Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes buying from them is unavoidable, since they seem to have more books listed than anywhere else. I recommend alibris, not as big, but not owned by amazon. Sometimes if I find a book on Abe, I’ll check and see if the same seller is on alibris, which they often will be. Alibris also actually lets you rate the seller unlike abe!
Thiftbooks is my goto for used but I’ve always used Abe as a backup. For new I use bookshop.org. So disappointing. I will check out alibris. I know the name, but have never used the service.
There really is a need for some kind of exchange trade site. If you’re familiar with boardgame geek “math” trades, this is what I mean.
Imagine a site like ebay, where you upload your books that you would like to trade away, and you can “like” books that you want in return. Then somehow there is a market value or score assigned to items so that they can be traded amongst many users automatically.
Now imagine this for everything. We could go back to a bartering economy while cutting waste and cost.
Didn’t know about ThiftBooks, thanks for mentioning.👍 And, possibly stupid question, how is bookshop.org supposed to work exactly? Was never quite clear on that.
I’m not totally sure, but i think bookshop does profit sharing regardless if the indie bookstore you designate is actually the seller/shipper. I subscribe to Libro.fm (a drm free audible alternative), and they do the same thing. I can designate an indie store and Libro splits a percentage of the profits with them.
Not AbeBooks!?! 😲😭
Unfortunately, yes. Sometimes buying from them is unavoidable, since they seem to have more books listed than anywhere else. I recommend alibris, not as big, but not owned by amazon. Sometimes if I find a book on Abe, I’ll check and see if the same seller is on alibris, which they often will be. Alibris also actually lets you rate the seller unlike abe!
Thiftbooks is my goto for used but I’ve always used Abe as a backup. For new I use bookshop.org. So disappointing. I will check out alibris. I know the name, but have never used the service.
There really is a need for some kind of exchange trade site. If you’re familiar with boardgame geek “math” trades, this is what I mean. Imagine a site like ebay, where you upload your books that you would like to trade away, and you can “like” books that you want in return. Then somehow there is a market value or score assigned to items so that they can be traded amongst many users automatically.
Now imagine this for everything. We could go back to a bartering economy while cutting waste and cost.
I am familiar! (as an owner of too many boardgames) I think this could work for a lot of things!
Didn’t know about ThiftBooks, thanks for mentioning.👍 And, possibly stupid question, how is bookshop.org supposed to work exactly? Was never quite clear on that.
I’m not totally sure, but i think bookshop does profit sharing regardless if the indie bookstore you designate is actually the seller/shipper. I subscribe to Libro.fm (a drm free audible alternative), and they do the same thing. I can designate an indie store and Libro splits a percentage of the profits with them.