As I’m sure everyone knows, “one cent” books on Amazon actually cost $4 because of shipping charges. Now that we have “Fulfillment by Amazon” some of them are cheaper but you still can’t buy a book for less than $2 on-line (at least I don’t know of a way). I you can find a book lot on eBay that’s exactly what you want you might get them a bit cheaper.
So…does anyone have a method for getting cheap books cheaper? I’d like to be able to buy a bunch of SF paperback, for example…and I certainly don’t want to have to pay $2 each, because most of them are essentially worthless (except that I want them).
Salvation Army stores and all the equivalents (Volunteers of America, etc.) often have walls of cheap paperbacks.
Library book sales are not sales of old library bocks, but primarily of books people donated to the library to get rid of. The last sale day is usually buy a bag for a dollar or three.
Yard sales and garage sales often have boxes of old paperbacks.
You just have to look for places where people don’t need to account for operating overhead or postage in the final cost. They’re everywhere.
However, if you want a particular title, then you need to pay for someone having done the work of listing it.
Exapno Mapcase answered pretty thoroughly, though he didn’t mention specifically used book stores. Not everything they sell will be as cheap as you want, but some of their stock might be.
I love my local library. The used book store has a large inventory sorted into categories. Most books can be had for $1 or less. You can even put in a request for a certain book, and they will call you if it comes in.
A thrift store in a nearby town has a really good price for books - free. For some reason, while they charge for things like clothing and furniture, they’ve decided to just give away books.
My local library’s book sale was last Thursday - Sunday. On Sunday, there was still plenty of stuff left, and you could fill a bag with the regular books for $3.
The iregular books, mostly priced at $2 except for specials at slightly hirer prices, were all half price.
I got a bag with a dozen books for $3, & 5 other books, 2 CDS, and a complete tarot card set for $1 each.
I just checked out a few today too, it sort of works out ok if you’re looking for certain types of books (I’m thinking wide, hard back kids books).
I second, third and so on the advice to check out the charity shops, where they pop them on the shelves for next to nothing.
The discarded stock library sales in my Grandparents’ town was great till someone decided it was too much of a good thing and stopped it. My Grandfather gave me a tonne of big, colour, hard back books on aircraft, the best being the directory of aircraft from the past couple of decades, with big two page cut aways of the big fighters of the day (the page with a Lightning was ripped out though :()
If you don’t live in a big city, it could be worth it to you to go to a used bookstore in one. You can go to a place like Aldine’s Books in L.A., for example, and stock up. Says one anonymous reviewer:
And that means the original, 1960s price. (Don’t let the L. Ron Hubbard thing scare you away. The store is a few blocks from Scientology headquarters, and the people there regularly dump his books in this store to raise his profile.)
I live within walking distance, and go there often. If you buy a good amount of books, the guy will bargain with you–really, sometimes you’re helping him, buy getting rid of the mounds of books which occupy every space which isn’t necessary for a bare minimum to squeeze through the aisles single-file.
The old guy that sits at the register is usually just chewing the fat with one of his friends that always hang out there, and both of them will invariably have some kind of arcane knowledge about any author’s whose work you buy.
Most used bookstores I’ve been to don’t have a lot of 50 cent books anymore, or know their value all too well if they do. I have a fairly good chunk of what was published in that decade since that was when I began to collect. But for the most part, you are not going to do all that much better than $2 a book.
Library sales are very good. Thrift shops near me, anyhow, only have fairly recent and widely distributed books, along with a few weirdos. The best bet is to go to a bookstore which specializes in something else, like romances, and see if they have stuff marked way down because they don’t understand what they have. I once got a bunch of old F&SFs really cheap from a bookstore in NY which specialized in movie stuff. A book listing used bookstores mentioned they carried magazines - they actually had to take them off a high shelf, and sold them to me at the price they were originally listed at, maybe a decade before. So, you can get lucky.
By all means avoid sf specialty stores. If you believe the prices at “A Change of Hobbit” the last time I went in, I’m a millionaire on my sf collection alone.
Our local library has book sales each year, for 3 days. Incredible prices, even for rare books. At the end of the third day, they have a “Buck a Bag” sale. Fill up a standard grocery shopping bag, one dollar. For the whole bag. Of course, most of what’s left by that time is romance novels, but you can get a year’s supply, then bring 'em back next year for another load.
