Buying books online and make savings

Buying books these days can be a bit of a minefield, there are so many different stores out there selling them that it’s really hard to know where to begin sometimes. Especially with supermarkets and other shops that don’t traditionally sell books joining in with it all. Shopping from the comfort of your own home can often give you just as good a chance (if not better) of getting the book you want at a decent price as going out and walking round all day in the town.

There are obvious places to look from WHSmiths and Waterstones to Borders and Ottakers bookshops all of whom have online versions of their stores. There are also many stores like Amazon, The Hut and Play.com who only have online stores. There are also many stores that you wouldn’t think of as selling books such as dvd.co.uk who you’d traditionally think of as a DVD store, and Tesco who are traditionally a supermarket both of whom sell books as well.

Personally for me, if I’m wanting to buy a book my first decision is do I want a new book or a second hand one. If I’m buying it for myself then I’m often quite happy to buy a book second hand for various reasons, firstly it’s likely to be cheaper, and secondly I like to be environmentally friendly if I can therefore if I can feel like I’m giving new life to an old book it makes me happy. If I’m buying a book for someone else however, then I probably either want a brand new book in which case I’d start with the stores listed above, or I want one that even though it’s second hand is in ‘as new’ condition.

If I’m looking for second hand, then one of the first places I often try is Amazon market place. This is a part of Amazon where people can sign up and sell their second hand books through the site to other people. I will also try sites such as Booklovers and Ebay. For rarer or more collectible books that may have gone out of print, Abebooks and Zardos are both very valuable sites to keep in mind, as both of them are excellent at sourcing copies of out of print literature of all different sorts.

The biggest advantages that all these stores have of course is that to access them I don’t have to leave the comfort of my own home. I don’t have to spend money on petrol to get me to the different stores in town (and with petrol prices ever on the increase this is most definitely a bonus!), and of course I have access to a much wider range of shops and books than I would have in the few bookshops that I have in my own local town. There is another advantage and that is that with many of these sites – Amazon being a particularly good example of this – I can take a look and see what other people think of the book. Yes in a shop I could pick it up and read the blurb, but these days I can almost always do that online too, and in the store I wouldn’t have a group of people there to tell me that when they read it they thought it was excellent, or that it was a good yarn but not as good as the authors first book or whatever it is that they did think of it.