Go ahead and read your e-book. I won’t complain. I may mourn for you the luscious scent of print and paper wafting from newly purchased pages, or the clout that being seen reading a paper book seems to bring younger generations these days (fuck yeah).
I’m just happy when people read, on a screen or paper or written in yellow on snow. Whatever floats your boat. The plainest sticking point with e-books is Amazon’s dominance, which is honestly a sticking point with bookstores in general. Buy local, goddamn it!
For those who don’t wish to fund Bezos’ Trump-foot-kissing empire, or at least don’t want to contribute to Amazon’s stranglehold on human joy, there are few options for e-book readers. Or were, until today. Bookshop.org launched its e-book shop, so you can support independent bookstores (the best kind) even when you’re buying pixels.
it’s book independence day
Bookshop.org is a certified B Corporation online marketplace that, since it launched in January 2020, has allowed people to buy physical books from independent booksellers through an affiliate model.
The model works largely the same way for e-books purchased on the platform. Bookshop.org takes a small cut of each sale, but the bookshop that owns the stock and makes the sale takes home a larger percentage of the earnings. There’s also an inventive social media sharing mechanism, too.
“We’ll allow anybody to share any quote from any ebook to social media, and then people who are on social can click through, buy the ebook, and start reading it on their phone immediately,” Andy Hunter, founder and CEO of Bookshop.org, told The Verge in an interview.
The catch is that you can’t read them on a Kindle, which is the top dog in the e-reader segment. Hunter says, in the interview, that he plans to ask Amazon to loosen the restrictions on the Kindle so that e-books bought through Bookshop.org can be downloaded and read on the massively popular e-reader.
If appealing to their questionable sense of devotion to the survival of independent bookstores doesn’t work out, he said, “Then we will see if there’s a group of lawyers that want to try and take it on, and make it so you can buy your ebooks from whoever you want.”
You can download Bookshop.org’s new e-book reader apps on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store, but you have to buy the e-books through Bookshop.org online storefront and download them there before reading them in the apps.
The reason you can’t buy e-books through the apps, Hunter told The Verge, is because Apple takes a 30% cut of each sale through the App Store.
E-ink or real ink, support your local bookstores each and every time you can, and buy through an independent bookstore, because a future in which Kindle Books are the only books is a future I don’t want to live in.
The post Locals Only, Brah! You Can Now Buy E-Books From Indie Bookstores appeared first on VICE.
