Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Books after Amazon, and an Amazon alternative

This is a fascinating article from the Boston Review, written by Onnesha Roychoudhuri:

It is well worth your time if you are interested in a concise, cogent account of Amazon's role in and influence on the current and future publishing industries.

As a side note: for those of you who use Amazon and also like to engage in charitable giving, visit Better World Books at www.betterworldbooks.com. They donate a portion of sales to literacy causes, have free shipping in the US and reasonably priced shipping outside of the US. Well worth a look if you don't know about them already. I order books from them that are not available in Australia and never will be (mainly genre fiction).

Of course, there is Book Depository in the UK but I'm not linking to them for the simple reason that they appear to be inflicting more damage on independent booksellers in a year than Amazon has since they started. And we need our indies - they break all the good authors! (This Book Depository decision is a personal one, it is not a comment on their business or on anyone who buys from them.)