Life Without Amazon

It’s a couple of months now since I closed my Amazon account, nuking both my Kindle and Audible libraries in the process.

So far, the only wrinkle I’ve found is that searching where to buy a particular book online other than on Amazon is difficult to impossible — Amazon always seems to come up in the first few results, followed by reviews — the publisher’s or author’s page may not even make it into the first page of results. So instead I go and search on one of the alternative bookshops that I’m using, such as Bookshop UK, Hive or Waterstones.

Music is less of an issue since I rarely shopped for that at Amazon. If it’s not on Apple Music, chances are the artist is on Bandcamp, or at worst I can see if anyone is selling a copy on Discogs.

I’ve yet to do any tech shopping or other physical purchases online, so I’ll be writing another post about that experience.

I have no regrets about ditching Amazon — all the other bookshops that I’ve dealt with have provided equal or better service.