[dboreham]

> I normally just get books from a bookstore or library

Wow. Where do you live? I can't imagine being able to find 1/2 of the books I buy in any of the bookstores in San Francisco, for example.

otoh most "books" I buy these days are actually Kindle downloads, or on O'Reilly Safari.

[eridius]

There's plenty of other online retailers for physical books. Literally every book you can buy at Amazon you should be able to find somewhere else. And for digital books, there's other vendors there too (such as iBooks).

[bjelkeman-again]

I avoid Amazon. I buy my books elsewhere and nothing Amazon has that I need can't be sourced somewhere else.

[nommm-nommm]

Name a single book you can buy on Amazon and not somewhere else.

You must have not looked elsewhere, I bought a whole series of decades out of print books and didn't touch Amazon.