Help Local Book Sellers With These Amazon Alternatives
It doesn’t matter if you love Amazon or hate it. Two facts are clear right now: it will probably take you a little longer to get minor items from the retail giant, depending on what you order and when you order it, and there are a ton of small businesses out there. went out of business right now over everything to do with the coronavirus.
I love fast delivery, I love it, but only because I – and many others – move away from the rough mechanics of Amazon mode . This is a moral quandary that I don’t often think about, but it should influence my decision to renew my Prime membership. I’ll do it when the time is right, but for now, it’s much harder to ignore the barren parking lots and empty storefronts I see when I’m on my quarantine walk right now.
To get the best of both worlds – fast enough book delivery and a way to keep your favorite local bookstores afloat – I recommend you replace Amazon with two websites: Bookshop.org and Libro.fm .
Why you should buy books from a bookstore and not Amazon
The bookstore is an incredible competitor to Amazon, and it’s one of the few good things that has come out of all this coronavirus mess. The premise is simple: Order books online and your purchase contributes to a large pool of revenue that is paid to independent bookstores – 10 percent of all site sales. Bookstores themselves earn 30 percent of all the sales they generate if they use the bookstore to manage their inventory, packaging and shipping. In addition, the bookstore has an effective affiliate program that actually pays out a higher percentage for referrals (10%) than Amazon ( 4.5% ) for books, so sites and influencers who link to the bookstore help themselves. and local independent bookstores with every sale.
Honestly, there’s no reason not to give Bookshop a try if you’re looking for something to read while quarantined. Its website is easy to use if you know what you want; since it’s new, it doesn’t have the robust peer-review system that can be found on Amazon, but I doubt a lot of people buy books because Amazon buyers think they’re great.
In a perfect world, someone would create an extension for Chrome or Firefox that would alert you to the price of an item in a bookstore when you find it on Amazon – a handy little reminder. I haven’t seen one yet due to the novelty of the bookstore, but I’m sure we’ll see something similar soon.
Buy audiobooks at Libro.fm, which is bookstore-friendly.
As for Libro.fm , I recommend it as a great alternative for all audiobooks that you would otherwise buy on Amazon Audible. While this site, which OneZero’s Angela Lashbrook suggested to me, does not specify exactly what percentage of the revenue bookstores derive from your audiobook purchases (or any referral links they use), the site clearly caters to the interests of your independent bookstore. … As Lashbrook recently wrote:
Like a bookstore, Libro.fm also shares revenue with independent bookstores, but since most bookstores across the country were forced to close their doors, Libro.fm decided to expand this support with 100% revenue from new subscriptions to affiliate bookstores. stores. …
You can find a list of Libro.fm bookstore partners here to confirm that you can schedule your purchases to support your favorite local store (or any bookstore, in fact). You can listen to your audiobooks through the iOS and Android apps just like any audiobook service, and the $ 15 / month Libro.fm subscription is essentially the same as Amazon Audible . Heck, if you sign up for Libro.fm with the SWITCH promo code (active at the time of this writing), you can even get additional audiobooks for free with any new purchases.
Free books and audiobooks are fine too
To be honest, both of these services are great, but there are better alternatives if you need to fix reading (or listening) during a large quarantine. I would launch the Libby app right now and start accessing as many libraries as possible. Why not take advantage of free books and audio content if you can? Or go all the way to the old school and enjoy refined classics in e-books, if that’s your preference. You have no excuse not to take up literature while you wait for the world to open up.