Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 16

These days when I look for a specific eBook I’ll often check the author’s and publisher’s websites first, and see if it’s available from them directly. Or if they have a preferred source.

Here are some places I’ve bought, borrowed, or otherwise legally acquired e-books from:

Free (as in Gratis)

Standard eBooks focuses on making well-formatted books (review) from public domain sources, mostly from Project Gutenberg, and publishing them in major eBook formats like ePub.

Project Gutenberg makes bare-bones documents (review) of public domain material, but produces them in lots of formats including ePub, HTML, and even plain text.

Library Access

Libby and Hoopla both connect to your local library account, and you can check out eBooks and other media. Their mobile apps works well even on my older eink tablet. Hoopla also has graphic novels and individual comics, and you can check movies out to watch on something like a Roku.

DRM-Free: Publishers

Dragonmount sells most of Tor’s publications, and Tor provides most (or possibly all?) of their books without DRM on (almost?) all digital bookstores. Yes, even the big ones. Ironically, while I have bought some books from them, I bought the Wheel of Time series somewhere else.

Argyll Productions is a small publisher. I’ve bought some of T. Kingfisher’s books from there, both in ePub and print format.

Apress and its sibling publishers offer science, nature and technical books with watermarking instead of DRM. I bought a C++ book from them a while back, but they’ve since been bought by Springer Nature, and the website is focused on research institutions and inconvenient for individual use.

Smashing eBooks focuses on web design/industry topics, and while I could swear I’ve bought from them before, I can’t find anything with a cursory search. It’s possible I’m just thinking of articles I’ve bookmarked, or books published elsewhere by authors who write for Smashing Magazine.

No-Starch Press publishes computer/tech books. I bought a Humble Bundle of their stuff a while back, but haven’t bought from them directly that I can recall.

Angry Robot and Subterranean Press are a couple more that I think I’ve bought from before, but nothing rings a bell.

A Book Apart used to publsh “books for people who design, write and code” in the tech and web industry, but they shut down in 2024 and returned the publishing rights to the authors.

DRM-Free: General

Humble Bundle always has at least one bundle of books available, using a pay-what-you-want model with the remainder going to a specific charity (or group of charities) per bundle. They’re not always DRM-free, unfortunately. Sometimes they’re codes to redeem at Kobo or some other bookshop. (Even more ironically, the Ursula K. Le Guin bundle last fall was one of these, including The Dispossessed.)

DriveThruFiction publishes a lot of indie comics, RPG guides, and small-press books. I’ve bought a few graphic novels through them, in PDF form, and most of those were Kickstarters that offered the finished products through DriveThru.

Smashwords also sells mainly small press. I think I’ve only bought one book from there, and it was a while ago.

See Also:

• Libreture’s Ultimate List of DRM-free Bookshops

General EBook Stores

Places that sell both DRM-encumbered and DRM-free books. Most of them sell ePubs, and most of them have their own mobile apps for accessing your purchases (including the DRM’ed books). All of the apps work fine on my phone and Android-based Boox Go 7 eink tablet, which is my preferred reading device. Most of them still work on the older Boox Poke3, which I used through late 2025.

eBooks.com focuses on business ethics (review) and has a good selection. Books with DRM are readable on their website or on their app. The app is kind of bare bones compared to Kobo or Kindle: it stays out of the way and just lets me read instead of trying to sell me more books first!

Bookshop.org supports indie bookstores (review). You can designate a local shop of your choice to get part of your print or digital purchase. At first they only sold print books, but they finally added eBooks in January 2025. The selection’s comparable to eBooks.com, but their app is too slow for older hardware.

Kobo is a solid alternative to Kindle (review), from the eBook selection through apps and hardware. The app works well on my eink tablet without too much tweaking, though it still wants to sell me more books before I can open the one I want to read.

Barnes and Noble’s Nook ecosystem is like Kindle, but I’ve only ever bought a couple of books on there to see how the app works on the Poke3 (it’s fine). By the time I started looking for a non-Kindle system, Kobo was partnered with IndieBound and Nook was just another silo.

I haven’t used Google Books in ages, or Apple Books much at all, so I can’t really say much about them except if you’re looking for alternatives to Amazon, you’re probably also looking for alternatives to Google and Apple.

Kindle, of course, is owned by Amazon, which has been the subject of so much criticism over the years that the Wikipedia article is 32 pages long when exported to a PDF, plus another 38 pages of reference citations. I won’t go into detail, because if you’re ok with Amazon in general or Kindle specifically, you probably aren’t reading this page anyway (or stopped early on). But most recently, the item that prompted me writing this list, they’re holding a giant discount sale during Independent Bookstore day.

A conicidence, I’m sure. 🙄

See Also:

• Where to Buy Books Other than Amazon
• Ethical Consumer: List of Ethical Bookshops

Sometime last year I saw eBooks.com on a list of bookstores rated by ethics where it was the highest rated eBook seller. (It’s still only 63/100, but it’s tied with Better World Books, and waaaay ahead of Amazon at ZERO. They’re a small company, and they only do books – they’re not part of a larger conglomerate – and they do write about their company ethics stances on their website.)

