The Ideal of Switching from Audible to Kobo

I have often had the temptation to dump Audible.com since it was bought by Amazon but I haven’t. It used to be that I had so many books that I didn’t want to lose them. Now that I have my own self-hosting solution, Audiobookshelf, for my own listening of my own books I can toy the idea of sliding to another provider. The first option is Kobo.

Kobo offers a plan for about 12 CHF per month for access to unlimited books to be read at once on its own catalgue but the catalogue is a quarter as big as that of Amazon/Audible so it would seriously limit what I can read and listen to. On the flipside part of my money would remain in the EU and the rest would go to Japan rather than the US. In the current climate it would be nice to remind the US of the cultural monopoly they currently hold, without showing gratitude. By dumping Audible for a US or Japanese solution for three years, or more we would remind the US that it exports to the world.

Payot

If I want to stay local to Switzerland then Payot would be an interesting option. It would support Swiss book shops and the Swiss market, rather than the US. The two barriers to entry that I see are that they don’t seem to have a mobile phone app and that they have their own e-reader. Inkbooks are an EU based project. According to one source their own PDF they have 822,000 French books and 613,000 English language books.

Orellli

Another option is Orelli and they use Tolino e-books but one big flaw of their site is that they assume you understand German.

MaisonDuLivre

MaisonDuLivre which redirects to Buchhaus.ch is another option and their site is in French or German and you can choose which of the two you want to use. They also have books in English for those that want that option. They have an English e-book section. The prices seem reasonable but there are hoops to jump through.

And Finally

If you love physical books, and I do, then it is easy to break the Amazon monopoly because it is easy to go to a local book shop and buy a book. If you like e-books then it is harder to buy “local” because books are international, but also because of barriers.

Payot has a dedicated reader, MaisonDulivre uses pocketbook but this is clumsy and most of these sites are more expensive than Amazon and Kobo, which is why both thrive.

Having said this I would consider using Buchhaus/MaisonDulivre for book buying after a successful test with a one franc book.

Amazon should not be our default if we live in Europe. We should support Fnac, Payot and other book sellers locally. By local I mean Switzerland for the purpose of this blog post but Europe more generally.