Back in the old days, when Amazon only sold books, I used to buy used, "like new" paperbacks there for one penny plus shipping and handling, which could be around $1.65 to $1.80. Not all of them were a penny, but a lot were less than a dollar. It was awesome. I could get 10 books for around $20. Then one day Amazon raised shipping to $3.99 per book, splitting the extra profit with the sellers. It became harder and harder to find books for a penny after that. Today 10 books cost more like $40 to $50 or more. I stopped buying nearly as much fiction, not that I was buying a whole lot before. I never bought 10 books at a time. It's just a round number. Amazon basically killed the fiction market for me. Then the Kindle came out, but a lot of books are more expensive for a digital copy than the print version. I can't justify spending $9.99 for a fiction book that costs Amazon about $0 to send. It's not worth it for something I can read in less than a day. Mostly I download free or cheap books. Rarely do I spend more than a penny per page for fiction. Non-fiction reference books are different. I'll spend real money for those but not for fiction that's gone in a few hours.
Now that I'm putting a lot of time into learning French, I need to do a lot of reading. It's hard to find cheap, digital French books on Amazon or paperbacks either that I find interesting or worth reading. There's tons of stuff from the 1800s, but... And they won't let me download books from Amazon.fr, because the world is divided regions, and I'm in the wrong region. It's absolutely insane the way the regions work. Tip: if you get a multi-region DVD player, you can buy all the foreign DVDs you want from anywhere in the world you want in any language you want, including English.
Anyway, I found cheap copies of book 1 of Divergent and Hunger Games. I finished Divergente 1 this week. I'd been keeping track of the price of book 2 hoping it would drop. The day I went to order it, it had doubled overnight. Plus shipping. I started on Hunger Games instead. Lately, I've noticed that Amazon doesn't always have the lowest price anymore like they used to. I went searching online for Divergente 2 and found something amazing.
You can buy used paperbacks on Abebooks.com starting around $3.37, including shipping. Yes, including shipping. It's like Amazon in the old days adjusted for inflation. They didn't have book 2 of Divergente that cheap, but I got book 3 for $3.64 shipped. I can wait for book 2 to drop. I also picked up the Maltese Falcon for $3.64. I've been wanting to read that for a while now, but it costs too much in English. In all, I ordered five books in French that I find interesting enough to read for $18.46 total. On Amazon it would have cost me at least $50 and realistically quite a bit more. For instance, I bought Prelude to Foundation for $3.65. On Amazon it's $17.73, including shipping. The ebook is $9.99.
Not every book on Abebooks is going to be $3+. Some of the things I looked at were $5+, but that was still cheaper than Amazon. And speaking of Amazon, I've read that they bought Abebooks. Let's hope they don't ruin it.
Have a great weekend.
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