How to Buy Books Online

The aim of this article is to offer you, the buyer, some insights from a bookdealer on how to avoid these unpleasant experiences and to make buying a book online feel more like shopping in your favorite book store.

The first thing to do before making a purchase is to define what kind of book you want. I’ve broken this down to two broad categories: a reading copy (meaning a recent, common book), or a first/special edition. Determining what kind of book you’re looking for will help you decide where to purchase and give you a way to sift through your choices.

In this article, I’ll cover purchasing a basic reading copy since there are fewer variables (but many of the principals also apply to first editions). I’ll use Amazon for my examples since it’s the most trafficked venue.

Start by using the search box to find the title you’re looking for. I default to the “advanced search” option since it provides separate fields for title, author, etc. When you reach a book’s individual title page, you’ll see a box labeled “More Buying Choices. [#] copies used & new” on the right. Click on this link and you’ll see used copies arranged in order by price from low to high, with the cheapest copies having the best screen real estate near the top of the screen (except for Amazon partners or “Fulfillment by Amazon” deals which are bumped up regardless of price). There are also tabs for new, used and collectible, but for our purposes use the “All” tab.

You will find that in most cases the first page or so of listings for a common or backlist book will be priced at (or near) the hard-to-believe price of one cent.

One cent certainly sounds good but look closer and you’ll notice that listings from these “penny sellers” offer very little information about the book. Their descriptions are usually based on a generic template, used for every book they list, and these descriptions often raise more questions than they answer. Here are samples of typically unhelpful template copy:

May show water damage, moderate or excessive highlighting or underlining and/or excessive wear. Books may or may not include additional materials such as CD’s, cassettes, cards, dust jacket, etc. May contain highlighting/notes, may not include CDrom or access codes, customer service is our top priority!

In each of these cases, the space a professional bookseller would use to give clarifying detail is entirely filled with CYA (Cover Your A**) copy that warns the buyer to expect nothing. The verbiage on potentially missing “access codes” and “CDRoms” is also wasted as these descriptions are all from paperback bestsellers which would not contain such supplementary materials to begin with.

The dirty secret here is that the sellers of .01 cent books make their profit on the shipping commission; the meager difference between the cost of mailing and the slightly greater amount that Amazon reimburses the seller for the shipment (a difference of around one or two dollars). Subtract from this amount the price of a bubble mailer, the cost to acquire the book (often negligible because penny dealers get inventory for little or nothing), and Amazon’s commission and it’s easy to see that such a seller can’t afford to spend time describing a book or providing any manner of customer service.

So to save a few dollars, you may wait indefinitely, receive nothing like the item you intended to buy, and have to manage a return with a potentially unhelpful seller. Isn’t your time worth more than that?

My guideline for purchasing even a reading-copy is to scroll past all of the $.01 listings and template copy until I find a bookseller who is actually describing the book in hand; one whose description provides some assurance that I’ll be satisfied with my purchase.

There are professional organizations for booksellers, including IOBA, ABA, ABAA, ABAC. and others. Most of these organizations hold their members to high standards. For instance, the IOBA code of ethics states [link to full code of ethics]:

Members will provide a thorough and accurate description of all items offered for sale, noting appropriate bibliographic details, all significant defects, and all restorations or sophistications.

When you deal with sellers who value their trade enough to acquire professional credentials, you are not only more likely to get the book you thought you were ordering, but you can be assured that if anything goes wrong, the seller should be responsive and eager to correct any problem.

Once I’ve found a few potential sellers, I check their feedback (if available). Amazon’s stars and “percentage positive” ratings are broadly useful, but be sure to click through and skim the comments left by customers. See if there are negatives or complaints from previous buyers that would annoy you if you were treated the same. Also, see if any buyers went an extra mile and left a glowing positive review. There are a few caveats however. Since leaving feedback is optional, most buyers won’t bother unless they have a grievance (justified or not) or had a stellar experience. Also, because of the way seller rating is calculated, a single recent negative comment can have more weight than hundreds of older positives. Think of customer feedback the way you would a restaurant review on Yelp, useful information but to be taken with a grain of salt.

Once you’ve chosen a seller and checked feedback, determine if you have any outstanding questions. Is this the correct edition of a book required for a class? Do you need the book for a vacation next weekend? Do you have special sensitivities to pet or smoking odors? Send the seller a message and see if you can get a response.

