I mean, I have similar images from my early days as a DJ, just not with Beyoncé looking incredulous, but with other, rather unknown people.

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Yes, it’s nonsense, I know. Compared to him, I was probably a bit lazier. I put less effort into getting new records and gigs. That’s how I’d sum it up after reading the book…

Mark Ronson wasn’t really on my radar. Sure, Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars… I was aware of all that. Not my kind of music. But I also found the memoirs of Carl Cox and Harold Heath very interesting, if only because of my proximity to the subject. So picking up this book wasn’t a stretch.

Of the lot, I actually think Mark Ronson’s is the best. I like his writing, some of the scenes are incredibly quirky and entertaining (no spoilers: Robin Williams), and the music scene the book covers mirrors a time when I was tuned into much of what he describes.

Long story short: please get the book, it’s good!

The official playlist for the book is available on Spotify, with a copy also available on Deezer.

This post is part of my reading page.

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.