An independent bookstore explains why you should buy newly released hardcovers from their store instead of Amazon, even though Amazon has lower prices. Amazon's economies of scale, which has allowed it to lower prices and increase selection for us, have had negative consequences and we as book consumers should vote with our wallets to fight back and build the book-selling ecosystem we want. That's one with local book events, human recommendations/conversations with fellow readers (whether they work at the store or not), decent pay and benefits for employees, and a business with some knowledge of and care for the community.

The independent bookstore I go to in Alphabet City, named Book Club, is also a cafe, serving good coffee, beer, and wine, and a gathering place. They operate a website where you can order books to be shipped to you. I especially like the human-currated recommendations, Amazon's recommendations done by computer are lacking compared to finding someone else with similar tastes to you.

At Book Club they had a pamphlet out for independent bookstore audiobooks. I don't like audiobooks but here's the website.

There's also a few ebook ecosystems outside of Amazon's Kindle. I have only ordered a few one-off ebooks outside of Kindle, such as Make Book where the author rolled his own system for selling the book, and The Ultimate Guide to Body Recomposition which was a simple PDF paired with a Shopify-style checkout page.

There's an independent bookstore ebook, made by Kobo, where every ebook you buy is "from" a local bookstore. Here's a site where you can find a local bookstore to buy ebooks from. I found the selection too small when I last checked but am hopeful that this business continues to grow.

Also the Kobo ereader integrates tightly with local library borrowing, whereas with Kindle it's more awkward to borrow ebooks. So if you frequently use the local library integration on your Kindle it could be worth it to buy a Kobo as well.
https://dennislibre.com/some-notes-on-buying-books-from-amazon/
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