While living unchained in America, Lisa and I have been reading a lot of books about consumerism, chain stores, food, and other related subjects. We’ve been learning a lot from the books and thought you might be interested in reading them too. But we wanted to give you the opportunity to buy them from independent booksellers at independent bookstores — not from chain bookstores. So we became IndieBound affiliates.
What is IndieBound? It’s a group of independent booksellers who belong to the American Booksellers Association. They formed IndieBound in response to online bookstore chains such as barnesandnoble.com — and also amazon.com.
When you click a book link, either on our blogs or on our Books page, you’ll be taken to the IndieBound web site. You can select the version of the book you want — paperback, hardcover, audio, and so on. When you click on the version, you’ll be taken to a page that lets you select a local, independent bookseller to order it from. You can shop for other books to add to your order as well. The page also lets you find out the locations of independent bookstores near you.
We’ll receive a small commission for each book you purchase, which will help defray the expenses of running our web site.
Why Buy from IndieBound?
When you buy a book from a local independent bookseller through IndieBound — and also when you buy from other local, independent businesses — you help your community by:
- Keeping $68.00 out of every $100.00 spent in your community instead of $43.00 of every $100.00 spent at a chain
- Helping local businesses create higher paying jobs than those offered by chains
- Keeping more tax dollars in your community, where the money can be reinvested in your community
- Providing more in charity donations to your community because local, independent business people donate twice as much money to local charities than the national chains donate
- Creating a smaller carbon footprint than that created by regional and national chains because of reduced packaging and transportation
- Providing a greater variety of products — including unique ones — for you to chose from than those offered by chains
- Supporting your friends and neighbors who own the local businesses in your community
Other Independent Booksellers We Examined
We chose IndieBound after carefully examining affiliate programs with several other independent booksellers. And most of them were local, individual booksellers. Buying from them would help their local economies — but only individual local economies. IndieBound allows you — the buyer — to choose the independent bookseller you want to make sure your money helps the local ecomony you want.
Initially, Alibris was a strong competitor with IndieBound. Alibris claims to be “the Internet’s largest independently owned and operated marketplace.” Alibris also claims to support “thousands of individual sellers.”
But when we investigated Alibris further, we learned that Alibris is owned by the private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners. Alibris also partners with chains such as Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders Books, and Books-A-Million. When you order a book, you can get a gift certificate that you can use at Sears.
We think that instead of supporting independent booksellers, Alibris undercuts them. IndieBound doesn’t.
From IndieBound, you can buy books that are currently in print. Many of the books we read about consumerism and chains are out of print. So we’re looking for an online bookseller from which you can buy out-of-print books.
