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How online retailer Kenny's beat Amazon to bookselling
This summer marks 30 years since the launch of what is believed to be the oldest digital bookshop.
Kenny’s Bookshop – opened in High Street, Galway in 1940 by Des and Maureen Kenny – started selling books online in 1994, one year before Amazon began.
Kennys.ie wasn’t just a pioneering digital business, it was Ireland’s first e-commerce business. It was launched by Barry Flanagan, founder of Ireland On-Line, who saw Kennys.ie as a business he could showcase because it sold a product that was easy to transport, had a database behind it and also had an existing international customer base.
Three decades later and Kennys.ie is still shipping books to 150 countries worldwide.
Tomás Kenny, Des and Maureen’s grandson, who now runs the business with his sister Sarah, was there when the first discussions about launching a digital business were being had – although he was around 11 at the time.
Tomás only started working full-time at Kenny’s when he was 17, but was in the shop at weekends and during the holidays throughout his childhood.
Tomás told The Bookseller: “Nobody had any idea in the 1990s what would happen with [the internet]. We were well known at the time as an export-led business. Initial thoughts and conversations were about the possibilities and potential of email, as distinct from a website.”
He said: “In the early 1990s, we were getting emails from the US in particular. The idea was to help a pre-existing side of the business, because we already worked with institutions like the Library of Congress and Harvard and Notre Dame. It sounds silly now, but the sheer cost of ringing those people 10 times a week was insane back then. We were so export-focused anyway, [going digital] made sense. I wish I could say we’d had the foresight to see where it was all going with the dawn of the internet, but we didn’t.”
Kennys.ie might be the oldest online bookshop, but the rise of Amazon played a more positive role in its early incarnation than one might expect.
Tomás added: “Everyone hates Amazon, no matter who you talk to. But initially it was great. We set up an account and initially started selling books to the US. We suddenly had access to another whole market. We did a lot of business in Japan, and there was a very serious recession there in the mid-1990s. So we had all the stock we’d bought for Japan that we couldn’t sell. We started to catalogue it and sell it on Amazon and AbeBooks.”
The business fully moved to its current premises in Liosbán Retail Park in Galway in 2009.
He said: “In the early days we had four floors over two buildings. The shop building was 15th century, so it was full of small, pokey rooms and it required a lot of staff. There were days in November when we wouldn’t sell a book till midday. But the website started to transform it. You’d come in and there’d be orders every morning. We weren’t so reliant on customers in Galway walking in.”
Today the business ships hundreds of book parcels daily with An Post, selling everything from new and secondhand books to rare books and archives.
Tomás added: “I think realistically, if you were a bookshop in 1994 and you’re a bookshop of 2024 and you’re still doing the same thing, then you’re unlikely to be in business for very long. The internet is a part of that, of course. I mean, if you think about 1994, computers weren’t being widely used, and if they were, then they were coming to kill books.”
