Where I Buy Books

Page created: 2024-11-18
Updated: 2025-08-24
Draft!
 This page is a draft and may be incomplete, incorrect, or just a stub or outline. I've decided to allow myself to put draft pages on my website as an experiment. I'm hoping they will:
  • Help me address my backlog of article ideas.
  • Serve as a "living" TODO list of things to work on.
  • Be useful to myself or others in their incomplete forms.
As always, I'm happy to accept feedback on anything I publish including draft content.

Tons of TODOs to be done here. Search for "todo" in this document.

I buy paper (or "dead tree" as some folks enjoy saying) books and ebooks. Scroll down for the ebooks section.

Where I buy physical paper books

(See also the section about e-books further down on this page.)

In person, as often as the family is willing to go with me, local used book stores. I think a thriving secondary book market is, like public libraries, a beautiful and wonderful thing.

(Online, I started buying books from Amazon in 1998 and I loved it. I also bought used books from Abe, which is an Amazon property (found a replacement! see below). Goodreads is an Amazon property. I bought from Book Depository until Amazon bought them and shut them down. Amazon is eating the publishing world and the result of that will not be good. TODO: i’ve left amz!)

TODO: mention: Bud’s Art Books (budsartbooks.com) and Flesk and Century Guild and Kickstarter, etc.

TODO: also local bookstores and Barnes & Noble

Biblio.com

For used (and sometimes new) books online, I use Biblio:

https://www.biblio.com/

I was super excited to find Biblio. It’s everything that Abe was: a central site for finding and purchasing books from used booksellers. It’s basically Ebay with less hassle (and way better book search) or Amazon Marketplace with less Amazon.

Bookshop.org

This one is super weird, but seems to be working, so I’m using it for now. Bookshop’s Wikipedia page explains how it works in more detail, but basically: they provide a store front and an affiliate program. When you buy books through them, a percentage goes to local, independent brick-and-mortar bookstores. Anecdotally, this seems to have had a real, positive impact.

https://bookshop.org/

The thing that initially confused me about Bookshop was how the heck they supplied and shipped all of those books!

The answer is:

"All of our orders are sourced through Ingram, so in order for a book to appear on Bookshop.org it has to be available in Ingram’s catalogue."

From: https://support.bookshop.org/en/support/solutions/articles/65000180944-how-can-i-list-my-book-on-bookshop-org-

Ingram itself is a big and possibly scary entity in the publishing world, but has remained mostly in the background for us readers so far. Time will tell.

Technical books, specifically

I buy a lot of programming and computer-related books. I love them.

See also: Why I Read Technical Books

I buy direct from my two favorite technical book publishers:

Both are independent publishers who have real editors and consistently put out high-quality books. When you buy their print books, you get the DRM-free ebook too. I even have a No Starch t-shirt.

Another technical book (and fiction) author worth mentioning entirely on his own is Michael W. Lucas. He has written a bunch of books on specific Unix subjects and the BSDs in particular. He has some books available from No Starch, but most of his titles are best purchased direct from his website:

https://mwl.io/ (Michael W. Lucas and Tilted Windmill Press)

A pair of old favorite publishers worth mentioning:

  • O’Reilly - who were the tech book publisher in the early 2000s when I was getting my start. But something happened and now you wouldn’t even know they have anything to do with books at all on their website. :-(

  • Addison-Wesley - who was known for very high-profile (and high-quality) titles like Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming and Hacker’s Delight by Henry S. Warren. They still put out books, but they’re part of the educational publisher Pearson now and I find it hard to get real excited about them.

Where I buy e-books

I haven’t found a better e-book store than eBooks.com. Some publishers (such as SF and fantasy publisher Tor) sell DRM-free e-books. eBooks.com lets you filter your searches to show just DRM-free books, which is very nice.

Here’s my guide to removing e-book DRM: Removing DRM from e-books.

I use a Kindle PaperWhite, which is a wonderful piece of hardware. But I don’t like being tied to the Amazon ecosystem. Amazon has been a lot of fun for consumers in the short-term, but I believe it will be very, very bad for the future of publishing.

I use a Rakuten Kobo e-ink reader now. The cheapest model. It works just like the PaperWhite except it doesn’t destroy my personal library every time it updates!

I manage my ebook library with Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) and I’ve got this page with more: How I manage my e-books with Calibre.