Bookshop.org

★★★★☆

Shopping for Books

★★★★★ The Bookshop.org website is great for buying print books online and still supporting indie bookstores. When you buy books, they contribute part of your purchase to a local bookshop of your choice.

I’ve been using them for pre-orders for several years now. The prices can be slightly higher than Amazon, but the selection’s good, and I like being able to credit a local (or previously local) bookstore even when I don’t actually get out to shop in person.

EBooks

★★★★☆ They launched eBook sales early in 2025, providing another alternative to Kindle. The books are in ePub format, making them a lot more portable than Amazon’s, especially the ones from publishers that don’t insist on locking access with DRM. You can just download from the website and put them on whatever reader you want. Off the top of my head, Tor publishes most of their books DRM-Free, and Bookshop has a deal to include Standard Ebooks’ catalog of free public-domain books.

For books that do have DRM, you can read them on the website, or with Adobe Digital Editions, or using Bookshop.org’s mobile app. Similar to Kobo or eBooks.com, really.

Reader App

★★★★☆ Bookshop’s mobile app has improved since launch. Initially I rated it 3, but it’s a 4 now.

The app still complains when you’re offline, popping up first an alert (“Looks like you’re offline. Time to do some reading.” with a mismatched sad-looking book, slouching under a rain cloud) and then popping up an error message about how it couldn’t load your library. But after you dismiss both alerts, you can get at the books you’ve already downloaded now.

It’s also just a little bit slower than other apps I’ve used, which isn’t a problem on most devices, but made it completely unusable on the Boox Poke3 I was using as my main reader at the time they launched. The Go 7 I eventually replaced it with handles the app fine.

On larger displays it can do a 2-page landscape layout, but only for books, not for the home screen.

Like Kobo, the app tries to sell you more books. But this one directs you to their website for making purchases. (Apple and Google take 30% of all in-app purchases on their platforms.) It does, however, let you add a book to your wishlist, so it’ll be there the next time you open the website.

Bottom Line

I’m happy to keep buying new physical books from here! (Though I try to check Better World Books first on anything that’s been out for a while.)

As for eBooks, I went back to eBooks.com just because because I could use it on the Poke3. Though I have continued to buy the occasional DRM-free book from Bookshop and just read it in a faster app. Now that I have hardware that can handle Bookshop’s app, it’s a closer call.