The pandemic has been brutal for the creative industries. While many people have had more time to reflect, maybe even found more time to write, think or rehearse, getting their work to an audience has proved formidable.

There was a brief vogue for Zoom ­concerts and online social media ­performances but in the main they lacked the authenticity of the real thing, technology provided a ­veneer of connectivity, but stripped the ­performance of its specialness.

There is an old theory about theatre, it is essentially a black box, in which people watch something happening in the dark. Take away the people watching, and the magic spell is broken.

Only one area of the traditional creative industries seems to have bucked the trend and even that is a far from simple story. Book sales have soared and primary among them are sales of factual children’s books, as cack-handed parents try to ­pretend they are teachers. So if you are an author or illustrator of a glossy new book on the famous bridges of the world, it is relatively good news. If you are a ­musician, an actor or a DJ, the pandemic has been a life-shattering experience.

This week the book trade had more good news in the form of an innovative new sales methodology which hopes to dent the behemoth of Amazon and ­loosen its near monopoly over online book sales.

Bookshop.org has launched in the UK this week. It is a morally conscious alternative to Amazon, allowing readers to purchase their books online, while supporting their local indie booksellers. Independent bookshops can create their own virtual shopfronts on the site and earn the full 30% of the book’s cover price, the vital profit margin, that allows publishers to survive.

Bookshop.org is the creation of Andy Hunter, a writer and co-founder of the website, Literary Hub. It launched in America in January 2020 and already has 900 stores stateside, where it touched a moral nerve with lockdown readers desperate for new books but reluctant to use Amazon.

Hunter recently told the press, “bookstores have been in trouble for a while because of Amazon’s growth” and admitted that the pandemic has only exaggerated those trends and as a consequence small, local and independent bookshops are “hanging on for survival”.

More than 130 UK bookshops have ­already signed up and 200 more are ­expected by the end of the year. On the platform, there are already several Scottish bookshop storefronts in Glasgow, Edinburgh, St Andrews, Elgin, and Fort William, with more joining daily.

“It’s been a wild ride,” Hunter said. “Five weeks into what we thought was going to be a six-month period of refining and improving and making small changes, Covid-19 hit and then suddenly we were doing massive business.”

Scottish writers already have an admirable international reputation with some of our top crime writers like Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, consistently charting across the world. Others are less celebrated.

The Kintyre-set stories of crime-writer Denzil Meyrick have a substantial following in America where his books are ­successful both traditionally and in e-book form.

“For me, Kintyre is like the fifth ­Beatle,” Meyrick says. “Ultimately, setting plays a huge part in any fiction. I’m lucky to have the broad, beautiful canvass of ­Kinloch and its real-life environs on which to paint a picture.”

We know that crime books sell and that Scotland has a seemingly endless supply of good writers finding increasingly devious ways to kill people, but another ­astonishing trend in Scottish book publishing is for world-class books reflecting on an upbringing now long gone.

They are mostly too honest and earthy to be given the genteel name ‘memoirs,’ nor do they fit into any obvious fictional genres, these are books that reflect on family, community, and the social bonds that either unite or drive people apart.

Many are already prize-winning or critically acclaimed books. Deborah’s Orr’s posthumous book Motherwell: A Girlhood is about the author’s relationship with her complicated mother set against the backdrop of a Scottish industrial town ravaged by decline.

Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain is a dysfunctional love story between a boy and his mother. Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies set in the summer of 1986, portrays a “brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit”. But the standout for me is ‘Young Team’ by Graeme Armstrong a love letter to friendship shaped by the visceral challenges of gang life in North Lanarkshire.

So many great books by Scottish ­authors and a pandemic forcing you to stay in the house – there is only one obvious solution: read, think, and turn pages.

Amazon, though, casts a dark and malign shadow over book publishing, big and small. It dominates the market with a near ­monopoly over delivery and cavalier ­control over pricing. If Amazon decides to price a book at a huge discount that may be superficially attractive to the consumer, but it hacks away at the publishers’ profitability and cuts the small bookseller out of the action. The pandemic has been an unforeseen godsend for Amazon, as people shifted to online shopping, rather than walk around the bleak and boarded high streets.

Challenging the power of Amazon is a bold ambition, one that consumers need whether they know it or not. Amazon has built a remarkable business exploiting the gig economy and a network of delivery drivers incomparable with any other business. They have invested in smart technology, especially in search and recommendation algorithms that will be hugely difficult to replicate let alone surpass. Amazon have also built Author Central, a writer-facing database which is already the biggest knowledge and data library on authors globally.

One possible way of clipping Amazon’s wings is to legislate but that is an unlikely scenario in Britain with a government ­bewitched by out-sourcing, free-market economics, and an often-uncritical ­respect for American corporate ­monoliths.

Under a recent French court ruling, brought in to stabilise the retail economy during the pandemic, Amazon can only deliver items related to medical supplies, hygiene products, and food items in the country during the coronavirus restrictions. Last week, the Versailles Court of Appeals said if Amazon violates the ruling the company would be fined €100,000 for each delivery that breaches its conditions.

The French unions have used health and safety during the pandemic to take on Amazon, forcing the US giant to conduct a risk assessment of its warehouses in partnership with trade unions, after the unions pointed to a corporate failure to protect warehouse employees from exposure to Coronavirus. Fearing a shut down of some of it’s mega-warehouses, Amazon flexed its muscles, reassuring customers that orders would be fulfilled by warehouses in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

I wish bookshop.org a successful launch but there remains a lingering doubt about web sturdiness and its capacity for fulfilment and delivery.

It feels very much like consumerism is re-writing an already successful narrative – the myth of David and Goliath – where the rules are stacked cruelly in favour of the big guy and you fear an unromantic outcome.