"But I haven't the time not to shop at Amazon for books"

By Dilip Sinha
Posted Friday, November 5, 2004

It is correctly often thought that people's time is valuable and that they do not have the time to go shopping in the big book. stores - the gas costs, getting stuck in the queues at the checkout...I know what you mean.

But there are other people - like us - online as well as Amazon. If you are looking for one of the top books, people like us display them and allow you to pay by credit card as well. So you save nothing by going to Amazon for bestsellers unless they give you over around 35-40% off paperbacks and coming up to 30% on other books. Where I agree Amazon does score is that it displays lots of books for you to search through. Others don't either because they are not big enough companies yet or because few people enquire about most books - how often are you interested in seeing all the books Amazon has about kite flying? They are time saving yes, but because they allow people who are interested in things like kite flying to see books at the expense of people like you who want bestsellers - you pay $1.60 to subsidise kite flyers! So for bestsellers, ther is really no need to go to Amazon.... and if you don't care about you $1.60 and you don't need the book urgently, it won't bother you to wait a couple of weeks equally to wait while other people get you the books at a cheaper price...

About the Author
Dilip Sinha
A UK online bookseller selling books at prices often cheaper than Amazon.co.uk