Heyho! Last few days I’ve been working on leaving Amazon and in particular Kindle for ebooks, so I’ve been looking for alternatives for my reading needs. While I can’t recommend a specific book shop yet I’d like to recommend checking if your country’s or city’s public libraries allow you to take out ebooks online.
I’m living in Germany and found that there’s an app called Onleihe which lets you read books from German public libraries as ebook for basically free, you just pay a tiny fee for your library card which you can get online as well. I registered with VÖBB Berlin for example which is some kind of union of all public libraries in Berlin.
Pros:
- Flat rate reading – library card costs 10€ per year, discounts available for students, unemployed or disabled people etc.
- Huge selection of not only books but also audio books, magazines and even movies.
Cons:
- If you don’t like the built-in reader of the Onleihe app there’s an option to read ebooks in an external app, however that app as to support DRM and as far as I can tell that limits the options to PocketBook Reader (which isn’t too shabby though and made in Switzerland). You also have to register with Adobe to get some kind of DRM decoding account or whatever, which is an annoyance but free.
- Taking out ebooks works the same as with physical books, meaning you can only take out books for a limited duration (maximum 21 days) before it’s “returned”, and for a lot of new or very popular books you have to wait until someone else has “returned” their ebook before you can have it. Yes that’s stupid given were talking about ebooks, I assume it’s due to licensing stuff or whatever.
My conclusion: if you need a specific book NOW, you might be out of luck and better off buying it somewhere. If you just wanna browse a huge selection and look for something for entertainment then a reading flat rate for 10€ per year is a great deal.
Either way, might be worth it checking out if there’s something similar available where you live. If there is please share!
Great tip. Unfortunate to see that some countries lock their libraries e-book lending system into being app only. This heavily restricts what e-readers it can be used on, primarily only Boox and Meebook or similar android based e-readers. Overdrive/Libby is the best, especially due to their support for Kobo but also due to the possibility of downloading your lended books and transferring them with Adobe Digital Editions.
I’ve been using Kobo devices for several years now. I tried a Kindle last year and it was a horrible experience in comparison.
Kobo is not European though, but it’s also not American. It was founded in Canada in 2009 and later acquired by a Japanese company Rakuten.
Unfortunately my Kindle is still working fine and I don’t want to buy a replacement for something that’s not broken, but eventually I’m gonna have a look at the e-ink readers from PocketBook, founded in Ukraine, now located in Switzerland.
Not for everyone, but if you live in Finland you can (most likely) access National E-library. Unfortunately it’s only for IOS or Android, no e-readers are currently supported.
There are Android e-readers like Boox or Meebook though!
I don’t read much, probably still more than most people but that is still only 3 or 4 books a year so I just buy my books and after a couple years when im sure I won’t be reading them again I donate them to libraries. Libraries are a marvelous invention, I love those places even though I almost never use them. Just imagine how controversial they would be if they never existed and someone had the idea of them now. People would be crying piracy and socialism until their faces turn red.
Just adding my reply here because, although it’s not European, your post did remind me to check my local library in Sydney for DVDs. It’s free to join the City of Sydney network of libraries and they have an extensive range of DVDs to borrow, including very recent TV shows and movies.
I had also been intending to divest myself of Amazon and other streaming services and the like, and thought I’d be buying a whole lot of physical media, but turns out there’s no need as 99% of what I wanted is available through the library!
They also have an enormous range of ebooks and audiobooks available through connections with other services like Libby, Overdrive and Proquest. Definitely worth checking out your library.
Libby is used by many libraries around the world. The great thing about Libby is that many devices, such as some e-readers, supports it. So, you can check out e-books from your library, and they will appear on your e-ink device, or what ever device you want to read them on.
Another neat thing I recently discovered is, that libraries here in Finland use video streaming services. I can loan 4 movies per month and just watch them on my computer. No scratched DVDs needed. And library membership is free here in Finland.
One way to discover free video streaming services, such as possible library services, is to use JustWatch. It’s a free, European search engine that indexes the contents of video streaming services. For this, you will need an account, but it’s free. Once you are logged in, click the settings button (dude and cog) in the upper right corner, make sure your region is set correctly and select “Services”. Select “Free” and go through the list. You’ll need to search the internet for each of the services listed to find out what they are. This is how I discovered those library services.
Project Gutenberg and librivox are decent resources for free older books. The author needs to have been dead for 70 years, so they are old but I’ve enjoyed “The Lost World” and “The hour of the dragon”
Standard Ebooks provides better versions of public domain books, but their selection is more limited than Project Gutenberg’s.
I can’t speak for Europe, but in the US there is a system called “Little Free Libraries” where people put out a weatherproof box of books for people to take some, leave some, etc.
They just opened their 200,000th library(!)
We set ours up, I seeded it with about $200 worth of books, and it seems super popular. New stuff coming through a lot!
:( I don’t see any on the map for Germany, maybe that’s an opportunity to get it started there?
Oh we definitely have that here too, often it’s repurposed old phone booths filled with books where you take one or leave one. Probably goes under a different name here though, and it’s more of a novelty, not something where you go when you’re looking for a specific book obviously. ;)
