Book Shopping Guide

The following price-comparison engines are not for book shopping only. In fact, you can use them to shop almost everything online.

Forget about www.Amazon.com; Amazon means expensive. As long as the books that Amazon sells do not have its logo on them, you can safely shop at other online bookstores for the same books, but with much lower prices, yet without losing your social status. Of course, there will always be a faint possibility when most people take great pride in their Amazon shopping experience and use their Amazon books to demonstrate their better taste and healthier life style. If such a day comes, this guide will definitely need an upgrade. Otherwise, this is the guide for book shopping.

There are three great shopping sites with price-comparison engines:

but for books, there are two even better ones: Since they have some different sets of online bookstores, it would be wise to search the same book on all five sites. Also, be aware of that PriceGrabber, AddALL, and AllBookStores give you the final price (including shipping, handling, and sales tax), but DealTime and BizRate only have the naked price.

Always scroll down the final search results and look for the lowest prices, because the final search results are not entirely sorted according to ascending prices. Take DealTime for example, you probably will find that www.DoubleDiscount.com is buried somewhere at the end of the bookseller list in the search result. (I guess that DoubleDiscount pays less money to DealTime for service.)

Once you have found the online bookstore you want to shop, go to the following site searching for any coupons: www.Amazing-Bargains.com. Sometimes, you can get additional $10~30 off.

Moreover, you can even take advantage of international currency differences and order your books from the United Kingdom or Germany. Just go to the DealTime site, click the Books page, scroll down, click the United Kingdom or Germany link, and do your search there. Please note that the same book might have different ISBN's in different countries. Most of the time, you can save some $10~20 (sometimes even over 50%) off the price in the US for the same (academic) book. To save you some time, AddALL does the search from online bookstores all over the world and sorts the final result on one page, even with the dollar amount in your native currency! I highly recommend AddALL, although it covers fewer US bookstores than AllBookStores does.

Finally, if you order multiple books from the same online bookstore, you will save shipping and handling fee for books other than the first one. Therefore, I strongly encourage you to do the following:

  1. Have a book list handy,
  2. Go to one of the above price-comparison sites and search every book,
  3. Click the cheapest price and go to the online bookstore that the price-comparison site leads you,
  4. Place the book in the shopping basket of the online bookstore and bookmark the online bookstore's website,
  5. Go back to the price-comparison site and search a new book,
  6. Repeat Steps 3 through 5 till you finish your book list,
  7. Click the online bookstore's bookmarks one by one, find the online bookstore that will charge you the least for all your books (including shipping, handling, tax, and coupons),
  8. Place your order,
  9. Clean your web browser's favorite list and delete unnecessary bookmarks,
  10. Finish.
If you do not do as the above, you will pay multiple shipping and handling fees, which can be quite substantial in the end. Even better, if you have some friends who also want to buy books, you can all combine your orders into one and average out the shipping and handling cost. So, from now on, you can shop books from online bookstores with the cheapest prices around the world.

Good luck!