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This article was born thanks to a your suggestion on our subreddit r/LeAlternative! We therefore thank you first of all for your participation and all suggestions are always welcome. We also remind you that anyone can participate in the LeAlternative project even writing one of his articles and then seeing it published on the site. You can contact us almost everywhere, also for e-mail. Today we present to you invent, a possible one alternative to Amazon Books.
So let's talk about books and Amazon Books, as often happens, is just an excuse to talk about an excellent, interesting and collaborative product. There already exists one alternative social network for book lovers: it's called aNobii and it is also quite used in Italy. Born in Hong Kong, it has passed through various hands (including that of Mondadori) 1. It is now in the hands of Ovolab 2, a Turin company.
Today, however, we want to talk to you about a project Open source 3 called Inventory.
Inventaire: an alternative to Amazon Books
It's sort of collaborative online library. A really interesting method to be able to lend books and to be able to request a loan. Be careful though because it is not created just for loans: you can also give them away, sell them or buy them. They essentially want map the books around us.
We find it to be a splendid idea and, like all splendid ideas, it is often in need of some push to be better known. In fact, more users use and know about it Inventory and more people will be able to share their favorite books in total freedom. Unfortunately in Italy it is very little used and for this reason we feel obliged to publicize it.
After creating your account you can add books to your inventory. You can then decide whether to place the book on sale, whether to give it as a donation or whether to make it available for the loan. Alternatively you can simply add it to your virtual library without doing anything else.
A really interesting project that we hope will have a sequel!
Update December 16, 2021: Inventory joins the Fediverse!
Books
Other alternative to Amazon Books very interesting that was reported to us on Twitter 4. It's a nice initiative, a site to keep track of books read and to archive DRM-free e-books, there's also a page dedicated to the sale of DRM-free books, magazines and comics. DRM, like we have already seen in the past, they are useless and harmful, especially when it comes to books.
Honorable mention for Bookdealer
Talking about books and alternatives to Amazon we cannot fail to mention the beautiful project called Bookdealer. It is an aggregator of independent online bookstores. If you have to buy a book and want to do it online then you can decide to help an independent bookstore with extreme ease! The site in fact has an excellent Search engine very simple to use. The simplest method to take away power from big tech like Amazon (Speaking of which, how much does Jeff Bezos earn and which alternatives to Amazon?) is to move our money elsewhere!
- aNobii on Wikipedia[↩]
- Ovolab grows with the acquisition of Anobii, the book social network[↩]
- source code by Inventaire[↩]
- Libreture report on Twitter[↩]
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