Hacker News Reader

Comment by socialismisok | Hacker News Reader

Is "cheapest" the right objective? Because if that's the case, book piracy seems like the clear winner.

But maybe we should consider "cheapest with some boundaries". For instance, we probably agree that bookstores are nice for a myriad of reasons, even if we don't frequent them. They employ people in the area, they offer curation and recommendations, they invite speakers and host events, and they help local authors get started. They may offer benefits or profit sharing.

But a physical space like that costs money. Experience costs money. Curation costs money (indirectly).

I'd argue that cheapest as a metric undercuts best as a metric. Cheap is one important input to the purchasing decision, but it shouldn't be the only one.

We have to learn to accept some inefficiencies and some personal inconveniences for the sake of a healthier social ecosystem.

View on HN

Clearly this is the cheapest online and legal options. It would be odd and short-lived to include illegally shared books at $0, and a site that shows physical stores would also be odd, since if you are going to a local bookshop you are probably not price sensitive.

So for someone shopping online it a good objective, and may take away business from Amazon which is probably a good thing for competition. It is also useful in helping people find books at all, sometimes Amazon doesn't have everything, especially globally.

You can think of it as analogous to booking a flight. Do you want the cheapest flight with a 16 hour flight and 2 transfers with Ryanair? A lot of people don't mind paying a bit more for a direct flight and a complimentary chocolate (lot, swiss air), even if all are legal.

Some websites even included an option to check as "worry-free" or similar to filter out these cheap options.

Book equivalents could be quality of paper, status of the book, or having good customer support if there is a problem with the order.

>quality of paper

you are extremely unlikely to find this as book metadata

Online booksellers often denote "mass market" vs "trade" paperback which does potentially give you info on the quality of the paper.

"The paper quality is better as well, as most often they are printed on acid-free paper like a hardback book." - https://biblio.co.uk/book_collecting_terminology/trade-paper...

(I've found this to be relevant when sourcing physical copies of out of print books.)

I ordered books under the public domain on Amazon. At least 50% were printed on the cheapest paper and on Demand. Some were printed from scans were part of the text is missing and looked like photocopies.

Just because the book is in the public domain does not mean I want a book that looks like a fanzine.

Maybe it does not scale, I agree. This is why a curator is IMO important.

I agree the quality of Amazon self-published books can be terrible, notably recipe books. just as youtube can make anyone a tv star, or spotify a musician, Amazon self-publishing means anyone can be an author now

as for the metadata, that would be retrospectively impossible. your best chance would be to filter out Amazon as a publisher

You do get "Condition of book" which isn't quite the same thing but helpful along the same thread

I would take a coffee-stained, dust-clad, sepia-ridden second edition from a proper publisher over the 20gsm, toxic-inked, loosely-bound crap churned out by Amazon any day

But surely this website is comparing the same book. There should be no difference in quality of paper or condition of the book?

There shouldn't be, but sometimes there is and this is where a vendor's customer service comes into play.

I buy 10-15 books every year and almost all of them I order from the same place because they are reliable and provide great customer service when something does go wrong. Books are cheap enough and I don't buy that many so I'm not really very price sensitive.

It's comparing the same title (roughly, with some errors, but that's expected I think), and returning many editions. Some of those editions might be trade paperbacks, some might be mass-market on newsprint, depending on the book.

(One book I searched returned among other things an audiobook on cassette.)

Not for expensive books (like textbooks) where it is economical to print pirate copies, and where there are cheap international-market prints.

International market prints have a different ISBN so those shouldn't get mixed up. Pirate copies could be an issue, I have only heard about this issue on Amazon. I'm not sure about other stores? Skipping Amazon is likely sufficient.

I recently discovered that my local shop can sometimes order books at prices that are much better than Amazon ($80 vs. $110) and often not much slower (under a week, which is competitive with Amazon’s free shipping).

That's great, do you mind if I grab the name of one of these shops so I can look into including similar shops in the tool?

I actually found it via the publisher. Penguin Random House has a service that does it, at least in Canada.

Try here https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/656337/neural-contro...

Hit "Shop Local" on a webpage and enter a post code. I don't want to give mine (they sometimes resolve to individual buildings) but H1A1A1 works.

Thanks, I'll check it out

Perhaps you could hook into a service that already finds pricing and stock from local indie bookstores, like bookshop.org[0]?

