4 Amazon alternatives for book lovers
I love books, and I love all the different ways to brows, read, and borrow books!
Understandably, for many, the go-to way to get books is through Amazon.com and while I can appreciate why, I want to offer some alternatives as the holiday approaches. Yes, I’ve used Amazon, not only as a consumer but as a storefront for my own books. In fact, it’s where I’ve made the bulk of my digital sales for “Light Keeper Chronicle” so far and I’m phenomenally appreciative for those!
That said another company is going to be more appreciative of my dollar than Amazon will be. Now, this is by no means a cumulative list (there are plenty of other alternatives) rather, these are just some of the services I’ve been using. I hope you enjoy!
Bookshop.org instead of Amazon.com
I’ll preface this one by saying that, the best place to get a physical book to read is your local library. However, if you want to own a book then the best place to get it is an indie bookstore. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, a lot of those store created or expanded online storefronts they had to adapt from a period where people weren’t going out-and-about at all.
That said, Bookshop.org is a nice alternative third option if indie bookstores are out of your range. According to its FAQ page, this website gives 10% of purchases to indie bookstores that are included in Bookshop’s “pool.” According to that same FAQ, a gross 81% of Bookshop.org’s profits went directly to independent bookstores.
In my experience, Bookshop generally has all its books at the price you’d see day one on a store shelf and I’m generally happy to use the site to order books when I can afford it.
LibroFM instead of Audible
Most of the biggest readers I know love audiobooks! I think nearly every time I’ve spoken with a friend about what they’ve read lately and how they’ve managed to suprass 50 books in a year, audiobooks come up. While I have yet to release a book in audio form, it’s increasingly a priority.
Libro.FM is my go-to way to get audiobooks over the past couple of years. Like Bookshop.org, Libro.FM gives a portion of your purchase to indie bookstores it partners with, in this case, that’s 15% of a sale.
It operates the same as Audible in that you can pay for a monthly membership ($14.99 as of writing this) that gives you one credit to use to get any audiobook that month. You also get a 30% discount if you’re a member and want to get another audiobook that month.
Kobo instead of Kindle
Listen, I’ll take reading a physical book over an ebook nearly any day. That said, I remember reading the middle portion of “A Song of Ice & Fire” on my first edition Nook during college, which made the books much easier to carry around than the physical books. These days, when I use an e-reader, it’s a Kobo.
As I understand it, Rakuten Kobo is a Canada-based company and the average person I’ve spoken to in the U.S. hasn’t heard of it. During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I got a Kobo Nia ($99) which, as far as I can tell, operates the same as the latest base Kindle model at the same price point. It’s a black-and-white- six-inch touch screen with 8 GB of storage. (I think this year’s Kindle model has 16 GB, but I had dozens of books on my 2 GB first edition Nook and never hit capacity.)
My understanding is that only about 5% of a purchase through Kobo goes to the participating bookstore you decide to associate with your account. That said, since Kobo is popular in Canada, you can get all the big English language releases you typically find on Kindle and most other smaller publications that aren’t publishing exclusively on Amazon. In my experience, price points are also generally either the same or comparable on the ebooks themselves with differences only popping up when one of the two sites runs a sale.
Storygraph instead of Goodreads
Storygraph is a free-to-use website where you log the books you’ve read, write reviews of those books, and read reviews from others. One of my favorite features of this website is that you get charts that tell you if people who have read the book think its “fast-paced” or “adventurous” or “character driven” or anything else you might want to know about a book before you dive into it.
The website Goodreads was strangely (well, maybe not so strangely given who I am as a person) my social media site of choice through high school. Though also free to use, Goodreads was purchased by Amazon in 2013.
I’ll admit that, at this point, Storygraph doesn’t feel as robust as Goodread was in 2012-2014 when I was using it the most, but the stuff that is there feels specialized in a way I really like and I’ve recently started using it much more to record what books are on my to-read list.