Better World Books
betterworldbooks.com
betterworldbooks.com
Better World Books sends us a bunch of boxes and we can pack them and ship them whenever we need. They generate the label and all we have to do is tape it to the box and send it out with the UPS truck when it comes. No books in the garbage for people to get upset about and presumably Better World Books can do something useful with at least some of them.
(Search and filtering could be better with some better pics).
Well worth the wait.
My books came by ordinary post from Chennai, so I guess they ship them in bulk to a distribution hub which then sends them out by book post.
I order from them all the time. The books are very cheap, shipping is free, and it's a great cause.
Shipping is rolled into the price, which varies depending on where you're shipping.
When shipping internationally, you need to declare the cost of goods shipped for customs purposes - but do you need to include in that the cost of the shipping? If not - I suspect not but am not 100% sure - this approach of building shipping costs into book price may result in a massive increases in costs paid to import the books in question.
I think it depends on the country. Here (Canada) I believe you are instructed to include the shipping cost, but in practice they charge by the declared invoice amount, and vendors generally don't include shipping in that.
For BWB, it used to be the case that if you happened to have a US IP address (as I sometimes did from work), you'd be given the US price regardless of the destination. That was fixed years ago.
Bookfinder.com is also excellent to price compare used books (love the Web 1.0 look too!) but a lot of the recommendations are amazon-owned because they cornered the market, although BF themselves are independent.
Also interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powell's_Books (Portland - used books and large store)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Lights_Bookstore (SF - published Ginsberg's Howl)
https://blog.archive.org/2019/11/06/for-the-love-of-literacy...
search for "blank journal" or "sketchbook"; or "moleskine" if you're feeling lucky.
This one has a cover of a llama <3 -- https://www.secondsale.com/p/black-paper-sketch-book-x-large...
All of them seem to make you figure out how to open up their filter menu which usually means searching for “qwerty” and then clearing the search bar so that you can summon the language filter from the sidebar.
And then once you specify a language you have to trawl their entire collection in random order.
When I buy a book, I usually check Ebay, Thriftbooks, and Amazon (new and used) and do a comparison. Some books just can't be found for much cheaper than their brand new price. Most of the books I buy and read are software related, and some of those just hold their value. I'm pleasantly surprised by Better World Books though, this is the cheapest copy of GoF I've seen at $15 for the standard hard cover, that's a steal! Even the used copies I find are within $5ish of a new print (just about $40).
It's hard to find good software books at a library, usually you'll have something like "XHTML for Dummies" and that's it. If anyone has other suggestions for good places/ways to get technical books, I'm all ears.
I get most of my used books from Amazon. I like it that they handle the transaction, so I don’t have to worry about giving out my credit card or later updating the expiration date, etc.
They have bins all over town, usually pretty stuffed.