Bookshop.org’s Ebooks Still Have a Lot of Room for Improvement
Hi Readers,
Today’s post is something of an opinion piece. As you may or may not know, Bookshop.org is a rising alternative to Amazon. Amazon’s extremely competitive low prices of books may be alluring, but they hurt the book industry by discounting books to the point where bookstores can’t compete. These sales come at a loss for Amazon, who can afford such a hit while enjoying the benefit of not having to pay millions of dollars in sales taxes to strengthen their hold on bookworms.
Enter Bookshop.org. Each purchase made on this site supports local bookstores across the US and gives some semblance of power back to local communities. I’ve converted to Bookshop.org for physical purchases of books and have loved the results, even if it may cost a couple dollars more.
However, I recently purchased my first ebook from the site and had a not so great experience.
Finding an ebook on Bookshop was easy, but the functionality of reading an ebook through them is lacking. I bought an ebook copy of Severance by Ling Ma to celebrate this month’s AAPI heritage month.
It should be noted that I typically read books either on my desktop or on an eReader. My phone’s screen, while large, is something I don’t enjoy reading from unless I absolutely have to.
After I bought the ebook copy I wanted to start reading immediately so I pulled up my ebook library and took a look at my options, which were surprisingly minimal. When accessing an ebook bought from Bookshop, the only options I had were to read on my desktop or download the Bookshop App on my phone and read there.
Given that I hate the idea of reading from my phone, I opted for the desktop read. Boy was that a mess! When I brought the ebook up on my desktop, the page numbers wouldn’t display correctly and would imprint over some of the text. After resizing my browser screen several times, there was no improvement. Finally, a text size change did alleviate the problem, but by that point I was a bit miffed.
Another flaw in the design that irked me even more is that the bookmark function doesn’t currently work on desktop mode. Um, how am I supposed to track my progress then? Write down the chapter I left off on? I’m sorry, but that’s just not acceptable.
With no way to download the book file or send it to my eReader, I was forced to read on my phone. I will admit, the app works well and I can bookmark my progress, but I don’t enjoy being forced to use a medium I don’t like to use.
In the end, I won’t be purchasing any more ebooks from Bookshop.org’s site until more options are available. I understand that being able to download ebook files makes the content susceptible to piracy, which is an understandable concern. However, being allowed to register your eReader and send books to it from their site is a much better option and very doable (other ebook providers do this).
Until Bookshop.org gives their readers more options for ebooks, I seriously doubt they will make much headway against Amazon. If you want to support other ebook platforms, I would highly suggest looking at Kobo, who does allow the transfer of ebook data to readers (not Kindle since those are Amazon products exclusively).
How about you? Where do you read your ebooks? Have you found a good alternative to Amazon? Let me know in the comments, and have a lovely day!
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I get all of my ebooks from Amazon. They are the easiest for me since I’m not very good at technology.
Yeah, I totally get that. They do have their process down. I’ve been slowly distancing myself from Amazon, but there’s always something that’s just more affordable there that I really need.
Ooh, I love a good rant. And this was a good one.
Curious, did you try side loading/uploading the file to a different e-reader or app? I’m just wondering if it’s Bookshop.org, or a problem with how the file was formatted. But yeah, it does sound like a nightmare system for something that’s supposed to be so forward looking.
As for me, I AM IN LOVE with my new Kobo e-reader. I managed to download all my Amazon books before they killed that option, and it was super easy to convert most of them to EPUB and side load them (and my other random ebooks) onto the reader. It also lets me check out most books straight from my library. I’m also able to download books from BookFunnel, as well as sending my own books to it for proofreading (I go the one you can write on, so it’s been very good for saving trees and toner). There’s still a few books I couldn’t get onto the Kobo, so I’m still holding onto my Kindle, but I won’t buy any more books from Amazon. I don’t even grab the freebies from them anymore.
Thanks! I just wanted to get the word out there that it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. Unfortunately I didn’t have the option to export or download the file so that was a big upsetter for me.
I just got one too! I just started buying outside of Amazon for some book copies to help me transition over, then I’ll just use the Kindle as a backup and quite my KU subscription. Kobo has something similar I might look into.