How to save money when ordering books from abroad

Not living in Britain or anywhere else which has 'super saving shipping' or whatever it's called, ordering books from Amazon can be an expensive business. True, the books themselves are sold at reasonable discounts from their list price, but the shipping can be a killer.

For example, I have just been looking at the book 'Cider with Roadies' by Stuart Maconie, which would very much seem to be my kind of book. The list price is 7.99 GBP, and Amazon (in Britain) is selling it for 5.11 GBP, which works out to a 36% discount. Not bad ... until one considers how much the shipping to Israel costs. I don't know how they calculate the shipping: whether it depends on the weight of the items, their size, their cost or the day of the month. Anyway, almost completing my Amazon order with this book and a disk brought the shipping costs to 10.00 GBP! Assuming that the shipping cost for one book would be 5 GBP (not necessarily an assumption which holds), this means that I could purchase the book in Israel for 10.11 GBP, or 1.26 times its list price.

I don't know whether that book has been imported into Israel and distributed by the major book chain here, Steimatzky, but if it were, I imagine that the book would cost around 80 NIS, which works out at around 13.8 GBP at current exchange rates. So despite the hefty postage cost, it's still cheaper to order directly from Amazon.

Or so I thought until a few weeks ago, when I read on a blog discussing the fact that it's almost impossible to use an i-pad in Israel. Someone suggested ordering books from The Book Depository, which promises free delivery worldwide for all books. I checked into the site, saw that the above book was selling for 7.19 GBP and ordered it, paying by PayPal. I was not charged for postage, meaning that I bought the book with a 10% discount from its list price, but more importantly, at least 29% less than it would have cost from Amazon (depending on the postage, natch). Need I say more?

The only downside to this deal is that the Book Depository does not seem to sell DVDs nor musical disks, meaning that I will still have to order from Amazon and pay their inflationary postage prices whenever I want a non-book item. Consider the fact that Amazon started selling books.