Most good booksellers will appreciate a question (even if it doesn’t lead to a sale) because you are giving them a chance to personalize their service. You may even be bringing an unknown selling point to their attention. Unfortunately, figuring out how to contact a bookseller is often harder than it should be. Many of the larger aggregate sites (venues that display wares from many sellers, like Amazon) hide or anonymize seller contact information and monitor customer/seller communications, filtering out email addresses and weblinks. The stated aim of this barrier between buyer and seller is to prevent information abuse, but a side effect is that a seller often can’t send you an additional image, refer you to another item in his or her stock or give you direct contact information to speed service.

Here is Amazon’s description on how to contact a seller with pre-order questions:

From the product listing, click the seller’s name. You’ll be taken to their storefront page where you’ll find information about the seller and a “Contact this seller” link. The seller will respond to you via e-mail.

Once you’ve chosen a bookseller you have confidence in and received answers to any questions, add the book to your shopping cart. During the checkout process, select a shipping option that will get you the book when you need it. Use expedited shipping if you’re in a hurry (with confirmation from the bookseller if you have a hard deadline). Also, check that your address is up-to-date. Many buyers forget to update their shipping information after a move which leads to misdirected packages. Finally, click the checkout button and know that you’ve done everything you can.

Now a week or two later and it’s the moment of truth. Was the shipment on time? Was it well-packaged enough to survive the USPS? Is the book everything you expected? If so, congratulations! Your extra effort paid off. Leave feedback for the professional bookseller who served you. We often lead solitary existences—with little to no contact with the outside world–so kind words are appreciated. You’re feedback also makes the shopping process that much easier for the next buyer. And make it all fives. Don’t try to be nuanced. You’re making up for the guy who left one star because he didn’t think the book was a good read and blamed the seller.

If the book isn’t what you wanted, stay calm. Most buyers don’t realize that a book order is the responsibility of the seller until it arrives safely, in the condition described. First, save the packaging in case the book needs to be returned (or you need proof of damage for insurance purposes). If the book didn’t arrive on time, check the postmark and the shipping method to determine if the seller or the postman is to blame.

Once you’ve collected these facts, contact the seller. Explain your grievance and offer a possible remedy. Would a partial refund satisfy you? An exchange? If the item needs to be returned, ask the bookseller what shipment method to use and send it out promptly. Media mail will often suffice. You aren’t doing the bookseller a favor by returning a $20 book via priority or express mail for which the seller then needs to reimburse you.

If you came to an agreement and received satisfaction, consider leaving positive feedback. After all, handling a complaint with care and courtesy is the definition of customer service. If, however you’ve stated your case and the bookseller is unresponsive, explain that if you’re not satisfied by a given date, you plan to leave negative feedback and seek a chargeback on your card. Then do it. Many sub-par sellers count on buyer inertia to accept a lesser product and not seek a refund.

This may seem like a lot to go through to make a book purchase but more effort up front leads to a better book buying experience and more time to read.

In the next installment, I plan to cover the purchasing of first and special editions with information on how to choose the right venue, and using the search tools of each to find the best books.

Bookstores: Three Continents, Eight Countries, A Travel Journal – Part II

Central/Eastern Europe

Last Spring, my wife and I spent two weeks in Central/Eastern Europe. We started in Krakow, which we used as our home base in Southern Poland. My father’s family is from a small town called Gorlice, about 100 kilometres from Krakow, so we spent a day with a Polish driver/translator seeing the town and the house where my father lived until he came to America at the age of 15. I didn’t find any bookstores in the town, but there was a small museum where I purchased my first book of the trip. It was a paperback, published by the museum called Zydzi Gorliccy, a history of the Jews of the town written in 1998. I don’t speak any Polish, but I was able to find my father in the book, in a listing of survivors of the war. The book stated that he served in the Polish Army, then settled in Connecticut. This supports the adage not to believe everything you read in print, as he left Poland at 15 and served in the U.S. army.

Back in Krakow, there are two excellent bookshops in the Kazimierz district, the site of the former Jewish Quarter, that specialize in books on the Holocaust in many languages. The Jarden Bookshop is part bookshop and part Jewish Heritage travel agency, while the Yidishland shop is part of the High Synagogue Museum that contains photo exhibitions of Poland before and during World War II. Both shops specialize in new holocaust books and offer numerous holocaust memoirs from survivors from all over the world, many that I have never seen or even read about. In both shops the most of the books were not shelved, but piled high on tables by language, then title. I am in the process of putting together a collection of material about Anne Frank, but these shops focus on Poland and Auschwitz, while Anne died in Bergen Belsen. I did find some nice books on Krakow before the War.

