Where to buy ebooks other than Amazon?
May 24, 2014 9:25 AM   Subscribe

I often find, when I go to buy ebooks for my kindle, that Amazon does not carry the ebook title I am looking for. What are good sites to buy the ebooks that Amazon *doesn't* carry?
posted by The locked room sockpuppet to Computers & Internet (10 answers total) 33 users marked this as a favorite
 
A good general searching site for ebooks is found at:
http://ebooks.addall.com/
They check Amazon and a lot of other sites.
posted by tronec at 9:36 AM on May 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


I think that depends a lot on the publisher. For example, one of my guilty pleasures is that sometimes I like to dip into a Warhammer 40K science fiction novel... There are a whole stable of these, but Amazon doesn't sell any of them.

The publisher, The Black Library, has their own eBook site, where they sell eBooks for Kindle and other formats.

I'm not sure if this is normal for other publishers that Amazon doesn't carry.. but it's one example that comes to mind.
posted by kbanas at 9:37 AM on May 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


You could use an ebook search engine like Inkmesh to see what sites have the book you're after.

If the title is only available in epub format, you might have to look at using Calibre to convert the book to mobi format if you want to read it on a Kindle specifically.
posted by philipy at 9:38 AM on May 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


Because I don't like Amazon and like my local bookstore, I use Kobo. A portion of the proceeds goes to the local affiliate bookstore.
posted by munchingzombie at 10:01 AM on May 24, 2014


If you have a Kindle tablet you can get Overdrive from the app store to read epub formatted books. I use it (on my ipad) for the occasional library book that's only available in epub. Converting with Calibre works, but it's interface is remarkably non-intuitive. Plus if the epub you have has drm you'll have to remove it to convert which you may or may not want to do.
posted by sevenless at 10:09 AM on May 24, 2014


www.webscription.net
www.gutenberg.org
www.manybooks.net
www.munseys.com
www.feedbooks.com
www.openlibrary.org
www.worldlibrary.net
www.baen,com/library/
www.freekindlebooks.org
posted by easily confused at 10:18 AM on May 24, 2014 [2 favorites]


I publish through Smashwords. It might be worth searching through their ebook inventory.
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 10:59 AM on May 24, 2014


I like Luzme for comparing ebook prices across (major) retailers, but you could also use it to find out which ones have a particular ebook.

Are you sure that the books you're looking for exist as ebooks? Such a huge percentage of ebook sales go through Amazon that it's a weird decision for a major publisher not to make its ebooks available there. (The situation may be different if you're looking for self-published or niche stuff.) Many books that a publisher might like to sell as ebooks can't be made because of complicated rights issues or because the economics don't support it or any number of other reasons.
posted by teditrix at 3:15 PM on May 24, 2014


Keep in mind that some books aren't available in electronic form at any store, in any format. That too depends a lot on the publisher (and on the author, who may still have the ebook rights if the book predates the ebook era).
posted by mcwetboy at 3:17 PM on May 24, 2014 [1 favorite]


Where I can, I try to buy directly from the independent publishers that put out the books I'm interested in. They get mute money that way and the books are never more expensive and often cheaper. If you talk about the kind of books you like you might get some specific recommendations.
posted by smoke at 4:28 PM on May 24, 2014


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