Doing the de-amazoning
Sounds like I'm deforesting. I'm not, I promise.
Shops are dropping like flies around us. I try to shop locally and I'm lucky there are some great independent shops on my very street. My wife is slightly more ruthless and just wants to order from the settee for next day delivery. Whereas I will say, if we keep buying stuff off Amazon instead of going to B&Q soon there won't be a B&Q to go to. Like so many other places.
Also I think the pendulum is swinging back on delivery. Is it actually more convenient? Having expensive stuff ditched at your front door? Why not go pick it up from the shop at your actual convenience instead of worrying it will come when you are out and get nicked or wet or whatever.
Lots of other reasons Amazon is a Bad Thing also, obviously. Treating people badly. Monopolising.
One of the real tricky ones for me is books. I like reading ebooks, for lots of reasons. I have as many paper books as I can store and I worry how bad all that printing is for the environment. I'm not very good at listening to audiobooks. I zone out and I like highlighting and looking at the words, sort of thing.
I'd note that all the recent shenanigans of Amazon clamping down on ebooks is not part of this. I was never under any illusion I 'owned' my Amazon books (though I kinda do.) I'm not going to get into my further - library economy! - thoughts on that.
But if I want to buy less from Amazon ... the majority of what I buy from Amazon is ebooks. I always check my library ebooks catalogue, first. They are excellent but not often weird enough for my tastes. And I don't want to pirate. I want authors to get paid! Especially indie authors.
That said, I wish indie authors sold their own ebooks on their sites. Weirdly rare! It's just links to everywhere else. It's not actually difficult either? More difficult than linking to Amazon, sure.
Even less reason for publishers not to do it. Verso is great for this. Verso books are also very serious and one cannot survive on worthy nonfiction alone. There need to be kissing books also.
Why did Waterstones cede that battle? Bookshop.org is apparently starting to sell ebooks. Not in the UK yet though. There's Smashwords and Ebooks.com. Mere hours ago a friend pointed me to BookBeat, which looks promising? Not evil at least? It does seem to be mostly audiobooks which I am less good at.
Perlego is a library for more academic / textbooks. Bit on the pricey side but maybe I should. And of course there's Open Library, general Internet Archive, and Project Gutenberg but I'm not exactly getting my ladies kissing books there.