Best places to buy a book
Last updated: November 5, 2022
Here’s our favorite place to buy a book: IndieBound.
Why: IndieBound points to local independent bookstores where you can order the book you’re searching for. This helps you avoid ordering from Amazon. (See more: IndieBound FAQ.)
In the UK, order from Hive, which is "proud to support an independent bookshop with every single sale we make."
• Use these websites: indiebound.org, hive.co.uk
Whatever you do, don’t order books from Amazon. The subsidiary AbeBooks is also owned by Amazon, as is BookFinder.com – we recommend avoiding all of them.
Other options
• Order online from well-known bookstores like The Strand (New York City), Tattered Cover (Denver), Mac’s Backs (Cleveland), and Powell’s Books (Portland, OR).
• The Seminary Co-op, in Chicago, is the country’s first not-for-profit bookstore whose mission is bookselling (actually two bookstores, the Seminary Co-op and 57th Street Books). You can join the co-op for free. Read more about the Seminary Co-op in director Jeff Deutsch’s new book, In Praise of Good Bookstores.
• Bookshop.org, for new books, allows shoppers to direct a commission toward a specific indie bookstore (for example, NYC’s 192 Books).
• Better World Books, online seller of new and used books with a community-oriented mission.
• Half Price Books, which says it’s “America’s largest family-owned bookstore with more than 120 stores across the country.” See also this profile in Axios (July 28, 2022).
• ThriftBooks, which claims to be “the world’s largest online independent used book seller.”
• Biblio.com finds used, rare, and out-of-print books at independent bookstores.
• viaLibri is “the world’s largest search engine for old, rare, and second-hand books.”
• GoodMinds.com, “a First Nations family owned business, who is passionate about Indigenous education.” Based in Canada.
Audio books
• Libro.fm, which “makes it possible for you to buy audiobooks through your local bookstore.”
• Whatever you do, don’t get your audio books from Audible, which owned by Amazon.
Where to get free books
• If you don’t need to own the book, check your local library: Worldcat.org searches libraries worldwide. In the New York area, you can search the New York Public Library at NYPL.org.
• The Internet Archive “offers over 20,000,000 freely downloadable books and texts. There is also a collection of 2.3 million modern eBooks that may be borrowed by anyone with a free archive.org account.”
• Project Gutenberg offers over 60,000 free ebooks, all available via web browser. Founder Michael Hart created the first-ever ebook in 1971.
• Standard Ebooks has a library of free public-domain books with carefully edited texts.
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