The new Oskar Schindler Museum, built on the site of his factory in the Krakow Ghetto, also has an excellent bookstore specializing in material on Poland during World War II. The museum, itself, is first-rate and a must-see for any fans of the book or the movie.

The next day we took the bus to Auschwitz. As you approach the entrance there are several small kiosk type bookshops, with a large selection of Holocaust books in several languages, but I did not buy anything, as this excursion was neither a shopping trip nor a photo-op.

We left Krakow that night for Budapest, where I visited several bookshops, looking for a copy of Ulysses in Hungarian. It turned out to be impossible to find. There are some beautiful Rizzoli-looking shops on the Pest side near St. Stephen’s Cathedral, like the Ceu Bookshop, but they specialize in foreign language books for visitors, and few if any of them decide they want to read James Joyce on a European vacation. On the outskirts of the Jewish Quarter, there is a large academic bookstore called the Alexandra, but they did not have any Joyce translations. I ended up buying a very nice hardcover copy of Kerouac’s On the Road in Hungarian instead, because I thought the cover was interesting. The title in Hungarian is Uton which mydaughter’s boyfriend Aron told me is a direct translation: ut is the word for road, and the on suffix meaning “on the.” On Sundays there is a small open-air market on Gouba Street with several vendors selling books. We met up with a British bibliophile friend in Budapest, and we had a great time looking at the titles by English language authors and trying to guess the original English title. It was interesting that most of the translations here were in hardcover, not in paperback, which they are in much of Western Europe.

From Budapest we traveled to Vienna, where I actually purchased two Joyce translations in one day. One morning we took a side trip from Vienna to Brataslava the present capital of Slovakia and formerly along with Vienna, a second capital of the Austria-Hungarian empire during the Hapsburg era. It is a much smaller city than I had expected, but a major University seat in the region. While we were there for only a few hours, I found a bookstore, Knihy, right off the main square. The shop contained mostly used academic books. There was a table in the center of the store with some books each individually placed with the front cover face up, and lo and behold I saw a hardcover copy of Ulysses translated into the Sklovak language.

We returned to Vienna in the early afternoon, and I figured I was on a roll, so I went into another academic bookshop, Frick, in the center of town, a stone’s throw from the apartment where Mozart composed the Marriage of Figaro. The shop specialized in books in many languages, and the clerks were very helpful. I told them that I collected Ulysses translations, and was looking for a German one, they quickly turned up with a brand new copy, then spent 15 minutes unsuccessfully scouring the store for copies in other European languages.

We stopped in the small picture-postcard town of Cesky Krumlov in the Czech Republic en route to Prague. There were two small bookshops in the town, one catering to English speaking tourists selling used books, the other selling European books and prints. I walked into the later one, figuring this would be a better bet for Ulysses in Czech. When I asked the clerk, he smiled and said “No, sorry, your friends were already here asking. I don’t have a copy.” We were traveling with friends and had split up so they could go antiquing while we climbed up to the castle. I am sure it was the first time he ever got two requests for Ulysses in one day.

It is the spirit of Kafka, not Joyce, than infuses the city of Prague. Every few blocks there is a Kafka-something – the Kafka Bookstore, the Kafka café, etc. When you stand on the bridge looking at the old section of Prague, on the wall along the waterfront is a large sign for the Kafka museum. The Kafka bookshop is a clean well-lit shop with lots of Kafka in many languages, but the prices seemed a bit inflated. I bought one book, Franz Kafka and Prague: A Literary Guide, which I later saw back home at the Strand in NYC for a third the price. After visiting the Kafka museum, which is a must for any literary person, I had a hankering to read his Letter to my Father. Near the museum is an English language bookshop called Shakespeare Astnove (or Shakespeare and Sons) so I popped in for a look. There was a large selection of used and new books, mostly paperbacks, but the prices were pretty expensive.

