Forget Audible and Amazon – I'm switching to these 5 alternatives for audiobooks and e-books in 2026
Amazon and Audible aren't the only places to get the best e-books and audiobooks –in fact, these 5 alternatives will make you feel much warmer inside.
(Image credit: Getty Images / Future)
Like many people I'd like to spend my money more ethically, and as an author that's particularly true of buying books. Rather than contribute to Jeff Bezos's "let's send Katy Perry slightly into orbit inside a giant space rocket" fund, I try to buy most of my books from local indie bookshops, at book festivals and directly from small publishers.
That often costs a bit more, but as someone in the indie book industry I'm very aware of the difference that even small sums of money make when that money is spent locally or with small publishers. It really helps bookshops, publishers and authors alike, and that keeps the good books coming.
1. Your local library
(Image credit: Overdrive)
There are several apps that enable you to borrow library books as ebooks. The biggest are OverDrive's Libby, which also offers audiobooks, and for UK dwellers there's also BorrowBox, which sticks to text rather than audio and is favored by many UK councils. Libby and BorrowBox also feature a range of magazines you can browse, and Overdrive has another app, Sora, designed specifically for pupils of signed-up schools.
Both Libby and BorrowBox are based on using your library card as ID (and make it easy to get one if you don't already have one). Once you've signed in with that and set up your account you can then send titles to your device just like you would borrow a physical book from the library. And like physical library books, your loans are limited in number and have to be returned by a certain time.
2. Bookshop.org
(Image credit: Bookshop.org)
One of the things I love about Bookshop.org is that when I buy books from it, a little bit of my money is given to my nominated bookshop. And now the same can happen when I buy audiobooks.
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This is a relatively new service for those of us in the UK so the selection is currently small, but the prices of high-profile books like Cory Doctorow's Enshittification are close to Amazon's and there are plenty of big-name authors.
And there's a big upside to the the much smaller selection: you're not dragging yourself through AI slop and low-quality shovelware to find the diamonds.
