I seldom buy from Amazon these days because their international shipping prices are massive. I have a Kindle but, thanks to corporate bullying by the larger publishing companies, eBooks are frequently not available here or are considerably more expensive than in the US.
I usually check out the cheapest price on Booko and buy from the supplier with the best deal - usually book depository, who have free shipping.
What ebooks can’t you get? I have a Kobo reader loaded with books but I buy Kindle books on Amazon and use the Kindle reader apps on my PC, phone and tablet.
I, um, heard that you can get software that will usually allow you to hack Kindle books so you can load and read them on a Kobo, despite the protections Amazon attempt.
I can’t remember now but there aren’t many. I’ve simply got a message saying that the publisher doesn’t allow this particular eBook to be sold in Australia. No idea why not.
I also used to get emails alerting me to eBooks which were, for a short time, really reduced in price. Most didn’t interest me but there was one book I wanted to buy which was 99 cents, according to the email. When I went to Amazon to buy it, the price to me was $9.99. I emailed the sender of the alert asking why and they said the publisher set the price. No bargains for Aussies. 
I have tried that with unsatisfactory results. Presumably I am doing something terribly wrong because one can find thousands of ebooks to download in both epub and mobi formats with no DRM. The Kindle books I have bought aren’t terribly popular, so not otherwise available, and are cheap. The reading option is excellent really because the books are synced across all my devices. And I’ve always been one of those people reading several books at a time, so it is nice opening up one on my phone and zipping through to where I last was on my tablet or PC.
It’s no Amazon substitute, but booko.com.au searches for the cheapest price inc postage on books and gives you a list to compare. I find it very useful.
I’ve also used The Book Depository and was very happy with their service. For an Australian, “free international shipping” are the three sweetest words in the English language.
And booko.com.au links to The National Library so you can find every library in Australia that has copies of the book.
Indeed. Not Kindle, Amazon or even book related but I read today that M & S in the UK have free international shipping. Can’t wait to let my fingers do the walking.
If you’re not in a big city in Australia, is interlibrary loan a realistic or useful option, or do you have to wait a really long time to get what you want?
I’ve sold to Aussies from my amazon Marketplace Account, & it’s easy to lose your shirt that way.
Large books cost a ton to mail down Under.
I get that mailing an actual book costs a lot. Ebooks, however, should not.
High postal charges aren’t just one-way. I recently returned some books to a friend in Scotland. >$50 to send three paperbacks.
You guys do know that book rights are generally sold by country, right? It might be that the publisher of the eBook doesn’t have the Australian rights and thus can’t sell there without violating their contract with the author.
It’s not actually free, of course, since bookdepository simply roll up the postage charge in the price they quote you. (They know where you live! And if you lived somewhere else they would quote you a different price.) Still, the postage-inclusive prices they quote are usually pretty attractive.
Looks to me like almost everybody living in Australiawould qualify with those criteria. It is odd that they’re being ignored.
I can buy a paperback or a hard cover book for the same price (in US dollars) as anyone in the US, excluding shipping costs. So it’s clear the author and/or publisher are quite happy for me to actually buy and read the book, just not in electronic format.
Except that book depository is generally the cheapest option even if they do roll their shipping costs into the over all price.
We linked to booko upthread. Run pretty much any book you care to name through it and it will rank retailers by cheapest price including postage. Bookdepository is almost always near the top of the list, way above Australian retailers who only pay domestic shipping (it’s that parallel imports thing - our books are so expensive, I’ve been ordering autographed special editions of Terry Pratchett’s new releases from the UK for close to the RRP of an ordinary, unsigned, not special version of the same book from any Australian book store).
Sure. And as a consumer I don’t actually care about the breakdown between postage costs and the retailer’s take; I’m just interested in the total cost to me, and Bookdepository’s total cost is generally very competitive.
It’s not just the parallel import thing, though. That might explain why Bookdepository is cheaper than Dymocks, but it wouldn’t explain why Bookdepository is cheaper than Amazon US, as it very often is. Maybe shipping costs from the US to Australia are greater than shipping costs from the UK to Australia, although there’s no obvious reason why that should be so. Maybe Bookdepository is finding other efficiencies. I don’t know.
I’ve often wondered why Amazon don’t have a presence here either - I mean, there’s an Amazon.ca and that seems a bit odd since you’d think the US operation could handle Canada as well.
Besides the extortionate shipping Amazon charges to Australia (frequently as much or even more than the item itself), there’s a baffling array of stuff which they won’t ship here - often mundane stuff like pens, watches, clothes and so forth. And that’s not including their digital music services and the like which are unavailable here.
Some of the challenges they’d need to overcome have been mentioned (vast distances, no competitively priced large-scale courier services) but I think a lot of people would be happy to have their stuff come by Australia Post as long as they didn’t have to pay $100 for a pair of Levis anymore.
