The purpose of this FAQ is to help people who have never purchased a book from an online bookstore understand the process, the options, and the variations they are likely to encounter. It may also help give a glimpse into the book business and how it is trying to adapt to sales on the web.
Selection and Price. If you live far from a large bookstore, you can increase your selection by a factor of at least ten or even one hundred. Convenience can also be a factor especially during a busy shopping season.
Yes, for a single title order of an inexpensive book, but these days many books can cost $20-$40 and shipping is about $4 per book. Usually there is no sales tax and you can find discounts for 20-35% on popular titles. You may find some dealers that will ship for free if the order exceeds a certain amount or a certain number of books. The shipping cost per book may also decrease when multiple titles are ordered at some sites.
It can be hard to tell, unless it is a popular book that has been well reviewed or described in detail on the web. It is amazing how many bookselling sites can not even tell you the number of pages of the book you are considering. There are a number of sites devoted to supplying book reviews. Many other sites have bestseller lists of titles for many kinds of books. Others like amazon.com encourage readers to post personal evaluations next to the book on the page where you would decide whether to buy it. Finally many publishers post detailed information about their books online including the table of contents and a sample chapter. If you don't know the publisher of a book, you can find it listed on the detail screen that describes the book at any major online bookseller. For marketing reasons some big publishers hide behind pseudonyms called imprints. If you have your doubts, call a library reference desk and ask.
It depends. It is important to always ask the seller in advance for their returns policy. Most U.S. dealers will give the number of days you have to evaluate the book. Some actually encourage you to buy a group of titles, select the best one and return the rest. Some dealers do not allow returns unless they shipped the wrong title or it arrived in damaged condition, so be careful. The returns policy for some major U.S. booksites are shown on a comparison chart listed at the end of this FAQ.
Just how happy are onlinebook customers?
According to a survey by AT&T Solutions, online book customers are happier that any other type of online buyer studied."The highest satisfaction levels were recorded for those who purchased books online (71 percent)."<http://www.att.com/press/0697/970627.soa.html>
Another way is to check with a rating service like BizRate Guide They publish an on-line chart of the top 25 user picks each week. Bookstores and music stores are commonly found on the list.
The number of books claimed in bookseller advertising is the count of titles in the bookstore's database, not necessarily those on hand. There are a few gigantic bookstores like Powell's Books, but they are very rare.
One that has no "real" inventory. These book brokers pass your order on to a fulfillment center at one or more huge wholesale distribution centers.
Delivery. If you are in a hurry to get a book, use an online store that has real inventory. If you are quoted a 4-6 week delivery for a special order title from a major supplier like amazon and you are in a hurry you can always call the publisher and have them ship it to you direct. Most big publishers have toll-free phone numbers for ordering. Once you know which publisher, you call information or your library to get their number.There are also social drawbacks to think twice about which are discussed by the folks at book passage :
<http://www.bookpassage.com/battle/battle6.htm>
Very small young companies can look very professional and impressive if they create a snazzy website. Be sure you see a phone number and an address posted somewhere on the site. It is extra nice if that phone number is toll-free and someone actually answers. The virtual stores usually expect you to place your order over the internet.
This is a highly exaggerated concern. If you still worry about this, choose a bookstore with a secure server and be sure to use a browser with built-in encryption, like Netscape Navigator 2.x or above. With Netscape Navigator you can tell if you have a secure link by examining the padlock or key icon in the lower left corner of your browser window. If the bar that crosses the key disappears or the hasp closes, the link is secure. If you don't see a key or padlock or similar icon, the browser may not support the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). In all likelihood, a transaction payment sent in this way to a large company will never be seen by any human eyes. There will be no low paid clerks, telemarketers, carbons, bookkeepers or others in the middle necessary to process your credit card number and expiration date. This is actually enhanced security, not less security than normal.
A number of big online bookstores have so-called partner programs that enable enrolled book sites to earn a small percentage off the sale of any book that results from a direct referral. The enrolled site links to the large site at the last moment and the large site takes the credit card information and ships the book. The exact details of such programs vary widely. Such programs are controversial and have made many people very mad. For a discussion see:
Since you are really buying direct from the larger of the two companies, your credit information is never seen by the smaller of the two. You are governed by the sales policies of the actual seller. If a price was quoted at the partner site, be sure to verify that it is accurately reflected at the purchase site. Prices can change unexpectedly and smaller sites may be unaware of the changes.
After the life of a book is over in the catalog of the original publisher, the unsold inventory is often disposed of by selling it to a remainder house at a huge discount. Such bargain bookstores can then offer these often out-of-date books at a 50-70% discount. The selection at such stores is very limited. If you don't care a lot about the author or title, but want a beginning book in a certain subject area, you can find good buys.
