Like so many people, we’ve been using Amazon for years but have felt increasingly uneasy about it. Firstly, we love bookshops and don’t want them to disappear – reason enough then not to use the behemoth. But on top of that is the fact that Amazon benefits so hugely from us as taxpaying shoppers, and yet pays a disproportionately low amount of British tax. That’s hard to stomach. Then we read the relatively recent New York Times article about Amazon’s working practices, and it made our hair stand on end. All in all, Amazon is not a company whose values and practices we like or want to support, and yet there we were – using it ourselves and adding it as a link on our website so that people could buy the books we recommended easily and cheaply. It didn’t feel right.
So when one of our subscribers told us about Hive, we couldn’t wait to try it. Hive is an online British bookshop, set up in 2011, and it’s similar to Amazon in that you can get pretty much any book, eBook, DVD or CD out there on it. It also delivers books very quickly (within five days for free and within two for standard rates), and offers discounts that are comparable—if not always quite the same—as those offered by Amazon. But here’s how it’s different: it supports local book shops (instead of effectively obliterating them) by donating a portion of every sale to your local or favourite independent book shop. You can also pick up your book order from your local store if that is easy for you, though we love the fact that Hive delivers to your door for free. Plus, like you and I, it pays a full quota of British tax! We are now true converts and hope you’ll try it out too and, if you like it as much as we do, recommend it to fellow book buyers. The bigger it gets, the better an alternative it will be.
