How Can I Buy Some Great New Books?

There are two ways that I get most of my personal books (which I usually end up donating to the SRR). First of all, I'm a big supporter of Booker in Gadong. For those of you who haven't read my previous posts, Booker is the cheapest shop in the country and it has really started to develop a good collection of young adult fiction.

They actually have a wide selection of different books and authors and have stocked a lot of the books that I've been raving about and promoting at the SRR including many of the books from the Teens' Top Ten list.

When I took a group of the girls on a book-buying trip earlier in the year, we were absolutely shocked by the difference in prices. On a few books we looked at, Booker was actually 30 - 40% cheaper.

No, I don't work for Booker, but I'm just so pleased that at least one bookstore is trying its best to stock a variety of books for young adults and teens. The more people who buy those books from them, the more they will be able to stock. You get the picture.

I had visited a number of other shops in the past month and I had been wanting to buy a copy of hush, hush (recently voted #5 on the 2010 Teens' Top Ten list) but I didn't want to pay the crazy prices at the other shops. Anyway, I went to Booker last week and told myself, "If they have hush, hush I'm going to buy it." Sure enough, they had it and it was very reasonably priced. Watch this space for a book preview and review in the next couple of weeks!

The other way that I buy a lot of my books now is through a website called bookdepository. They have almost all of the books that you would expect to buy at Amazon, but there is a huge difference - at bookdepository shipping is free. For me that's huge! I used to spend as much on shipping as I did on the books whenever I ordered from Amazon. Also, I used to save up my money for three or four months and then order books to try to cut down on shipping. At bookdepository there is no shipping so I can order even just one book at a time whenever I want to. It's great.

Some people probably guess that bookdepository has more expensive prices than Amazon. That may be true sometimes, but not always. And, from my experience, when you factor in shipping, bookdepository has always been much cheaper. You might guess that shipping is slower with bookdepository, but I certainly haven't noticed any difference in shipping times so far - they seem to be pretty much the same. I recently ordered Maria V. Snyder's Storm Glass and it got here in only about two and a half weeks.

By the way, I've registered the SRR as an affiliate with bookdepository so if you click on our link below, we'll get a small commission on the order. It doesn't cost you anything to order through our link, but it can help us out a little bit. So far after 15 months as an affiliate we have about $20 in commissions saved up which will be enough to order a book or two.

Anyway, please help to support the SRR by clicking on the banner ad below if you are going to order any books from bookdepository. Thanks and happy shopping! :-)





PS. For the girls in Form 5 who are broken-hearted because they must say good-bye to the SRR, there is still hope for you out there! Pick up books from Booker and Bookdepository and swap them with each other! :-)