Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 5

Gorgeous views from the trailhead, and I even saw a hawk just perched in a tree the second time I tried to hike here, but the trail downstream is closed and I couldn’t find the trail upstream on either visit.

Getting There

There’s a sign off of Montemalaga Drive across the street from a church. The upstream trail should be right by the sign, but it was too overgrown for me to find. It’s not clear whether you’re allowed to park in the church lot for hiking or not, but there’s plenty of street parking.

The trail itself isn’t on the PVPLC main map, just the reserve boundary. The website links to the Portuguese Bend PDF instead. It’s not on AllTrails as far as I can tell.

PVPLC does link to the trailhead on Google Maps, which shows another connecting trail on the far side of the church. Apparently the downstream end of the trail connects to Via Campesina and the upstream end connects to the Mossbank Trail, which conncets Basswood Ave and Mossbank Drive.

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 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). Most of the apps work fine on my phone and Android-based Boox Poke3 eink tablet which is my preferred reading device, except where noted.

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 just doesn’t work right on the Poke3. At least not yet.

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

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

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.