Bookshop.org: Buy & Read Books

This is a seriously wonderful idea. We must resist the hegemony of the tech bro desecration of the local. It can change. The app is great. Early days, but if everyone gets on board it can only get better. The prices of the ebooks are competitive too.

BYYER BEWARE if you want to spend a gift balance on ebooks: the app does not allow purchases which presumably is down to Apple policies. However the web site checkout process does not support the use of gift balances such as national bookshop tokens despite the website allowing them to be transferred. I feel as if I’ve been scammed as I now have a gift balance that can only be used on physical books. Hopefully their customer service will help in which case I’ll change this review accordingly and upgrade from 1 star. UPDATE: Customer services were fantastic and sorted out the balance so despite the above limitation, have upgraded the rating.

Buying ebooks this way avoids giving money to A***e or A****n, and with a contribution going to your local bookshop. So far, so good. It is still a proprietary system like the others, and you are at the mercy of what the developers do. So far, main gripes are: it doesn’t play nicely with windowing, often resizing wrongly and sometimes the Options panel disappears before you can select from it; it lacks a lookup function; it doesn’t respond to external keyboards, even the arrow keys; and its layout is ugly, with a ridiculously excessive gutter margin. I’m sure it will get better, but it needs to do so fast to avoid being written off as a very poor substitute for the established reader apps.