Inspired by Jess Mahler's writeup of Amazon alternatives for ebooks, I thought it'd be useful to collect all of my favorite Amazon alternatives in one place.
Physical Books
It's hard to beat a good local library for browsing, if you're lucky enough to have one. I'm fortunate enough to find a lot of books through mine, both physical and digital. Want to use your local library? Library Extension tells you if your local library has what you’re looking at, while WorldCat allows you to search virtually every library out there.
- Library Extension lets you see what's in the collection of your local library system right on the Amazon page.
- WorldCat lets you search multiple library systems across the world, useful for Interlibrary Loan.
Want to support a brick and mortar alternative to Barnes and Noble? Bookshop can help with that. Failing that, there's always Powell's, which is one of my local bookstores and also one of the largest indie bookstores in the world. I am, again, priviledged to have access to many local bookstores, offering both new and secondhand options. I also get cheap used books from BetterWorldBooks.
- Bookshop Buy books online while supporting the small, local shop of your choice.
- IndieBound Indie Store Finder if you don't know whether you have any local indie bookstores.
- Boardgaming similar to IndieBound but for gaming stores.
- Powell's the largest indie bookstore in the US. Can still do phone orders if you can't order online.
- Better World Books a good source for inexpensive used books, often library copies.
I don't always buy hardcopy books- I've moved enough times in my life that I really value the ability to own an ebook library- but I also enjoy owning really beautiful books, or having physical copies to read we're having Family Reading Time (yes, we're really that twee I guess) and I'm putting my screen down because my kid can't really tell the difference between me on my phone reading a book and me on my phone messing around. I especially like graphic novels in hardcopy, and I tend to buy MG and YA books I'm interested in so that they can hang around in case my kid gets interested in them later. I did a lot of exploring of my Dad's paperback collection when I was a kid, and I want to make sure my kid has that opportunity.
eBooks
The rest of the time, I tend to go for ebooks. The joy of never not having a book has not dimmed since I was trying to get books on my PalmOne, and I love having my entire Calibre library available on my phone, should I need it.
- Smashwords lots of really good indie authors, but unless you are linked here by an author, finidng stuff can be a bit of a crapshoot.
- eBooks.com a good Amazon alternative for major publishers' ebooks.
- Weightless Books great for sci-fi, fantasy and horror. Also carries short fiction magazines.
- Book View Cafe an author-owned ebook cooperative with sci-fi and fantasy.
- Standard eBooks high quality versions of public domain books.
- Scarlet Ferret Scarlet Ferret
- Angry Robot Books
TTRPGs
- DriveThruRPG has PDF as well as POD versions of roleplaying games, plus a fiction section.
- itch.io
DRM-free Bundles
Goodreads Alternatives
- LibraryThing has been around forever.
- BookWyrm uses activitypub and integrates with the fediverse.
- StoryGraph
- Hardcover
Fanfic Ebooks
It's free! It's sometimes better than the original! It's often queerer than the original! How can you go wrong? First of all, I like to download fics in ebook format when I can:
- Archive of Our Own The AO3 has almost everything represented, it's a huge resource, and it has built-in magical epub/pdf/mobi downloads. Love it.
- Ebook Library This doesn't have a huge selection but it's curated and the fics are formatted individually. I've read fic I wouldn't have read otherwise because it was collected here.
For stuff on other fanfic archives:
- FanFictionDownloader Downloads a multichapter story from fanfiction.net, fanficauthors.net, mugglenet.com as a single epub. For when I hit a fandom that's still heavily on ff.net.
- Fanfiction Lightweight Automated Grabber Web-only downloader for fanfiction.net, and some Twilight archives.
For stuff that's on LiveJournal, deviantArt or other websites:
- dotEPUB Saves a webpage as an epub. Short and sweet. In dA, I make sure to use "download as HTML" and then save from the plain HTML doc that opens.
- Instapaper You can use folders to collect a bunch of webpages on a theme and then save them as a single epub file with a table of contents. Good for fics with chapters in multiple LJ/DW posts. Also sends to Kindle.
Other pages you may find relevant:
- Ebook Formatting Tutorial Is what it says on the tin. Great reference.
- Where To Buy Ebooks Other Than Amazon Jess Mahler's page, which inspired me to post my own round-up of links
- Amazon Pamphlet is a collection of resources for moving outside of the Amazon ecosystem.
- Ethical.net is a directory of alternatives for people looking to move away from unethical companies.
- Fuck Off Google! is exactly what the name suggests.
- De-google-ify Internet offers what it says on the tin.