SOB - Save Our Bookstores!

I recently bought a book (Exposure Photo Workshop) in a local Waterstones shop at the reasonable price of £15.99. In the back of my mind I knew I was probably paying more than I would online at Amazon or Play.com. Having just checked, Amazon.co.uk have a massive 35% discount on the book. Ouch!

I thoroughly enjoy rummaging around bookshops when I am in town. I much prefer sitting down and leafing through a book than using dodgy Look Inside features or the Comment minefield. The problem is, when I see a book I am interested in a little voice whispers in my ear “Its probably cheaper on Amazon”. So I usually set the book back planning to look it up online, which I usually forget to to anyway. Is the “in store” experience and convenience worth the extra markup? How many times do you buy a book online only to realise its not quite what you were expecting? It is definitely worth more but maybe not 35% more! I think bookstores should take a leaf from the likes of Tesco and declare the difference in price compared to the major etailers. At least that way, I could make an informed decision on the spot, and unless there is a massive markup, I’d probably buy it there and then.

The sad thing for me is how good IT books are a dying breed in bookstores, being replaced with smaller collections of terrible “Dummys Guide to …” and crud like “How to use Excel” and “Ebay hacks”. No doubt this is due to Internet savvy IT pros buying their books online or increasingly reading ebooks. I guess we have only ourselves to blame.