, then increase to 25%. That being said, you would receive 100% of the profit from any stock you place (local zines, store merch, etc.) Have multiple locations? We're open to discussing various profit-sharing models.

    Beyond profit sharing, our expectation is that your traffic will increase by having a cafebooks machine in your location, in turn increasing your profits!

  • We digitally keep track of how many items are purchased from the machine, and get alerted anytime a row is out of stock. We'll restock the machine within 2 days, and over time learn how frequently your patrons purchase books so we can schedule regular re-stocks.

  • If after a 6-month period you decide you want to stock the machine yourself and get 100% of the profit, we're open to selling the customized machine directly to you.

    We'll also work with you to partner with local bookstores to stock the machine and set up a profit splitting agreement.

  • E-commerce has enabled best-in-class models for personalizing recommendations to a consumer. We use these models and tune them to the purchasing history per machine to auto-select the authors, genres, and individual books to stock the machine with.

    Over time, cafebooks will be the perfect selection for your regulars.

  • While we can stock books from every genre, we stick with small and mass-market sized paperbacks - meaning certain genres like photography and cooking will be limited.

    We'll work with you to pre-select genres (Sci-Fi, Romance, Mystery, Classics, etc.) that you'd expect would fit your patrons' interest. Then organize the machine to have rows-per genre, author, etc.

  • Mostly! Out of the six rows of stock, 4-5 will be reserved for small used paperbacks. We'll always have one row with some note-taking and art supplies, and are open to leaving a row free for you to stock with merch and other stock you select (and make 100% of profit on.)

  • All over! Library sales, bulk online retailers, garage sales, used-book stores, etc. We're also interested in working with local bookstores to stock cafebooks machines near their shops -- extending their reach and collaborating with local cafes in their community.