E-Books
There are plenty of places to buy e-books online other than Amazon's Kindle Store. Here are the best online e-book stores.
Amazon
Apple Books
Apple users should check out Apple Books (formerly known as iBooks). Non-Apple users, however, should give it a wide berth. Unlike Amazon Kindle, which has apps available on every major operating system, Apple Books is limited to macOS and iOS devices. The store itself offers titles from both mainstream and independent publishers, but it doesn't have the same volume of content as Amazon. You'll struggle to find free e-books to download, whereas Amazon's list of free titles feels endless.
eBooks.com
eBooks.com has been around for more than 20 years. In that time, it has grown to become one of the largest e-book sellers on the web. Almost two million titles are available via local portals in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Europe. The site has both an online reader and a downloading tool. That means you can read a book directly through your web browser; it's a useful feature if you want to do some light reading while also working on other projects on your computer. The site only sells books in EPUB and PDF formats.
Smashwords
Smashwords is the world's largest distributor of independent e-books. It lets budding authors publish their work for free and provides a way for them to get into larger retailers and libraries. From a reader standpoint, the library has more than 500,000 books available. According to the company, 70,000 of them are available for free. The Smashwords homepage offers some filters that you won't see in many other places, including a word count filter (under 20,000 words, over 20,000, over 50,000, and over 100,000), and filters for essays, plays, poetry, and screenplays. Several e-book formats are available to download, including EPUB, MOBI (for Kindle compatibility), and PDF.
Barnes and Noble
Barnes and Noble is the largest brick-and-mortar bookstore in the United States, with more than 600 retail stores. The company also makes the NOOK e-reader. NOOKs are arguably the best alternative to a Kindle and their largest competitor in the market. The Barnes and Noble e-book store contains more than 3 million paid titles and 1 million free e-books. If you buy e-books from Barnes and Noble but want to read them on your Kindle, there are a couple of hoops you need to jump through. Firstly, you need to convert the books into a different format. Barnes and Noble's e-books come as EPUB files, so Kindle devices cannot read them. Secondly, you need to remove the Barnes and Noble DRM. You can easily perform both steps using the Calibre e-book management app. If you want to see the differences between the Amazon and Barnes and Noble e-readers, read our article pitting the Nook versus the Kindle.
Kobo
Kobo is another one of the best places to buy e-books. Like Barnes and Noble, the company also produces a few different e-reader models. With five million titles available for purchase, Kobo is also one of the largest e-book stores on the web. Content is evenly divided between fiction and non-fiction. There are Kobo apps available for all the major operating systems, including Windows, iOS, and Android. The store benefits from its powerful customized recommendations algorithms; the more books you download and read, the more personalized the recommendations become. Kobo also runs the Kobo Writing Life program. It is a way for new authors to get their work published. As a reader, it means you have access to thousands of fun indie titles.
Google Play Books
The Google Play Store has an entire section dedicated to selling e-books. It consists of more than five million titles. Books on the Google Play Store are only available in the EPUB and PDF formats. Kindle devices can read the PDF format, but you'll still need to use Calibre to remove the books' DRM restrictions if a publisher chooses to enable it. If you're an Android user, you might find Google Play Books to be the most convenient option. The app is tightly integrated with the rest of the Android OS and plays nicely with other Google services like Google Assistant.
Harlequin
Harlequin is one of the leading publishers of books aimed at women in the United States. The site is a division of HarperCollins and publishes 100 new titles every month. Most of the books on the platform fall into the romance category, though since the mid-1990s it has started to branch out into other genres such as thrillers, suspense novels, small-town dramas, and paranormal stories. You can read the books you buy using the site's built-in e-reader, or you can download them onto your device.
BookBub
BookBub offers users handpicked deals on e-books via its in-house editorial team of experts. Covering both bestsellers and hidden gems, it's a great way for book lovers to broaden their reading horizons. The site doesn't sell books directly. Instead, it uses your interests to aggregate the best and most appropriate deals for you across many of the other e-book sellers. For example, if you love Stephen King novels, BookBub can alert you to the best deals and prices on his new releases. It saves you from manually crawling through e-books shops and still potentially missing the best deal.
Blackwell's
The UK's largest bookseller, Waterstones, no longer has an e-book store. However, if you live in the UK and want to buy e-books from somewhere other than Amazon, check out Blackwell's. After first opening its doors in 1879, the Oxford-based company has made a name for itself as a leading publisher of academic books. You will find titles in business, economics, history, social science, travel, theater, religion, philosophy, music, and a lot more. The e-book section is not as extensive as the list of physical books you can buy, but if you are looking for something non-fiction, it's worth checking out.