NEW- Indiebound Reader for Android devices  Just add in 05101 for Village Square Booksellers and you can buy books from our website and they will appear in the reader app

Adobe Digital editions- Download for your computer, copy books from your computer to your e-reader (Nook, Sony. Kobo)

Ebooks purchases from the website of Village Square Booksellers: Yes, you can buy ebooks from your local independent bookstore!  If, like many of us, you like being able to read on your electronic reader as well as from printed books, we can provide you with many books in the format of your choice.  On the Village Square Booksellers Bookstore website, we offer two major categories of ebooks - Google eBooks, and all other formats -- and the two categories work slightly differently.

Finding ebooks
Start with the "Search All Books" box in the right sidebar.  Use the author's name, title or keyword, just as you would in searching a regular book.  Look for the "Google eBooks" and "Other eBooks" tabs at the top of the book listing to see what the available electronic formats are for the book of your choice. Or click "Search for Google eBooks" in the right sidebar to find just ebooks. 

  
Setting your preferences

Create an account on our website.  At that time, you'll be given the option to select the electronic device(s) you might use for reading ebooks. Our system will then steer you toward the corresponding file format(s) for ebooks as you shop.  Or you can select file format manually for each book.

Google ebooks
When you buy a Google ebook through the Village Square Booksellers online bookstore, you are purchasing a file that is stored "in the cloud" -- just like your Gmail, Google Calendar entries, or other Google products you can access from any computer using your Google login.  You can also download Google ebooks to Android phones, iPhone, iPad, and many eReaders, and read them using the free Google Books App.

You can read your purchased Google ebooks several different ways:

1. on your "My ebooks" page when logged into Village Square Booksellers Bookstore
2. on the Google Books page when logged into your Google or Gmail account;
3. on your smartphone or ereader.  As you read, your page positions are saved across all the devices so you can pick up reading where you last left off. That means you can start reading on your PC, continue on your laptop, and carry on reading on your smartphone. (Pat’s note- I tested this with a free book available on Google Books - it came up on the same page on my iPod Touch Google Books reader and in my computer on my Google account.)

The first time you buy a Google ebook from Village Square Booksellers, you will be asked to link your Village Square Booksellers Bookstore account to your Google account, and accept the Google Books Terms of Service.  You only have to do this once; checkout proceeds as usual, and you can then access your Google Books.

Other ebooks
In the "Other eBooks" category, you can purchase ebook files in formats for use a number of devices.  Through our regular Book Search tool or the Search eBooks tool you may find and order ebooks for Adobe Digital Editions (which supports the Sony Readers); the Palm eReader (serving Blackberry, iPhone, and iPod touch); and the Microsoft Reader. (Sorry, we cannot sell any ebooks for the Kindle.)  Wikipedia has a great page explaining the different formats, showing the usage for each and suffix of the file formats.

Getting help
Though we hope the experience of buying ebooks from Village Square Booksellers is relatively straightforward, you may find things confusing at first, or there may be occasional glitches.  Though the staff at Village Square Booksellers Bookstore has been trained to understand our system and all the formats of books we offer, and we're always happy to help - Pat is our resident techie and the best one to speak to about e-books!  Please call her at (802) 463-9404 and she will be happy to walk you through the process.  And if the problem is something more complicated, she can pass along questions to our site hosts at the American Booksellers Association or to Google.

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Please note that not all titles are currently available as ebooks, and the prices on some ebooks (as set by publishers) may sometimes seem strange.  The world of ebooks is still in a state of flux right now, which means that these options will probably change in the coming months and years – hopefully for the better. At Village Square Booksellers, we're excited about the possibilities for books in any and all formats.

This note was adopted from Greenlight Bookstore at 686 Fulton Street in Brooklyn. One of the owners, Rebecca Fitting, was one of our Random House sales reps for a while. If you are visiting Brooklyn, please visit her store and tell her Pat sent you!