So I figured I’d give it a try and bought a few books from them.

The online store and help documentation is a bit sparse, but they have a good selection of books available, which is the more important part!

Reading Options

They don’t sell hardware (which simplifies a lot of supply chain questions!), but they have a mobile reader app for Android and iOS. On Android at least, it’s bare-bones compared to the Kindle or Kobo app. But it doesn’t get in your way: you can read books easily, whether side-loaded from your device or downloaded directly from your account. Frankly it’s kind of refreshing that the app isn’t trying to sell me more books! It runs fine on my Android-powered Boox Poke3 with an e-ink screen, as well as on my phone and tablet.

They also suggest PocketBook or Bluefire Reader as alternate apps, neither of which I’ve tried.

Of course, DRM-free books (from publishers that allow them, like Tor) can be read on anything.

Like Kobo, they have an online reader on the website. You can also read books on a desktop through Adobe Digital Editions. ADE only runs on Windows and macOS, but eBooks has a guide to running it on Linux using Wine, which I did manage to get working. Sort of.

Extremely customizable, capable, cluttered and complex. Also extremely frustrating to use, especially on a phone. Better on a tablet where there’s room for more columns at a time.

I like the ability to set up a “pseudo account” and follow the local feed on another server.

Interaction buttons are hidden by default like Phanpy. Unfortunately this includes the buttons to show the rest of a thread, which kept tripping me up.

Despite all the options, I could never quite get it configured the way I wanted, though.

The biggest problem I have is that in trying to avoid the pitfalls of other apps that are so easy to use that you can stay on them longer than intended after finding what you wanted, it’s got just enough roadblocks that I stay on it longer than I intended anyway, trying to find what I’m looking for.

I finally got around to watching the movie, having soured on the book by the time the adaptation came out. It was better than I expected!

It’s not a straight adaptation of the plot so much as taking the same premise and characters and finding more cinematic ways of hitting the same beats. And having Spielberg and real actors (or their voices, for the parts of the film that take place in virtual reality) definitely makes it more character-driven (shallow as the characters might be) than a book that mostly existed as an exercise in including as many pop culture references as possible.

My main problems with it are:

1. Expanding the nostalgia beyond the 1980s to include the 70s and 90s breaks the laser-focus of Halliday’s obsession, and the focus on Halliday/Morrow as Wozniak/Jobs analogs.

2. Some suspiciously convenient lapses in security. The guy with an easily-identifiable tattoo on his head, who doesn’t put on a hat when he acts against the giant surveillance company? The prison cell that can be opened from the inside by feel, relying on the prisoner not being able to see the opening mechanism?

3. Tacking on the moral about having to live in the real world too was…well, to be fair it was a very 80s thing to do, but it still felt tacked-on. The movie really emphasized the OASIS being an escape, whereas in the book it was made clear that people were using it for school, business, etc. along with the gaming. Y’know, like the actual Internet the whole thing is a metaphor for.

Hilly, with not much shade except in the lightly wooded areas along the intermittent streambeds. The higher areas have clear views of the LA Basin to the north and east (Downtown LA to Saddleback), but mostly you can see the golf course it wraps around, a couple of Little League fields, and the suburban neighborhoods that surround it. Lots of up and down, mostly scrub habitat with some grassy areas.

After this year’s comparatively dry winter (not as bad as some, but below average and way below the deluges of the previous two years) the grass was green, but the scrub was just kind of scrubby, and the streams were little more than a trickle. I did spot a couple of rabbits, some dragonflies and bumblebees, and some hawks, but not much else in the way of wildlife. (I imagine the noise from the baseball game didn’t help much.)

And peacocks! There’s a population of feral peafowl on the peninsula, dating back to the early 1900s, that I hadn’t run into on any of my hikes out at Point Vicente or up in the canyons. I did see some near the Malaga Cove library the last time I was in that area. But they were just wandering around the neighborhood! At least half a dozen. All males, though - I didn’t see any hens. I don’t know if they weren’t out, or if I just didn’t see them because they don’t stand out as much. I stopped to let one cross the street on the way in, and watched another strutting along the trail while I was hiking.

Where Else?

Unless it rains some more this spring, I don’t really have much interest in returning to this particular preserve this year. The habitat is similar to Entradero Basin (which is easier to get to), the view is better at Vista del Norte, there’s more shade at Valmonte/Frog Loop, and the canyons at George F. and Agua Amarga are interesting in the dry seasons too.

The Palos Verdes Land Conservancy operates a bunch of small preserves all over the peninsula where they could buy out some land, convince someone to donate it, or make arrangements with one of the cities. Mostly areas that are too steep or have historically been too unstable to build on. Chandler isn’t adjacent to any of the others, but several along the south side of the peninsula form a continuous wildlife corridor now.

Getting There

You have to go through winding residential streets. There’s a parking lot next to the baseball fields, and room for a few cars to park at the end of Buckskin Lane near the trailhead there. In addition there are connections to the bridle trails that riddle the peninsula. Dogs (leashed) and horses are allowed on the trails, so watch your step!