0: https://bookshop.org/

Good idea, I'll look into it

If I want to discover a book I don’t know about, curation provides value. If I want to attend an event, some place holding an event provides value.

If, on the other hand, I know what book I want, the curation is done and I’m not looking for an event, so cheapest seems a reasonable thing to optimize for.

cheapest seems a reasonable thing to optimize for

Until you find out that the cheapest source also waits two weeks to send your book. And sends it by a method that takes another four weeks. And doesn't package it properly so it arrives with the spine broken and water damage. And sends you a used book with pages missing. Or might just accidentally send you the wrong book but doesn't have a customer service contact.

The internet used to be a great place for bargains. Now "cheapest" is almost always the wrong choice.

The site also posts delivery times for vendors. It's usually fairly accurate even if it is a little longer than Amazon's 1-2 days, so at least you know what you're getting into beforehand.

That's one way to think about it. But that may not be enough to sustain the places that provide curation, events, browsing, etc, etc.

I've mostly stopped buying books from Amazon. I generally buy them from my local bookstore via their website. Because it turns out I like having a local bookstore, and I think Amazon has quite enough money and power already.

Ive been a huge fan of betterworldbooks since discovering it for university textbooks over a decade ago. They have a pretty massive selection and the money goes to some respectable causes.

I'm sure BWB is fine. Anyway, you are also allowed to pay less at a different seller, and donate the savings to causes you respect. "Bundling" commerce and charity opens the door to risk of abuse.

In some sense, overpaying a local bookstore for a book you came searching for because you like the fact they do unrelated events and activities is a form of charity coupled with commerce.

Oh, neat! I would love to see plenty more not-for-profits competing with for-profit businesses. Especially when it's a stable, commodity business or something off the beaten path, it makes a ton of sense to me.

Thanks for your comment, all of that is certainly true. I'm thinking through a solution that would likely come in the form of certain filters on the site. I'd try to get your region as accurately as possible or ask for input, and then serve you local bookstores in your area that have their catalogues online. Something like this would help promote local stores and help you differentiate between your local bookstores. It's not something I've started building yet but what do you think of it?

Just as a counter. You are not obligate to listen to OP's comment, that is just one of the many perspectives that one can have around a book shopping.

Please go ahead and do build a hyper focused product which finds out most 'inexpensive' source for a book that one is clear about (that is, one is not in a discovery mode).

I'm sure there would be whole lot of students who would be super thankful about this service, there is enough of price gouging in educational segment. Even if you are not building textbook related service, still it would help.

Thanks for this. The focus of this product is cheap books. I do find it interesting to learn about different approaches to purchasing and purchasing decisions. In the long term, additional filters to support local bookstores could be a cool addition. Also, I'm looking into targeting textbooks more closely. Hopefully the textbook specific results will be better and cheaper before the end of the month.

I like it, but most of my local shops don't have their inventory or prices online, sadly.

Hmm that does make it difficult. Perhaps a solution that allows local bookstores to put their catalogues online easily, this data then feeds straight into the search product. It would be difficult and manual to make happen but it could be extremely useful.

Spanish website Todostuslibros.com did exactly that.[1] It was sponsored by a private association of booksellers, with some public funding (this is a common approach in Europe).

[1] https://www-elconfidencial-com.translate.goog/cultura/2020-0...

Not sure why local bookstores would like to participate in a race to the bottom, though.

Probably because Amazon is already competing with them, and they at least get some independent sales.

This feels like a roundabout way to getting bookshop.org, which might not be the cheapest, but is simple to use as a consumer.

that already exists: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780988518391

> Curation costs money

In my experience curation beyond the mass-market mainstream is the province of fora and clubs, rather than bookshops and public libraries.

The long-tail is so overwhelmingly long and thin that no general-interest vendor can hope to have any insight.

100% agreed. Whenever I see something being promoted as "cheapest" I try to stay clear. Not only because you often get what you pay for, but also for reasons like the one you mention.

>Because if that's the case, book piracy seems like the clear winner.

You can read lots of books for free legally in the Internet Archive, specially books that are out of print.

> Curation costs money (indirectly). This is mostly done by (big) publishers who want to push their shallow literature series and a couple of good books here and there. Which, again, makes places like the IA so much better for readers like me.

>You can read lots of books for free legally in the Internet Archive, specially books that are out of print.

maybe, but I guess there's also lots that are in a murky gray area

https://blog.archive.org/2022/09/03/internet-archive-opposes...

