for ireland, that tiny island that's full of poets and writers:

- kennys.ie/ (online and offline)
- charliebyrne.ie/ (offline, mostly, I think)

What's the criteria threshold that makes Google a "not avoid" and Amazon/Walmart an "avoid?"

How do you vet the non-avoids to make sure they're not "avoids?"

Nice list -- boosted and bookmarked!

I've found myself following a similar priority list when choosing where to buy ebooks (and where to link to ebooks as well), which makes me wonder if I got the idea from one of your earlier posts!

Would you be interested in adding sites with good public domain collections, like Project Gutenberg and Standard EBooks? Or do you want to keep it focused on better purchasing choices?

I’ve bought some books through Book View Café, which is an author-owned publishing cooperative: bookviewcafe.com/

It’s only 28 authors, but some dang good ones are in there, and 90% of profits go to authors.

They have a much smaller selection than PG, but they're a volunteer project focused on the publishing quality. Making all the type and spacing and spelling consistent, lots of proofreading, structuring the data for maximum usability across readers, stuff like that.

I've read several books they produced, and just started putting together one book's sequel (partly to get a sense of how epub works), and the style guide gets way into details like semantic marking of roman numerals.

This is all very interesting, thanks for the articulation.

I found it surprising because I've known several people who work for Google but didn't earn enough to live in an apartment and were living the street full time while working in Google's ancillary teams (janitor, cook, etc.) So I would say they also mistreat their non-tech employees. It just gets less press because it's a smaller number.

It's a solid rule of thumb to assume if a company is large enough to have staff that have to do traditionally low-wage jobs (and this is basically every mid-level tech company or higher) someone is getting exploited way worse than the average person at the company.

Guarantee you the same is true of all tech companies on the non avoid list with a physical office

I think you can add epagine.fr/ for france

they clearly indicate if a book has DRM (and which), a watermark, something else or nothing

I have never had a trouble with this merchant

definitely, hence my initial curiosity about how you define "least bad enough."

Anyways, thanks for engaging my curiosity!

AFAIK, BookDepository is also owned by Amazon (yet keeps getting promoted as an alternative to).

Dymock's in Australia doesn't seem to offer eBooks, but they're an option for print books.

Booktopia (also in Australia) offers eBooks set up for Kobo or through their own app, plus physical books. Independent as far as I can find.

Hey, nice!

Was gonna throw in a plug for Hoopla: hoopladigital.com/ . If your public library partners with them, they're pretty great. Lots of trad pub and indie pub (Draft2Digital distributes to them) and their whole catalog is available -- your library doesn't have to pick specific titles to buy beforehand, as with OverDrive.

A good shop i've used before is Scarlet Ferret.

Mostly indie authors I believe mostly(all?) DRM free

scarletferret.com