this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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Where do people who use kobo readers buy their ebooks? Is there a reliable non Amazon e-reader shop that sells from free books? (Besides humble store)
You can buy ebooks on your reader from the Kobo store. I have a Kobo with the "plus" subscription which allows you to rent certain books too.
The biggest problem I have with Kobo isn't even really something that's their fault or that they can do anything about. Amazon through their Amazon Unlimited program has locked a bunch of major authors into exclusivity contracts where they're contractually barred from distributing their ebooks on other platforms. That in turn means a bunch of major authors are just completely unavailable anywhere but Amazon, and of course Amazon ebooks exclusively only work on Kindle devices. It's a vicious feedback loop where authors refuse to leave Amazon because it's the market dominator by a large margin and consumers refuse to use anything else because all the authors are only on Amazon.
If you can make do with non-Amazon sources of ebooks it's great to do so and we really need more people doing exactly that in order to convince authors that the Amazon shackles aren't worth it, but it's definitely a struggle sometimes.
I ran into this exclusivity thing and sent a message to the author. He promptly gave me a copy of his book (since he is prohibited from selling it to me). So I sent him a tip on ko-fi for the amount of the book.
No promises every author will do this, but it went pretty well for me.
If an author is Amazon exclusive I don't feel bad getting the book from other sources, and just put it on my Kobo.
If I want to support them, I will buy the book either as a physical book or on Amazon, and read the otherly-acquired book on my Kobo anyway.
This is definitely where a 3rd party comes into play. I buy lots of books, but if you want to be difficult there's always an alternative way.