Buying Books: Give Me Amazon Or Give Me Death
How did we, the nation's great mass of bookbuyers, survive before Amazon.com came along?
I had the opportunity this afternoon to go into a large local bookselling chain and browse. Not because I wanted to but because I had purchased a book online and needed to exchange it. Instead of paying to ship it back to the seller, I decided to take the time to actually walk into a bookstore, something I do very little of in the age of the computer. And it brought back quite a few memories, most of them bad.
Unruly crowds of post-holiday shoppers, store clerks with blank stares on their faces trying to help too many customers at a time, and bookshelves that were a huge mess. It seems that holiday time greatly depletes the shelves of a bookstore, as I found a lot of older titles and very few of the new ones I coveted, as well as many titles in the wrong section or in disrepair. Kind of an unsettling experience overall.
The ease of Amazon is matched only by its cheapness. Books can be found for, usually, one third lower price than in a bookstore. Today, I was forced to pay full price for the only title in the entire store I thought I wanted. Not fun.
For this book lover, waiting a week to get a book if fine, since it's so much cheaper to buy from Amazon, as well as easier to look through their many hundreds of thousands of titles.
Me, I'll take Amazon.com every time over the big box chain bookstores.
I had the opportunity this afternoon to go into a large local bookselling chain and browse. Not because I wanted to but because I had purchased a book online and needed to exchange it. Instead of paying to ship it back to the seller, I decided to take the time to actually walk into a bookstore, something I do very little of in the age of the computer. And it brought back quite a few memories, most of them bad.
Unruly crowds of post-holiday shoppers, store clerks with blank stares on their faces trying to help too many customers at a time, and bookshelves that were a huge mess. It seems that holiday time greatly depletes the shelves of a bookstore, as I found a lot of older titles and very few of the new ones I coveted, as well as many titles in the wrong section or in disrepair. Kind of an unsettling experience overall.
The ease of Amazon is matched only by its cheapness. Books can be found for, usually, one third lower price than in a bookstore. Today, I was forced to pay full price for the only title in the entire store I thought I wanted. Not fun.
For this book lover, waiting a week to get a book if fine, since it's so much cheaper to buy from Amazon, as well as easier to look through their many hundreds of thousands of titles.
Me, I'll take Amazon.com every time over the big box chain bookstores.
posted by joe sweeney at 2:58 PM
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