It’s cold, it’s dark, things are intermittently locked down. It’s not a great time to be a bookshop. Now more than ever, customers are turning to the internet to look for books. But with on-screen face-to-face contact on the rise , it’s becoming increasingly noticeable how sterile, impersonal and monopolised the whole online shopping thing is. Corporations and algorithms and joyless basket-filling as far as the eye can see. So thank heavens for Bookshop, a new way to discover books online that has a touch of humanity to it.

A certified B Corporation (“a business that meets the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose”), Bookshop’s mission is to financially support local, independent bookshops, who benefit from a percentage of every sale.

Publishers and booksellers alike are understandably welcoming this new platform; a new revenue stream particularly welcome while the doors are closed. At time of writing, Bookshop has raised over £434,000 for bookshops (yes, that name does confuse things). They’re not shy about the market implications of all this – the website proudly boasts the Chicago Tribune’s response to their successful US launch earlier in the year: “Bookshop.org hopes to play Rebel Alliance to Amazon’s Empire”.

It’s becoming increasingly noticeable how sterile, impersonal and monopolised the whole online shopping thing is

One welcome, irresistible feature is the chance for anyone to curate a list of books to share with others. Some are using this to make their own little virtual Bookshop-bookshops (with a modest affiliate kickback, natch); others are using it as a pseudo-blogging platform, logging their reading habits with commentary. However it’s adopted (or, because this is the internet, repurposed in unexpected ways), this feature will result in customers being exposed to a far wider variety of books, old and new.

I’ve started putting together my own list, a collection of design book recommendations based on my own modest library. There are some obvious ones in there – your Bieruts, your Kidds, your Müller-Brockmanns, countless titles with forewords by Steven Heller – but it’s by no means an exercise in canonical must-reads.

I’m not recreating yet another automated bestseller list or preaching 1000 DESIGNY THINGS TO READ BEFORE YOU DIE. There’s also a lot of source material books that I’ve found handy over the years (I’m currently nose-deep in the excellent Logomotive: Graphics of the Great American Railroads), a few personal art-crushes like Ed Ruscha and John Stezaker, and lots of book design titles.

This may be of use to others, it may not be. But hopefully someone will stumble upon something unexpected they hadn’t heard of before and give it a try, while simultaneously supporting the little booksellers and publishers that make books so bloody wonderful in the first place.

I’ve started putting together my own list. There are some obvious ones in there – your Bieruts, your Kidds, countless titles with forewords by Steven Heller

It’s not perfect. Searching isn’t as intuitive or flexible as one is accustomed to. And from wherever/however Bookshop draws its inventory, there are niggling omissions. No sign of Michael Bierut’s relatively recent essays collection Now You See It, for example, which is odd. And there’s no way to add non-Bookshop items to your list, such as books outside of the conventional publishing model – the Kickstarter and Unit Editions-shaped gaps in my recommendations are horribly conspicuous.

But these are minor, perfectly surmountable quibbles though. The platform is in beta and still being developed, and it deserves some patience. It’s a welcome new way to buy, browse and discover books online, one that returns humans to the centre of the whole experience, even if they can’t be there in person.

Plus there’s one other detail that surpasses all the other benefits, one particularly important to those of a design-pernickety persuasion: the basket is represented by a basket icon, not a shopping trolley. And now I can sleep at night.

Daniel Benneworth-Gray is a freelance designer based in York. See danielgray.com and@gray; bookshop.org