The Booksellers Association and Bookshop.org, working in partnership for the National Year of Reading, are delighted to announce Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow and The Skull by Jon Klassen as Indie Book of the Month and Indie Book of the Month (Children's) for September. The year-long partnership brings together the Booksellers Association’s Books Are My Bag consumer campaign and Bookshop.org’s online platform to champion monthly Indie Book of the Month titles, supporting reading for pleasure and driving readers towards independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland. Each monthly selection benefits from coordinated promotion across the combined reach of the Booksellers Association’s and Bookshop.org’s social media channels, newsletters and digital platforms, ensuring independent bookshops remain central to reader discovery. Independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland will also promote All The Lives She Lived and The Bakery Dragon throughout August via in-store and digital promotional materials. Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It by Cory Doctorow (Verso) examines how the digital platforms and services we rely on deteriorate over time, exploring the forces that drive this decline and what can be done to resist it. Drawing on Doctorow's influential concept of "enshittification", the book considers how platforms shift value away from users and towards business customers and, ultimately, themselves, while setting out a case for how a better digital future can be built. Cory Doctorow, author of Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It, said: "As a recovering indie bookseller myself, I am absolutely devoted to community bookstores and have seen the role they play in both developing communities AND authors. It can be life-changing to be hand-sold a book by a trusted bookseller from your own community - and for writers, that act of literary generosity can be career defining. I'm so honoured and pleased by this. Thank you!" The Skull by Jon Klassen (Walker Books) is a distinctive illustrated tale inspired by a Tyrolean folktale. It follows Otilla, a girl who runs away from home and finds herself in a mysterious house inhabited by a skull. As an unlikely friendship develops between the pair, Otilla discovers that the skull is afraid of something that comes looking for it each night. Strange, atmospheric and darkly funny, the story combines Klassen's characteristic artwork and humour in an unusual tale of friendship and courage. Jon Klassen, author of The Skull, said: "I've met so many amazing independent booksellers in my trips to the UK. They are a fickle, eccentric, strong-minded, indestructible group, and I flatter myself to say I feel a kinship with them, and I am humbled by and grateful for this sign of acceptance. Independent bookshops and booksellers are the reason bookmakers are able to try things out. 'The Skull' is a weird story, told in a weird format, for a readership of indeterminate age. It is allowed to be those things, in the marketplace, because of independent booksellers. They are able to give books that they like a chance, and it was made in the hopes that they, specifically, would like it. It feels hugely lucky that they do, and they have chosen it for the month of September. Thank you so, so much." The Indie Book of the Month and Indie Book of the Month (Children's) titles are selected by panels of independent bookshops from publisher submissions. The Indie Book of the Month and Indie Book of the Month (Children’s) titles are selected by panels of independent bookshops from publisher submissions