It is a standard library and book trade reference from R.R. Bowker available as a large set of reference books, as a CD or as an online service. It is widely accepted as the most authoritative source of information about what book titles are listed as in print by publishers. The set of bound volumes has books listed by author, by title and by subject. BIP has an elaborate subject classification system that is used for the the volumes of titles by subject. It is not free unless you are fortunate enough to have access to a library that has purchased it. Any public library should have a copy. A university library may have the CD online. Though the 1.7 million records from BIP are available online as a paid service from DIALOG (file 470), OVID Online (BBIP), OCLC and Compuserve (BOOK1), the advent of the virtual book superstore is likely to limit the saleability of this data.In one sense BIP is the ultimate bookstore because you can always just send a check to the address listed in BIP for the publisher and get any book listed in it. If the book is a popular one, you will probably find it discounted on the web for less.
Quality varies a lot from site to site. Many bookstore sites are not designed for online sales. They are simply electronic calling cards that list the hours, the email address and perhaps a map of how to find the store along with the address and phone number. If you want anything from them you will have to contact them directly and perhaps wait quite a while for a reply. Some have a little form to fill out where you put down the title and author of the book you want and your email address so they can get back you. I pointedly ignore such sites unless I am desperate. There are plenty of full featured on-line sales sites available. When you look at a site with on-line ordering decide whether you will be ordering frequently or occasionally. Many sites require you to set up an account with a password. This can be nice if you are there a lot and a nuisance if you have to keep track of the password. and forget it from lack of use. It is a bad idea to use the same password from site to site or for other multiple purposes.
This varies a lot from site to site. It is important to distinguish between the word browse and search. Browse means to follow links and scroll your browser window on each page until you find what you want. You may want to speed through long pages by using the Find command on your browser Edit menu to look for a specific item on a page, but be sure the page has finished loading before you try the Find or you may not get an accurate result. Search means to use a search engine supplied by the site. Some sites confuse these words to the frustration of all. The best sites often have a way to browse subject categories or search for titles or authors.
A search engine is software installed on a site that provides a way to look through a large number of titles and return a short list based on your exact needs as you specify them. AltaVista and Yahoo are two very different sites that use search engine technology. Using a search engine involves filling out a form and either pressing the return key or a special button. If there is an opportunity on the search form to fill in more than one text box to specify the searched for item, then a button will be necessary. The button will be conspicuous and labeled something like "Submit" or "Go!" or "Search" or "Find" or whatever. The boxes to fill out may enable to you specify the author, title, subject, ISBN, publisher or keyword. If may be possible to fill out some combination of these simultaneously. For example, you can look for a book with "fudge" in the title and with an author whose last name is "Smith". Some sites will contain both a page with a one-line form for a simple search and another with a multiple line advanced form for complex searches. Adding to both the versatility and confusion of such forms is the use of wild cards. The alt.bookstore store is an example of a site that uses them. There may not be a clear label that a site uses wild cards. Instead of wild cards, a site may use a series of radio buttons, like amazon does.
It is a place holder. The most common wild card is the asterisk (*). Placed in the middle or at the end of a word, it means that any number of characters can follow. Thus "angel*" will give a match if the search engine encounters a title containing angel, angels or angelic. Unfortunately it will also match Angeles, Angela, Angelo or angelus to name a few more. So you could be looking for a book on angels and get a list of tour guide books for Los Angeles or a biography of Angela Davis. Using a wild card like "Angel*" is equivalent to using the word "Angel" and a radio button that is labeled "starts with" on a search engine that does not allow wild cards. The advanced search on amazon is the only one I know of that is sophisticated enough to let you cryptically say -- title words start "angel", but do not start "angela", but "angelo", but "angelina", but "angeles", but "angelus". If you want to play with some popular book search engines conveniently grouped to together on an experimental page. Only the alt.bookstore part of the page honors wild cards.All-in-One Booksearch: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/booksearch.html>
This is the International Standard Book Number. It is unique to a given publisher's edition and to a given binding. It is similar in function, but different in implementation to the UPC code used by supermarket scanners to tally up merchandise. To learn more than you probably want to know, click here. If you find the ISBN for a book you want on one site, copy it to your clipboard for use later if you want to do some price shopping. It may be the fastest and most unambiguous way to access the same title at other sites. There is a logic to the structure of the digits in an ISBN. If the first digit is 0 or 1 the book was issued in an English speaking country. The last digit is a check digit which may occasionally be an "x" instead of 0-9. ISBNs can be used by vendors for other things too, like software, audio cassettes, and CDs.
The CDs and databases used by booksites contain book data that vary widely in what information is included for any given title. At a minimum the best CD may have no author, binding or subject and only an abbreviated version of the title. So if you want to find a book and know the exact title, use the basic form of that title in your first attempt to find the book at an online bookshop. A book that has gone through several editions may have several different ISBN numbers, one for each publisher, edition, and binding.