The last morning, before heading to the airport, I went into the bookshop in the large modern shopping mall across from our hotel. If I took my glasses off, so I couldn’t read the titles (which were all in Czech), it looked just like any mall bookshop in America. There were very few English language books, so I headed over to the literature section to look for Ulysses. There was no Joyce to be found, but I did see two different hardcover editions of On The Road. At first I could not figure out why there were two recent, but different, translations. Closer examination revealed that one was a translation of the 1957 edition, the other was a translation of the original scroll, first published on 2007. I was so impressed that someone would make the effort to translate the scroll, that I was ready to spend the $30.00 on it, until I looked at each copy of this heavy but not well-made book and noticed that both had tears in the front boards. In the airport, I spent my last Czech crowns on a souvenir copy of Kafka’s Letter to my Father which I read on the plane home.

Overall, I guess you can say that experiencing bookstores is a lot like trying different brands of ice cream. Mall Bookstores everywhere are like Baskin Robbins, the ubiquitous mall ice cream stands, lots of flavors to appeal to everyone, but none of them very good. Many big city bookshops are a lot like Hagen Daz, readily available, yet expensive, with an aftertaste that is a little too sweet while the big chain stores are like frozen yogurt, not quite the real thing. Stumbling upon a shop with interesting items with reasonable prices, is a special treat even rarer than really great ice cream. My own town has a sweet shop that makes the world’s best coconut ice cream, but not one bookstore.

Postscript

Since returning, I have managed to find and purchase three interesting translations of Ulysses on-line. Europa has published both Polish and Hungarian editions in hardcover. I also found the second German translation, from 1930, which was done at Joyce’s request, since he disapproved of the original German translation. If anyone knows of a copy of Ulysses in Swahili or Czech that is for sale, please let me know.

My First Book Fair: A San Francisco Fairy Tale

I thought I knew what to expect from my ‘first’ fair. From a visitor’s perspective, I had a visual and sensory expectation set, which went something like: heavy lifting, eight-hours standing, casual browsers, heavy hitters, high rollers, soft selling, gentle banter, brain teasing questions, booth memory game, occasional water breaks, invoice writing, rinse, repeat.

All true. But I missed an important piece to the puzzle: it’s a love story.

Some time ago, some century or decade past, our story begins with a font’s impression, a pen’s flourish. The object of affection: bound, free or gathered, emerges and makes its way through the hands of time and man, until we are here at this moment. Now the dispensary of art, beauty, and the word awaits discovery. Thus the courtship begins.

Time to decorate for company. Counting down to their arrival, books are gently upwrapped, paired with easels and shelves as they find their way into context and storyline. How does this guest become drawn in? The lures: visual, sensory and tactile – the cadence and tone of the siren’s song.

The bacchanalian stage is readied, the curtains rise: seekers descend and set forth, clutching maps, on a quest for their object of longing. Hopes high for literary intervention and sated appetites.

Some liltingly run their eyes across the general culture of the booth and move quickly on. Some are captured by a shelf, a book propped open to an illustration that tempts. Some resist, but some fall madly. I sent a personal friend (a first time fair visitor) to wander about, and my counsel was this: Allow yourself to take in the macro, then slowly attune to the micro. A cacophony of spines and text slowly filters into meaning and recognition, look close and see.. a shelf, book. Then really look. Start a conversation and listen – what is the book whispering to you? Asking of you? Stirring in you?

A young, dynamic, lovestruck couple strolled in on Sunday, and some of Vic’s ‘Books on Books’ reference titles got piled up for purchase. Their heads were clear and they were making sober choices. But then: the siren called. A lush, richly and naturally buffed leather Bible, in Gaelic, spoke to them, haunted them with font and form – love at first sight. Two visitations and a couple of gold coins later, and they rode off into the sunset together.

One morning, a seasoned, perhaps jaded, lover of the book strode in, and again, and again. He visited perhaps three times – caressing and courting one particular San Francisco journal that he coveted. He was a collector of loves, had 60 of the same title in different manifestations, but was missing this particular binding color. Butterflies will be caught and pinned – the suitor would have his way, and he did.

A green eyed, mature beauty who had suffered love and loss in the flesh spent time with us one day. She had become a lover of Fine Press titles, a new fascination and friend to her, something to adore and cherish, somewhere to pour the love that once poured out. She sought much from the book but as well in the company kept. Here, the custodians and fellow lovers are all in communion – she found solace in this love story.

Thus, with naive eyes I witnessed, in the course two rich, influential days, the stories not of the written page -but of those inked upon the human heart. As we rolled up our tents and caravan, I slept dreaming of the tales yet to be spoken and discovered. Such to be spun not by tradesmen, but by talismen, as we administer the rites for lovers and seekers.

Dreamers, hope! The muse awaits.