Comments on: Usually available in 24 hours

By: tom

tom — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 11:10:45 +0000

I use http://www.newsfromnowhere.org.uk/ for preference, an independent, not-for-profit radical & community bookshop, run by a workers’ co-operative, based in Liverpool, UK. They can do you any UK-published book, not just lefty nonsense

Obviously not so useful for those outside the UK, but great if you are in the UK and that’s your bag…

By: Tyrone Slothrop

Tyrone Slothrop — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 01:26:14 +0000

Kevin Drum posts about Amazon S&H charges:

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_02/008210.php

By: redfox

redfox — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 02:30:34 +0000

I’ve had entirely the opposite experience—Amazon is so faithful about mailing things promptly that it has spoiled me for all other mail-order purchasing. I get so terribly confused when I pay for two-day shipping, say, and don’t get my object for a week. What? You mean it takes time to find the thing, pack it up, and send it off? This cannot be!

I am, however, an Amazon Prime subscriber, so perhaps that’s it.

By: Daragh McDowell

Daragh McDowell — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 15:05:39 +0000

Henry, this discussion of bookshipping is fascinating, but as your cousin I must warn you that I never want to hear you use the word ‘guesstimate’ ever again.

By: lalala

lalala — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 04:20:16 +0000

About a year ago, I noticed and upon checking found that several of my friends also noticed, that Amazon shipping had gotten considerably less reliable, mostly because of them taking a long time to ship out things that had been claimed for shipping within 24 hours. It’s not like they’re always that way, but enough that I noticed it as a trend.

Also, recently Amazon shipped me entirely the wrong order of books (someone was having a book group reading diet books, clearly) and between that and slow shipping times on the original set of books and on the replacements, it all ended up taking several weeks longer than the books I’d ordered at the same time from the local bookstore where I grew up (which had to order them, then ship them to me, which is why I’d ordered the ones I wanted quickly from f’ing Amazon).

By: Stephen Frug

Stephen Frug — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:49:08 +0000

For “price is an option” read “price is an issue”.

Oops.

By: Stephen Frug

Stephen Frug — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:48:19 +0000

For those for whom price is an option, it’s worth noting that there are a bunch of sites that will check multiple sites all at once (amazon, powells, b&n, alibris, abe, etc) and report the various prices. I should say that these are not 100% reliable—sometimes a book is listed as in that, once you click through, isn’t; sometimes they miss a book that a site actually has; sometimes they simply fail to find some editions. Nevertheless, they’ve lead me to some good bargins. The two I use are:
http://www.anybook4less.com
http://www.allbookstores.com

There are others, too, but those are the ones I’ve used. Give ‘em a try.

By: fyreflye

fyreflye — Sat, 11 Feb 2006 03:34:53 +0000

I started out as a Powell’s customer but Amazon’s super saver shipping and overall reliability converted me. One advantage not mentioned here is that you can often get O/P books from Amazon’s Marketplace sellers while Powell’s has no such resource beyond its own used book stock. Amazon is also an increasingly useful source for O/P and used classical CD’s. ABE is reliable but slow and you always have to pay for shipping.
If you’re not a rich college prof and price is an issue try http://www.fetchbook.info/

By: matt

matt — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 22:15:35 +0000

Hey, if you’re gonna buy from amazon, go through alonovo.com—it’s a front-end to amazon that adds corporate responsibility ratings and sends some of the proceeds to charity..

By: gideons

gideons — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:11:23 +0000

Powell’s is great. I love going there and ordering from there is decent. They are a union shop. However, the management does engage in constant low level union busting activity. I still think it’s worth supporting them. But Michael Powell and the rest of management took it as something of a personal insult when the employees decided to unionize.

By: Jeff R.

Jeff R. — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:08:57 +0000

I signed up for Prime when my wife needed a bunch of books for a class quickly, and worked out to be cheaper. It’s always been within two days and sometimes just one. I’ve noticed from the UPS tracking it usually ships from Horsham, PA, (I live in eastern Mass.), while super saver seemed to come from all over. I also noticed with super saver, it would take several days for the carrier to pick up. Maybe they spread the work around their distribution sites depending on which ones have slack time.

By: cm

cm — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:47:58 +0000

My rather spotty experience with Amazon suggests that the 1-day delivery thing is a bunch of baloney. I suspect it is to marginally entice buyers to make the (impulse) purchase by creating the expectation of immediate gratification.

By: MC

MC — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 16:11:11 +0000

The last two times I’ve ordered from Powell’s, it has been for books they claimed were clean copies. When they arrived, both books had marginalia and underlining in ink. I would prefer to support Powell’s but find that unreliability too offensive.

By: MFA

MFA — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:32:34 +0000

I have had at two or three instances out of perhaps twenty Amazon purchases (not all books) where the ‘usually ships’ information was not just wrong but wildly misleading. Two of those few instances were hard-to-find books with shipping estimates of a couple of days or weeks. In fact, neither book ever shipped (and I cancelled the orders after 90 days).

I certainly appreciate the difficulties involved in providing accurate shipping estimates for products of that nature, however a shipping estimate that read ‘Shipment times for this product vary too widely to provide a reliable estimate’ would have been truthful. The estimates I was given were not.

…

By: John Emerson

John Emerson — Fri, 10 Feb 2006 15:11:42 +0000

Bookfinder.com