For a small number of titles any scheme that is intuitive and "makes sense" to the user will probably work out all right. But for massive databases of millions of titles, these schemes fall apart because the number of titles in any given category can become totally unmanageable and may number in the thousands. The most comprehensive subject category scheme in use at bookstores is the full Books in Print implementation. This is almost never found in real life and is a major problem if you want to browse by subject. Another aspect is that many titles are never assigned a subject and thus will not be seen at all in a subject browse.
Before the advent of computers there were used booksellers that used this term to mean that they would use their book trade connections to try to find a copy of a hard-to-find or out-of-print book for you if they did not have it in stock themselves. Now the term is likely to cause confusion to the beginner, but it is still in active use. Using the term book search service instead of book search helps make an important distinction between the traditional meaning and a more confusing ill-defined meaning.
Small simple sites may have you phone or FAX in an order, once you find the price of an item that you want. Large sites have installed electronic shopping cart systems where you type in the shipping and credit information needed. They may set up an account for you with a password. This is usually a bad idea, because so many people will just lose the password. Passwords can help users check on the status of order directly. Normally when a book is shipped email is sent out with a tracking number and you can use the carriers online tracking system from then on.
Go somewhere else. Many sites are under construction and there is nothing you could possibly do to order a book. Others are very poorly designed. First, look for an underlined word or icon labeled "Help", "FAQ" or perhaps "How to order" and press it. On large book sites the ordering does not take place until you have gone through the process of actually selecting a title to buy. This is usually done at the detail screen. At that point you may be presented with an opportunity to place the title in an electronic shopping cart. Then and only then can you go to the electronic checkout stand and complete the order.
After you locate the title you want on a list at a large site with a shopping cart system, you can usually click on the title to view a detail screen. A detail screen is available for each book giving at a minimum the title, author and price. Depending on the site you may also see a publication date, publisher, ISBN, the binding format, series, page count (rarely), physical dimensions, a list of the Books in Print subject categories and an occasional synopsis, reader evaluation or cover shot.
Not a cent. Even if you pretend you are going to buy a book just to see now the system works, you can always change the quantity on your order to zero at the end or just type in a new URL and go somewhere else. You can learn a lot just by experimenting.
Try used book and remainder houses first. Then try the deep discounters who list their full inventory online. There are shopping agents you can try to save time, but there is no assurance, they actually have the lowest price. In fact, they probably do not. You have to decide what your time is worth.
The same way some meta search engines on the web like AskJeeves can look for information in several different places, a book shopping agent will check several different online bookstores for a book you want and let you know what it finds out.
These are a marketing ploy to gain repeat business. They seldom have any real significance if you shop around. They are used to inspire vender loyalty. They might allow you to a get notification of availability which is freely available elsewhere.
If you read the language well and have a credit card acceptable to the seller, you can have them shipped directly from abroad. The shipping may be cheaper, however, if you buy from a specialty book distributor in your own country, especially if you might want to return it. The returns policies abroad can be very restrictive.
One that does does not necessarily exist on paper, but as text in a computer file that can be read either with a browser or a word processor. Electronic books are a very new concept. Not very many titles are available compared to paper books. Some sites will sell you an electronic book and email it to you after they receive payment. The only sites listed in Best Big Online Bookstores are sites that sell traditional books.
There are companion pages to this one like Best BIG Online Bookstores. Sites that are part of a partner program are not listed unless there is a compelling reason to do so. People in a hurry might like to see the big stores compared in convenient chart form. The stores listed are online bookselling sites which with rare exception have their entire inventory listed online.Best BIG Online Bookstores: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/books.html>
Bookstore Crib Sheet: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/bookstores.html>
Store comparison chart: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/bookstore.html>
Bookstores Abroad: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/bookshops.html>
British Comparison chart: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/bookshop.html>
Best specialty bookstores: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/specialty.html>
Bargain bookstores: <http://www.shoppingagents.com/bookstores-bargain.html>
If you have any suggestions for questions that arenot answered here or corrections to statements made, drop us a lineat info@shoppingagents.com
Disclaimer: Caveat Lector. These ideas are for informational purposes only and constitute neither an endorsement nor a recommendation. We assume no responsibility with regard to the selection, performance, or use of any products or vendors. All understandings, agreements, or warranties, if any, take place directly between the vendors and the prospective buyers. We make no warranties as to the completeness or accuracy of this information.In fact, we guarantee that there will be errors on this page and other connected with it.Copyright 2000, ShoppingAgents.com. All rights reserved. This FAQ may be posted to any USENET newsgroup, on-line service, web site, FAQ archive or BBS as long as it is posted in its entirety and includes this copyright statement. This FAQ may be distributed as class material on diskette or CD-ROM as long as there is no charge (except to cover materials). This FAQ may not be distributed for financial gain. This FAQ may not be included in commercial collections or compilations without express permission from the author.