Samir Patil is a former McKinsey consultant who previously founded Scroll.in, one of India's leading independent digital news publications. His latest venture, Stck.me, is an e-commerce platform that’s making a fresh push into international book sales and positioning itself as a global bookstore for publishers seeking better margins and direct reader relationships.

Patil argues that the publishing industry is fundamentally flawed insofar as publishers and authors generate consumer demand, then hand buyers off to companies like Amazon, which takes a significant cut and then owns the customer relationship.

"Amazon does not truly sell any books," he says. "It is the publisher and the writer who are selling books by doing all the activities they do. They are sending all the traffic to Amazon."

The New York–based platform, which launched in 2021, works with self-published authors and traditional publishers alike, allowing companies to sell individual chapters, webcomics, e-books, and audiobooks, as well as print books via print-on-demand. It currently attracts nearly one million readers a day, processes around 10,000 transactions daily, and lists books approximately 15,000 writers, according to co-founder Samir Patil.

The platform currently lists titles from such corporate Indian publishers as Penguin India and HarperCollins India, as well as Speaking Tiger, an independent New Delhi house, and Kalachuvadu, a Chennai publisher catering to Tamil-language readers.

On Stck, publishers and authors keep 75–90% of each sale, retain their customer data, and hold their rights non-exclusively. The margin math, as Patil describes it, is straightforward. On a $25 book sold through Amazon at a 50% discount, a publisher nets roughly $10 after printing costs. The same book sold through Stck, using print-on-demand at an estimated cost of $5, would yield around $16.

"That's a huge difference," he says, noting the gap is wider still for smaller publishers on worse Amazon terms.

Patil takes particular issue with how print publishers traditionally get paid. Under the traditional model, publishers pay authors, printers, and distributors before seeing any revenue themselves, all while waiting for a platform like Amazon to complete a sale to a customer whose identity they never learn. Stck, he said, inverts this order of operations, with the reader paying first, and the publisher covering fulfillment costs after while retaining the buyer's contact information.

"This is the negative operating cycle that Amazon pioneered 20 years ago," Patil says. "It should be there for the publisher who's taking the risk."

He adds that publishers face a compounding problem as AI-generated search results reshape book discovery. Publishers spend on SEO, social media, and advertising on platforms like Amazon, all while losing search placement to Amazon's own product pages. He believes this can be resolved if publishers truly have control over search, which should point to the “canonical web pages” for their books and authors.

"We will do all kinds of things to make sure that a page for the book or the author is owned by somebody who owns that IP, and is not just always defaulting to Amazon," he says. This, he notes, allows publishers and authors to capitalize on customers he describes as "fans," or those who are loyal, likely to make repeat purchases, and appreciative of a direct relationship with authors and publishers.

Expanding international sales, especially in North America, is Patil’s immediate priority. While he has had discussions with numerous Big Five publishers, no U.S.-based major publishers have signed on yet. "The global supply chain for international publishers, even when they are translations, really is broken," he says. "We want to help fix it. We want to be the world’s bookstore.”