I noticed a price drop in the US market of new books recently. It made me wonder if it had anything to do with the booming secondary market and pay-per-print market getting larger. I don't shop on Amazon and unless I'm looking for a book that's out of print, I don't shop online at all. I used to be a fair regular of Amazon, until I noticed that my books fell apart a lot faster. I don't know if that was due to the knocking around they got at the warehouse/shipping, or whether the prints were run on a cheap press with even cheaper glue, but I didn't like how fast the books died. The savings didn't equal the aggravation of having the covers and pages fall out of my books in just a few months. If a book self destructs that quickly, I'm not likely to buy it new a second time or buy it for anyone else. The only thing I even go to the Amazon website for anymore is to find release dates. (I am literally ticking off days until House War comes out - two weeks! AUGH!)
I live in a city that has a SciFi/Fantasy-specific owner-run bookstore. I've been going there for years, and they may not have the standard X% off specials the big box stores do, but the big box stores don't call me to find out how I'm handling the wait withdrawal between series books, and can't make recommendations to tide me over based on what types of stories I like. On what genre I buy, yes, but the computer can't differentiate between Bujold and Niven. It's not a store, it's a relationship. I can also handle the books and check the covers and pages to see if there's any noticeable flaw in the bindings before I bring them home. I'd rather pay more to the store.. and I wind up spending more, because I walk in for one book and walk out with 12 due to the owner being an evil enabler of my addiction.. than pay less somewhere online and get impersonal spam about 'Our Customers Also Bought..'.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2008-02-18 03:59 pm (UTC)I live in a city that has a SciFi/Fantasy-specific owner-run bookstore. I've been going there for years, and they may not have the standard X% off specials the big box stores do, but the big box stores don't call me to find out how I'm handling the wait withdrawal between series books, and can't make recommendations to tide me over based on what types of stories I like. On what genre I buy, yes, but the computer can't differentiate between Bujold and Niven. It's not a store, it's a relationship. I can also handle the books and check the covers and pages to see if there's any noticeable flaw in the bindings before I bring them home. I'd rather pay more to the store.. and I wind up spending more, because I walk in for one book and walk out with 12 due to the owner being an evil enabler of my addiction.. than pay less somewhere online and get impersonal spam about 'Our Customers Also Bought..'.
-T