The Problem: You look for a book on a retail website. No Bear Is A Island by Mawson Bear looks like an excellent choice. You send your order to the “Shopping Cart”. But what’s this? A delivery charge rises up on your screen like monster rising out of a swamp. And the size of the thing!
‘Bother!’ You say. (You might say other words entirely and at some length, but this is a bear-friendly web-den.) You Consider changing your mind about buying that book in print because the delivery cost has trampled over all your hopes. Is there another way? Why, yes. Read on.
BOOK SHOPS. Visit your friendly local book shop. The book you want, quite possibly Dreamy Days and Random Naps, by Mawson, might be in stock, and you can buy lots of copies too as random gifts of kindness for your friends. But if not, the staff can order it in for you. This is good for everyone: you get your book and the book shop people stay in business.
LIBRARIES. Visit your local library (where the staff are friendly because they are always surrounded by books). When you borrow a book, very possibly She Ran Away From Love, by Mawson, you pay for neither the book nor postage.
In Australia, the author gets a fee for each borrowing (a very small fee, but still a fee). If book is not there, you can ask the staff to consider adding it to their stock. That is good for you, the library, the publisher and the author. You can also just enjoy being at your library and play games there and do jigsaws and read magazines and relax.
SHOP AROUND. Shop around with OTHER on-line retailers! Don’t stick with, for instance, ‘A-Far-Too-Powerful-Retailer-Named-After-A-River’ . There are other retailers, such as Bookshop.org (Recommended by me because it supports bookshops).
SPEND MORE. Send three or four books of the books you want to the ‘Shopping Cart’ then wait. Sometimes the retailer will advise you of markdowns on them. This is when you pounce because you might also get a waiver on the postage costs. Advantage: you save on postage. Disadvantage: You have to spend more money than you meant to. And when the books arrive, the To-Be-Read-Pile of books in your room gets so high that it topples over and buries you under hundreds of stories and your family doesn’t find your body for days because they just assumed you were reading your way through them all.
EBOOKS. Go digital. Sadly, this means you will miss out on the pleasures of holding the book itself: enjoying its particular weight and texture, slipping your battered old book marks between the pages, shelving it in your favourite way (by colour, by height, by author, by subject), ostentatiously opening it up to read on the public transport, lending it to a good friend, seriously wondering about the ‘goodness’ of that friend when the book is not returned … But I digress. The thing is, there are no postage costs with them.
Your Challenge: Beat the postage monsters. You can do this, really you can.
Have a practice with getting your paws on, say, No Bear Is An Island, , Dreamy Days and Random Naps or It’s A Bright World To Feel Lost In without high postage costs. . For instance, try:
Amazon everywhere, AbeBooks, Ad Libris, Booklubben, Bookshop.org (Recommenced by me because it supports bookshops), Desert Cart (several regions), Fa Saxo (Denmark), Linnaeus Boekhandel, Loot (South Africa), McNally Jackson (New York), Mighty Ape (New Zealand), Rahva Rahmat (Estonia, yes, Estonia – this bear gets around), Walmart (USA), Google Books, and more.
Hopefully, at one of these you will beat the postage monsters. Otherwise, back to the library! Our publisher is Shooting Star Press.
Your host, Mark, is Mawson Bear’s Guardian, photographer, editor, blundering typist, chocolates fetcher and cushions re-arranger. Baffled Bear Books ABN: 4787910119.
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