Some time ago, the thought crossed my mind to stop using Amazon the way I had been. Practically every day, and practically everything, I ordered from Amazon. And why? Because the company has managed to optimise its processes to meet the needs of the customer, and you genuinely don’t have to worry about much. Except maybe that Bezos wants to send a giant phallus into space with the money he makes, along with two or three other things.
I started with what I hold in my hand almost every day, my Kindle. Again, Amazon does a few things right that others can’t or don’t do as well. Apart from DRM, not much really bothered me about Amazon’s books until then, and you hardly have to worry about DRM if you stay in the Kindle world. I’ll come back to that another time.
Now I wanted as much contrast as possible. Instead of funding a space phallus, I wanted to put the money I was spending on books to better use. And, surprisingly, the selection of alternative bookshops that spend part of their turnover on charitable causes is not so small.
Most often, buch7 is mentioned as a fair alternative to Amazon. buch7 claims to put 75% of its profits towards supporting social, cultural and environmental projects. Two things about buch7 didn’t quite add up for me, though. I mainly read e-books and their e-book selection is rather limited. And the statement “75% of our profits…” is considered non-transparent by the German Central Institute for Social Issues. Depending on how you calculate your profit, that figure could easily amount to nothing.
fairbuch.de, for example, does it better, donating 2% of the purchase value to Kindernothilfe.
fairbuch.de uses the white-label solution from Libri. This means that the online shop and the logistics behind it come from Libri, and fairbuch.de slaps their own branding on it and handles the marketing. As a customer, this gives me a comprehensive range of e-books, the option of using a Tolino with these e-books and, of course, the physical book catalogue.
By the way, ecobookstore.de does the same thing and is another often-mentioned alternative. Since they’re in the same ecosystem, you can shop at both with a single account. So sometimes I support the rainforest and sometimes Kindernothilfe.
But what about local bookshops? Some of you may be wondering. As I wrote at the beginning, for me it’s about having a good digital experience that matches how I actually use books. The discussion about whether printed books or e-book readers are better is absurd. There’s no single right way to consume a medium – it’s about the content.
But since there are still plenty of cookery books and photography books, like the excellent Hamburg Cityscapes by Milan Horacek, the local bookshop still sees me from time to time.
For anyone interested, Seitenflügel has a great write-up on what it’s like dealing with the book trade as a small publisher, and Kaffeehaussitzer explains why he doesn’t buy books from Amazon (both in German).
This post is part of my reading page.
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