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 just launched eBook sales this year, 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
★★★☆☆ Unfortunately I haven’t been impressed by Bookshop’s mobile app, which I’ve been using on the Boox Poke3 and occasionally my Android tablet.
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The biggest problem is that it really wants you to be online when you open it. I’ve had to connect to wi-fi, open the app, and then disconnect in order to read books I’d already downloaded. I’m hoping this will clear up as they improve the app.
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The second-biggest is that touch responsiveness is slower than usual, which makes turning pages on an e-ink display difficult and unreliable. I’ve also had problems with inconsistent font sizes, but only on the Poke3.
Once I got it set up on my regular tablet, page turning and font sizes were fine! But it’s just enough bigger that books work better in landscape. The Bookshop app’s home screen is portrait-only, and it takes a while to find the controls to set the page view for two columns.
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 happily 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.)
But I’m less certain about their eBooks. At least the ones with DRM. The eBooks.com app is more reliable on my preferred device, so I’ll probably go back to buying from them for now. With any luck either the app will improve, or it already works on newer e-ink hardware.