For years now this blog has earned a small income from Amazon sales–not much, just enough to cover our hosting fees and pay our webmaster.

Meanwhile, Amazon has grown to proportions that would make a 19th century robber baron blush. The New York Times reported this month on Amazon’s poor treatment of white collar employees while BBC’s Panorama showed the hellish conditions at the bottom of the Amazon pyramid. For years Amazon avoided paying local sales taxes, gaining a discounting advantage that put small local bookstores, unable to compete, out of business. I could go on. If you’d like to know more read this roundup of Amazon’s sins in Salon.

And yet, I suspect, few of us (including myself) have had the moral courage to delete our Amazon accounts like Rob Hoskins, founder of the Transition movement, did and blogged about it recently (Thanks FR for tipping me off to Hoskins’ post). Those Amazon discounts are just too tempting and their comprehensive selection of goods too convenient to bypass. And for bloggers, such as ourselves, those associate referral fees provide one of the few viable sources of funding for our efforts. Even less appealing than loss of income is clean-up work: our site is now riddled with links to Amazon which, if we want to divest from Amazon, we will have to remove one by one, by combing through more than 2000 posts.

We’ve considered using other advertising models, but found those to be even more potentially offensive. Face it, most of consumer culture is offensive.  Should we push factory-made clothing? Toxic electronics? Cars? Credit? Click bait? We’d like to have small businesses as sponsors, but finding them, negotiating with them and wrangling their ads is a part-time job that neither of us wanted to take on.

Regarding alternatives to the Amazon model, there was a period when Amazon dumped all associates in California after the state went after them for not paying sales taxes. During this time, I tried using Portland-based bookstore Powell’s associate program, but it proved unpopular with our readers. There were maybe one or two orders total in the six months I went with Powell’s.

I believe it to be unethical to write for free. It’s not fair to our fellow authors and I don’t want to be part of the race to the bottom that’s destroyed the music business and is currently destroying publishing and journalism. That’s why I feel morally compelled to find a funding model that keeps Root Simple free while providing us with a modest income.

I’ve long been an admirer of the folks at the Idler in the UK. Like us, they teach classes. But they also self-publish beautiful books. What if we were to do the same and sell them through our website rather than through Amazon? Marshall McCluhan noted that when a new technology takes over, what it replaces becomes an art form. I have a sense that, with so much time devoted to staring at screens, people will increasingly want the peace and focus that comes with holding a beautiful book in one’s hands.

This is where you can help by answering, in the comments, a few questions I have:

If we were to start self-publishing short how-to books would you want them in an inexpensive ebook format or would you be willing to pay more for a physical book?

Do you think we should cut all ties with Amazon?

How many of you have gone as far as Hopkins and have deleted your personal Amazon account?

Would you be willing to support us through donations?

How about online classes? What subjects would you want us to tackle?