I see a lot of "staff recommends" on bookshelves when I shop local, with little blurbs about why the book has had an impact.

I think you might be confusing peoples desires of a physical book, vs bookstore?

I want a book, I can choose to buy from a local shop or Amazon or print on demand shop selling a pirated copy.

Those options are listed most expensive to cheapest.

But a portion of the the sale goes to that business, who in turn passes it on to various places.

The local bookshop uses the money to keep an asset in my local community and employs people in my local community. Amazon ships from a warehouse, and provides no local amenity. But they might employ someone locally. Maybe. The print on demand shop is giving me a counterfeit product, but it's the cheapest. It provides no local benefit.

So I'm not confusing book for bookstore. I'm specifically saying that the second order effects of seeking the cheapest copy of a book have implications beyond the sale of the book itself.

You’re conflating cheap with copyright violation, which is a bit disingenuous in an attempt I guess to guilt people for wanting to buy a cheap book.

It’s fine to want a cheap book, want to support the publisher/author with a legit purchase, and not care about supporting a bookstore. Not everyone who likes books cares to keep alive the industry of physical books and bookstores.

What is "fine" is a values judgement. I would say that there's a continuum that goes from downloading an unapproved copy (worst) to buying the book at a local bookstore (best), and buying from Amazon instead sits somewhere in the middle. Somebody else might find the whole publishing industry gross, and decide the most moral choices are to either pirate the book or buy a secondhand copy.

>buy a secondhand copy

the site's cheapest appear to be exactly that. not only is secondhand the cheapest legal, but also the greenest

>would say that there's a continuum that goes from downloading an unapproved copy (worst) to buying the book at a local bookstore (best),

Because you’re still fixated on bookstores, which tons of people don’t give a shit about. You’re incorrectly putting stuff on a one-dimensional continuum.

>or buy a secondhand copy.

Being a secondary market participant supports a market. If you don’t want to support publishers, it must be pirated.

I'm not trying to guilt anyone. Some folks need to optimize for cheap.

What I'm trying to say is that cheap might not be the best general metric, and laying out reasoning behind that.

I try to avoid saying that someone is bad for choosing cheap, and if I did earlier, I apologize. The goal is to say, "here are some conditions to consider when making a decision".

Print on demand is more expensive than Amazon for all but expensive technical books.

I guess you wouldn't be buying it if you pirate it.

This is aimed towards physical books. Hopefully if people can access books legally and cheaply it will discourage piracy.

Sort of. Making used boo market more efficient distorts the market and causes a reaction in new book prices. In a perfect used book market, a new copy would cost over >$1000 and a used copy would sell for $5-20 less each time it changed hands.

You think someone shouldn't use the word "cheapest" because they aren't factoring in piracy? Do you think stores that price match should sell an item for $0 if someone shows they can shoplift it?

The whole idea is absurd, why would you make a comment like this?

I think we have to consider why books exist. There are many reasons such as disseminating knowledge, broadening perspectives, entertainment, but I would think one of them wouldn't be "to let people have a nice job in a shop".

Certainly, but also in terms of disseminating knowledge, broadening perspectives, and entertainment, if people are able to access cheaper books more easily, it will allow them to gain more of all of these things.

Yes, which is what Amazon and other online retailers (love them or hate them) has done for people.

For buying an ebook, cheapest is almost always the best option - perhaps a better term might be "least overhead".

There's very little actually needed, for ebooks - it could literally just be a plugin for e.g. goodreads, with a "buy this book" button and then it triggers another plugin to send the ISBN to calibre or to download a torrent or do whatever you normally do with your ebook. The point is, the only part the shop really needs to handle is payment. And by "handle" I mean "delegate to paypal etc".

Small book stores are one of the least deserving businesses I can think of. They are no different from drop shippers or amazon resellers. These people buy things they had no responsibility creating and sell it to you for a higher price, injecting themselves as middle men to a transaction where it’s not required and then justifying it with a hobby job they made up themselves. The author gets nothing if the book is used so there’s no reason not to pirate. Cheapest is a great metric when you’re dealing with books.

Cheapest restaurant isn’t The French Laundry w/ the caveat that you skip out on the bill.

Piracy is not paying for it. A qualitative difference, really.

the title states cheapest place to buy a book, not the cheapesst way to acquire a book...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com