3w ago

750 german independent book stores operate a webshop together to compete with Amazon – do other EU countries have something similar?

www.genialokal.de genialokal - Bücher Online kaufen mal anders

Über 10 Mio. Bücher, ebooks, Hörbücher... Sehen Sie direkt, wo Ihr gesuchtes Buch sofort zum Abholen bereit steht, bestellen es zum nächsten Tag in Ihre Buchhandlung oder lassen es nach Hause liefern

genialokal.de is backed by over 750 owner-managed bookshops across Germany. Since 2015, the joint umbrella brand has stood for the goal of strengthening the local book trade, with 80% of users using the delivery option "click&collect" to pick up their order from their local book store.

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This is really cool. I moved to Austria from a country that doesn't basically have Amazon and ordering anything from closest "Amazon country" costs way more than local online shops, but I've taken a stance to continue avoiding Amazon.
So far so good. Initiatives like this will help to have other options!

In Benelux we also have Bol.com as an Amazon alternative.
I have never in my life purchased anything from Amazon and am fully intending to keep it that way.
- I've had moments where Bol didn't have something but Amazon did. In those cases it's because it came from AliExpress. Might as well just order at AliExpress at that point :-/

In Belgium, there's Librel but I think it's only available for the french speaking part of the country.
- Both the desktop and mobile versions of Firefox have local machine translation built in, while it doesn't support that many languages it works well with most European ones!

UK (and I think Ireland) have uk.bookshop.org. It's a US based B-Corp though if that influences anything

Sad that Thalia isn't part of this.
- Well, Thalia is one of the enemies of independently owned bookshops so no surprise there I guess
  
  Learnt something today, thanks.

In France, I believe that Place des libraires and Librairies indépendantes have a similar system. There are also smaller, local bookshop networks like Librest.
I’ve never ordered on one of those sites, but I’ve used Place des libraires a few times to check if a book was in stock nearby. Most of the time, when I want a book, there’s no emergency, so I just walk to the nearest bookshop and place an order it if they don’t already have it in stock. I only buy used or foreign books online.

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