Okay, listen. You know I love buying books and one of the things I've been doing this year is buying some from Amazon in the UK. I like buying them here in Brunei when I can, but some books are so hard to get.
Try finding a copy of Hunger Games in Brunei. You won't. How about Vampire Academy? Not likely. It's just impossible. Even Twilight was hard to get a hold of for most of last year.
Well, I order the books I want from Amazon, but the cost of shipping is often the same price as the book itself. In my last two orders I think I was paying about $8 per book in shipping.
But imagine if you could get free overseas delivery. Wouldn't that be awesome? You could have great prices and get the book delivered to you. You could have any book you wanted, whenever you wanted it. Can you imagine how that would change things?
Welcome to the world of book buying heaven!!! Welcome to the Book Depository!
I've just placed an order for the two books we are missing from the 2008 Teens' Top Ten list. I got Sweet Far thing for 6.28GBP and I got Vampire Academy for 6.14GBP. No shipping fees. That's 12.42GBP total. (The UK pound is making a comeback, but that's still only $29BND for two books.)
Over at Amazon I would have paid 30.93GBP for the same two books. Wow!!! How is that possible? Half the price is in shipping fees.
Anyway, I've placed the order today. Let's see how this works. If this pans out, I will be ordering A LOT OF NEW BOOKS this way. You know, I was going to wait until September for these two books because I was trying to cut down on the shipping costs. Now I can order books whenever I want. This is so amazing. Happy days!
4 comments:
Seriously that is like a massive bargain, the airmail postage on those two books must be somewhere close to two thirds of that cost... good find!! :o)
Hi Peta. I know. It is seriously weird. How can they make any money at all? Have you ever heard of bookdepository? I'm trying it out first to see what happens but it looks legitimate.
Yes, I've heard of them and know people that use them but for books buyers in the UK they have priced themselves out of the market on most books, especially since Amazon ship orders over £5 here for free but... for o/s orders the prices are really good, I hadn't even noticed that they offered free shipping before. I've really no idea where they make the money though, I guess they must have got a good bulk shipping deal as most normal sized paperbacks cost £4-5 each to send airmail. But hey, what does it matter anyway if it saves you money? More Money = More Books... Yay!!
Hi Peta, I'm glad you've heard of bookdepository. I think you are right. The listed price on some books is a tiny bit more than that of Amazon so it makes sense for you to stick with Amazon. However, when you factor in the cost of shipping, Amazon gets fairly expensive for us.
I suspect you were correct when you said that it is likely bulk buying. That's the only way I can understand how they could afford to spend so much on shipping.
For us in Brunei, this is a dream come true! Once the word gets out, bookdepository will be flooded by orders from us.
This is incredible news for our reading room collection too. Any books that I can't get from mooching may, eventually, get bought. I don't mind buying a book a month or something like that and if I can get some funds for book purchasing I may be able to put it towards ordering books now that it can be justified as a viable option. YES!
This really does change things for us book lovers trapped in Borneo. I think I could spend hours just browsing for books now in this amazing online bookstore.
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