Boycotting is Hard; Let's go Shopping!

[bcholmes]

Urgh. Amazon. What's a Canadian to do? Chapters-Indigo is icky. American sources like Powells.com end up being more expensive 'cause of shipping. I suppose we still have Glad Day, A Different Booklist and the Toronto Women's Bookstore. But I've gotten so accustomed to easy online shopping.

Comments

[the-nita.livejournal.com]

A lot of local bookstores that aren't major chains have websites you can order through.

I do that with Wordsworth (in Wloo) all the time. It's nice - I can avoid most of the crap with major chains and work with people who know me by sight now, as well as by email.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I tend to go to AbeBooks (http://www.abebooks.com/). They collect listings from all kinds of small bookstores all over the place, mostly for used books. When you get your search results, you can filter them down to just the stores in Canada by using the "Location" drop-down. (This assumes that there are stores in Canada in the results.)

If I can't get a book from a Canadian store that way, I just get them shipped to eeyorerin and pick them up next time I'm there, but usually I can get them sourced from Canada. And even if I get them from a U.S. store, it's usually cheaper by a huge enough margin in the first place that paying for shipping still leaves it cheaper than Amazon or Chapters.

Or at least, that's what I mostly did back in the day. Nowadays I pretty much buy ebooks anyway. But if I wanted to buy a paper book, I'd still go that route.

Well, rrrr. They were acquired by Amazon last year. The site still exists and the company is still supposedly an independently operated company out of Vancouver, but Amazon owns them now.

Hmm.

Re: Boycotting is Hard; Let's go Shopping!

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

that site you linked to wants me to read pdfs. i think websites should display their points in html. but i know what that's about anyway, and umm. it's fairly low on my ickiness scale. i am not happy with soldiering in general, but israel has rather more of a reason to need it than many other countries, and while soldiers do support the total crap of their government, i find it kinda hard to rail against an organisation that helps former soldiers who have nobody else with scholarships.

amazon has already been off my "buy from" list for a while.

it's not just the shipping that kills powells right now, but also the value of the US dollar (way overvalued). powells isn't cheap to begin with, but i used to put up with that when at least the shipping was free. but now that really hurts, and i'd rather throw the extra money at a good charity. we don't _have_ any good local bookstores when it comes to new books. and amazon bought abebooks (the fuckers). so i'm gonna stick with indigo for now as the least offensive (for me).

also, i am reading more and more ebooks.

[the_axel]

My guess is that after a couple of days of bad publicity Amazon will pull the 'computer error' card, or similar, and go back to ranking those books again.

In fact it's a glitch.

Amazing what a pile of bad publicity & public pressure can do.

[the_axel]

By 'it's a glitch', btw, I am not in any way implying that I believe Amazon's excuse.

[the_axel]

One, quite believable theory about what happened here.

In the comments to the post that got me there, was another suggestion and question:

While that theory is fairly plausible, I was thinking about all this last night at work while working on a MySQL database, and it occurred to me that all it would take was something like Bob the Data Entry Monkey writing an overly broad command string like "drop table where CATEGORY='homo*';" while trying to remove homogenized milk from Amazon Grocery in the middle of the night on Saturday, and all of a sudden the entirety of Amazon's immense product database has to be restored from Friday's backups. Never attribute to malice what can easily be attributed to stupidity.

[sonjaaa.livejournal.com]

I like This Ain't the Rosedale Library.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

trixtah just pointed me to Better World Books. She posted about it here (http://trixtah.livejournal.com/234589.html). They appear to ship anywhere in the world for around $4 USD (and have free shipping in the U.S. and U.K.), and are an organization promoting global literacy.

[shara.livejournal.com]

I'd rather encourage you to go out and shop in the real world, but if you're really set on online shopping, McNally Robinson (http://www.mcnallyrobinson.com/home) sells stuff online...