We begin today's post by extending our sincere thanks to Blogville for designating this blog an Editor's Choice. There are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there. For a major search engine like Blogville to pay attention to such a young blog (we began this blog on 29 March 2009) is very gratifying....
Attention is precisely what independent booksellers have not been getting much of since the rise of bigbox retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
These retailers purchase titles in enormous volume, and they use this purchasing power to ruthlessly negotiate price points with publishers. End result: bigbox retailers consistently undersell independent booksellers. This is great for consumers (at least in terms of price), not so great for independent booksellers.
Which is why a lot of independent booksellers have moved away from stocking "everyday" titles. Instead, they focus on specialized genres, out-of-print titles or antiquarian books, areas where it's much more difficult for bigbox retailers to gain an advantage. (Although bigbox retailers take advantage of this as well. Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble allow independent booksellers to set up storefronts on their sites, and Amazon--as noted in yesterday's post--owns both ABEbooks and Bookfinder.)
That said, if price is your major concern in building your private library, the bigbox retailers definitely will well repay your attention to what they have to offer.
Which is why you should be aware of sites like BestBookBuys and AddAll, which allow you to "comparison shop" for the best deals among bigbox retailers. You can sort these deals by total price (including shipping), determine whether a title is in stock, get an approximation of shipping time, etc. Depending on the search engine, you also can search out-of-print titles, sign up for a book club, or use coupons.
Coupons, which are available with membership at several bigbox retailers (Barnes & Noble, Borders/Walden Books, etc.) can save you as much as 40% per title, more if the retailer allows the coupon to be used in addition to any other discounts.
Book clubs deserve a post of their own...tomorrow.
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