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.

It’s a bit different with CDs. There is music I find interesting that is either very old or wasn’t widely distributed, so it’s no longer of interest for digital distribution. The albums or compilations I want are then only available on CD, and almost exclusively through second-hand portals.

I first got into this when DJ Pierre sadly passed away in 2012. Pierre was one of the residents at Stammheim in Kassel. As the club became more popular, compilations under the name “Heimfidelity” followed. The first one was by Pierre, and we listened to it so incredibly often back then (1998) that when he died, I also regretted no longer owning that CD.
On Amazon, some crazy people are offering the Heimfidelity CDs for even crazier sums. I seriously wonder who buys them?

What came back onto my radar when I was looking for the CD was Discogs. I only remembered Discogs as a “registry” for music. It was only in 2012 that I finally realised people were selling their used CDs and records there.

With this late realisation, the collecting bug kicked in. Not only have I acquired the Heimfidelity series over a period of time, mainly through Discogs, but I’ve now got it into my head to buy all the mix CDs by 2manyDJs. Just today I saw on Discogs that alongside “As heard on Radio Soulwax” and “Hang all DJ’s”, they’ve unfortunately also put out the live series “Get Yer Yo Yo’s”. And I’ve only got halfway through the first two series…

The music nerd might well get lost there and will love it. I love it not only because I can get the really old stuff there. I also found newer bits, like the reissue of Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaataa, including the Boys Noize remix. Unfortunately, without a download code.