11–20 of 74 posts
Specifically in the mostly-but-not-exclusively tech world, Leanpub (Leanpub.com) is very close to a bandcamp for books. Authors get most of the sales revenue, and are free to publish what they want including in-progress works. I’ve got a few books there, the readership is smaller than with my mainstream-published titles but as this article shows, that’s because readers don’t yet know about these places.
Every sale is linked to a physical bookstore of your choice, which gets between 10% and 25% for physical books (dependent on delivery/collection), and 8% on ebooks even though the nominated store has no work to do for it.
Another option in the UK is https://www.hive.co.uk/ which is an online bookstore (physical, ebook). Every sale is linked to a physical bookstore of your choice, which gets between 10% and 25% for physical books (dependent on delivery/collection), and 8% on ebooks even though the nominated store has no work to do for it.
That said, a combination of hive, bookshop.org, worldofbooks and being prepared to pay a couple of pounds more has meant I almost entirely avoid amazon for books now.
(not sure how ethical worldofbooks is, they sell through amazon which is how I found them, but _not Amazon_ is the point)
Another option in the UK is https://www.hive.co.uk/ which is an online bookstore (physical, ebook). Every sale is linked to a physical bookstore of your choice, which gets between 10% and 25% for physical books (dependent on delivery/collection), and 8% on ebooks even though the nominated store has no work to do for it.
What I don’t like about hive is that as far as I can find out it’s somewhat vague about how much and how the bookshops get (and I consider “choosing after” to be a somewhat darkish pattern) That said, a combination of hive, bookshop.org, worldofbooks and being prepared to pay a couple of pounds more has meant I almost entirely avoid amazon for books now. (not sure how ethical worldofbooks is, they sell through amazon…
What they say is: Whether you order books, films, music, games, or anything else, your chosen bookshop will receive commission. They will receive a minimum of 10% on the net value of all book orders, rising to 25% when you select store collection. We pay 8% on eBooks and 3% on entertainment products. Bookshops receive their commission monthly.
Specifically in the mostly-but-not-exclusively tech world, Leanpub (Leanpub.com) is very close to a bandcamp for books. Authors get most of the sales revenue, and are free to publish what they want including in-progress works. I’ve got a few books there, the readership is smaller than with my mainstream-published titles but as this article shows, that’s because readers don’t yet know about these places.
Bandcamp is 15%, Leanpub is 20%, right? (For sales alone, leanpub also seems to be a lot about the publication process, i.e. how to get the book made, not just selling a finished PDF/epub) Another interesting shop I've discovered for me within the last year is itch.io. It's mostly for games, but I found out that this includes more and more tabletop role-playing games as e-books. The site is responsive, the individual…
1) Leanpub is more well known for ebooks, their UI is better and 45-day return policy is great for readers
2) Leanpub has weekly/monthly newsletters that also offers books at a discounted rate. That gives me decent sales. And I think their SEO optimization is better than Gumroad.
I find https://readwise.io is a valuable tool for retaining ideas from what I read. That tool helps to gather book quotes from ebooks and physical books and then uses spaced repetition to remind you of quotes over time. Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 boo…
Specifically in the mostly-but-not-exclusively tech world, Leanpub (Leanpub.com) is very close to a bandcamp for books. Authors get most of the sales revenue, and are free to publish what they want including in-progress works. I’ve got a few books there, the readership is smaller than with my mainstream-published titles but as this article shows, that’s because readers don’t yet know about these places.
Bandcamp is 15%, Leanpub is 20%, right? (For sales alone, leanpub also seems to be a lot about the publication process, i.e. how to get the book made, not just selling a finished PDF/epub) Another interesting shop I've discovered for me within the last year is itch.io. It's mostly for games, but I found out that this includes more and more tabletop role-playing games as e-books. The site is responsive, the individual…
I find https://readwise.io is a valuable tool for retaining ideas from what I read. That tool helps to gather book quotes from ebooks and physical books and then uses spaced repetition to remind you of quotes over time. Personally I have never really used a tracking tool like Italic Type because I didn't feel compelled to enter all of the metadata for what felt like an unknown resulting value. But I do juggle 3-4 boo…
Everything I highlight in Kindle now gets automatically imported into my Roam graph. The quotes go into the page for each book (autocreated) under timestamped sections that also show up in my daily notes page. All my highlights from the past were imported in bulk.
It is now trivial and pleasant for me, at any time while I’m thinking and journaling in Roam, to pull in a quote reference from any of my Kindle books, just with a nice inline search box.
I’m getting into writing and researching in a much more serious way and this workflow is a big part of why. I love it so much.
Are there no independent sites like goodreads or LibraryThing left? I don't really need the tracking, but the discovery.
Also I have found that actually ebooks are sometimes cheaper on other places than Amazon, so a price comprison would be good. It could be integrated into a site like LibraryThings- LibraryThing already has it to some extent, but doesn't seem to include most vendors in my country (Germany).
Also there were other reasons why I didn't want to use LibraryThing anymore, which I have forgotten. I just remember that I didn't want to use it anymore some years ago.