I own a first-generation Kindle.
I was a member of Audible back in their pre-Amazon days when you could only listen to their stuff on a pre-iPod mp3-player and when they had different compression rates
(Level 1 sounded terrible but downloaded quickly and didn’t take up much space on your device. It was also barely intelligible, but that ‘barely’ was better than paying $45 to own the cassettes or CDs, and then having to lug around the large, battery-hungry device that played them.)
I loved Amazon and Audible with a passion.
When Amazon bought Audible them I had vague concerns about monopolization but I also deeply loved the ‘whisper sync’ feature that meant that I could be reading an ebook on my Kindle and then switch to the audiobook on Audible which would pick up at the same point
Holy heavenly reader joy!
However, now that Amazon has gone full Robber Baron, I no longer buy my ebooks from Amazon and have stopped paying Audible the $15 a month I’ve happily paid for about 20 years.
How I Get My Books Now
(tl;dr: Resource Section at the end of this article)
Physical Books
I’m lucky enough to live in a town with an indie bookstore, so my first port of call when I want a book is Reads & Company.
(If I’m honest, my first port of call is usually Bookshop.org which claims to share profits with the indie bookstore of your choice (my designated bookstore is my local indie. N.B. I’m keeping an eye on this in the ‘this seems too good to be true’ category. That’s why I try to make an effort to walk down to the shop or call them and have them order things for me if they don’t have it in stock.)
Also I have a library within walking distance that is connected to a large county-wide system and which also offers ebooks and audio books, though the wait times are often comically long.
The upsides – I interact with real, flesh and blood book lovers; I get some exercise, if I walk there; I get to browse and stumble on titles I might never otherwise see; my money helps employ local folks, support a local business and funnel tax revenue–from sales and the employees’ income–into my town’s coffers, which make it a better place to live (taxes are good, m’kay?).
The downsides – I’ve had to learn to be patient again. I can’t one-click buy a book on a whim, while listening to an NPR interview with an author (which will then sit on my Kindle, forgotten about in the terrible, terrible interface for browsing and cataloging your books that Amazon never bothered to improve–wait, it that actually an upside?); I might not get the big discounts; they might not have it in stock and I might have to wait. (Again with the patience. Aargh. Again, this might be an upside)
eBooks
Bookshop.org now offers ebooks. Not always, and sometimes imperfectly (I bought a book that was listed as DRM-free – so that I could download it and read it on any device, but the publisher had not done the settings properly so, turns out, it wasn’t DRM-free), but it’s a young service and I have hopes it will.
I also try to order directly from authors.
This can be a little tricky as I have to apply some thought to the process: how do I get this onto my devices, again? Every author uses a different system (some use Bookfunnel, some use SendOwl, some have you download them directly from their website…). This may put off people less comfortable with tech (and trial and error) than I am, but since I can tackle these minor obstacles, I do.
(Most authors and indie publishers provide a handy step stool to help you clamber over the gate, by means of step by step instructions on the download page.)
How I Read Ebooks
I do love my Kindle with its e-ink screen and handy form factor, so often I will email my downloaded books to my Amazon digital library.
(Go here and scroll down to “personal document settings” to set up your ‘send to’ email and your approved ‘send from’ email addresses. Then it’s as simple as sending the ‘epub’ file to that send to address and it’ll appear on your Kindle.)
Yes, I know this keeps me tethered to Amazon’s platform and prevents me from deleting my account.
Second option: connect my e-reader to my computer via a USB cable and drag the documents across. (This still works for now, though I will not be surprised if Amazon turns off this ability, at which point my Kindle will become a very expensive ornament.)
The upsides – I’m not supporting a corporation that is trying to take over our whole lives and grind smaller businesses in every realm (including pharmacies, medical records and grocery stores?!) under their boot heel.
The downsides – these are considerable–to me–but they are all related to my convenience and I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay for the irritating luxury of having principles. Namely: It’s not a one-click process to load my ebooks onto every device I own through one handy app anymore. I have to pause and read the instructions. I am responsible for remembering what I bought and where I put it (the horror!). After years of being groomed to use the frictionless Amazon eco-system, it’s taking me a minute to get used to reintroducing al little inconvenience into my life, but I’m actually starting to dig it. (Is it wrong to feel heroic for doing something as simple as NOT-buying-from-an-evil-corporation-because-they-made-it-easy-to-do-so? Perhaps…)
How I listen to Audio Books
I have swapped my Audible membership for one with Libro.fm, which is an employee-owned, social purpose corporation, B-Corporation (which means they pursue social and financial goals in the for-profit sphere, and which gives them more latitude to pursue social goals over financial goals, than other corporate structures allow) and their profits support indie bookstores.
And sometimes I buy directly from the author, as I did with Cory Doctorow’s book Enshittification, which explains how the promise of the internet was hijacked and “enshittified” by a few big corporations and what we can do about it, which was directly responsible for me creating this article.
However, then I had to apply brain power to figuring out how I was going to listen to it.
Fortunately I’ve been online for a looooooong time, and remembered a little app I used to use for putting audio from courses into a useable format on my phone. It’s called Bound and it still exists. I saved Doctorow’s book files to Dropbox and then used Bound to
(Fun fact: writing this gave me the opportunity to instruct my word processor to learn the spelling of “enshittification”…)
The Upsides Titles from Libro.fm and direct-from-author can be downloaded and saved on my local hard drive or in a cloud storage of my choice, backed up and moved around, and will be mine forever. (One of my pet peeves with Audible is that sometimes a publisher will lose the license for an audiobook and a new publisher makes a new edition with a different narrator and all I want is the original audio…if Audible takes that version off their site I may not be able to access it again—this used to not be true because you used to be able download audible files but they changed that rule this year. And yes, I did spend an afternoon downloading 20+ years of Audible files to my local drive before that policy kicked in, thanks for asking.)
Libro.fm is a socially-conscious, employee-owned company and I feel good about that.
If I buy directly from the author, NOT via an app, the author gets to keep more money, hopefully freeing them up to write more stuff I might enjoy.
Additional note: if you can buy directly from the vendor, on a website, you save them the ruinous fees charged by app stores, sending more of the money to the people who are providing the services you value (the authors, the vendors, not the third-parties-who-act-as-slum-landlord-storefronts.
The Downsides Again: a lack of convenience, for me, and a little more use of my brain. Sometimes I have to (gasp) stop and think “how can I listen to this?” or “Which app do I listen to this one in?”. My ebooks no longer sync with my audio copy, if I haven’t bought both from Amazon. And sometimes they cost more. But not always.
Have you noticed how my downsides lists all involve me having to use my brain and be a little bit inconvenienced and how that sometimes ends up flipping back into an upside? Hmm….
In case you want to ditch the ‘zon, too:
A By-No-Means-Exhaustive List of Resources
(…but containing some of my favorite tools and services)
Physical Book Resources:
Bookshop.org Buy books online, support indie bookstores.
Indybound Find an indie bookstore
Borrow from your local library.
e-Book Resources
Bookshop.org/ebooks Buy online, support indie bokstores.
libbyapp.com Access your public library’s collection. Requires a library card.
Epub reader (ebook reader – I haven’t tried this but it has a 4.5 star rating from 9k+ reviewers in the Apple App Store alone)
Hoopla (Access your public library. Requires an account)
Audiobook Resources:
Libro.fm Audible-like audiobook store and optional subscription service, with a social conscience.
(And here’s my referral link, which gets me a free audiobook credit if you happen to use it to create a new membership)
Libby & Hoopla (see above) also allow you to borrow audiobooks from your library.
Bound (use it for all kinds of audio that you might want to listen to: course replays, audio books, study notes…)