Whoring Myself to Bookcloseouts

This isn’t just to make myself money (I do though, if you buy books from BCO). I don’t expect to make much/any, but it’s my favorite book store in the whole wide world so it deserves some props.

STORE REVIEW:
My most recent BCO crazy deal example: I have a hardcover David Halbsterstam – War in a Time of Peace from BCO, autographed by the recently departed author, that was purchased as a gift for me for all of $7.99.  That Amazon.com link, I think, makes my point for me: The book is on sale at Amazon for $12.24.  And that’s a paperback.  And unautographed.  Though Amazon does have superlative shipping for books, I find (I have received some orders in under 30 hrs).

They are not perfect though: BCO mistakenly sent me two copies of The Calvin and Hobbes Lazy Sunday Book ($10.39 at Amazon.com, $5.49 at BCO when I purchased) rather than one copy of Lazy Sunday and one copy of The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book ($11.55 at Amazon now, $6.99 at BCO when I purchased).  When I made BCO aware of this, they immediately shipped out a copy of the Tenth Anniversary Book and told me to keep the extra copy of Lazy Sunday to apologize for their error without any bitching on my part.  Considering the amount of money I’ve lost in the past to e-tailers like Deep Discount DVD and RideGear from their errors, this was a breath of fresh air (only one other e-tailer, the computer/electronics store NCIX, has consistently provided excellent service and performed their due diligence to correct their errors in my past experience with them).

BCO has fantastic promotions (free shipping on right now, click on the promotions tab; often they will have a $5 off of $35 or so promotion as well).  There best regular deals can be found if you do not mind surplus/imperfect copies of books.  As I read books on the subway/bus and tend to throw them around (I have books for reading and lending away, not for modeling), I couldn’t care less if the books have imperfect corners or a market streak across the bottom edge of the pages (stores do this to overstock books before returning them to the distributors, I believe).  You can often find books at a 50% to 90% discount if you’re willing to purchase these types of books and the descriptions for the titles, in my experience, very accurately reflect these flaws.

Though the inventory is constantly changing and does not even remotely rival the current inventory of Amazon.com or other sites, you cannot find a better price.  And very reasonable shipping even to Canada, though it will take a couple of weeks normally.

I highly recommend checking BCO for books before you buy anywhere else (even eBay!) since you won’t beat the price anywhere else, if they have what you’re looking for in stock.  You can easily pick up ten great books for under $50 final.  I highly recommend using BCO for comic collections especially (such as for the great Calvin and Hobbes titles).  Great for gifts as well, if you know sensible people who don’t care if someone took a sharpie to the bottom edge of the book (along the edge of the pages so no one page shows more than the slightest mark) and would appreciate your being able to gift them a gift of six books rather than two.

Even if you hate me/this blog, do yourself a favour and check out the site (just don’t allow the cookies or copy and paste the url from the link but remove everything beyond the basic domain before navigating to the site to keep me from stacking my paper to the ceiling).  Unbelievable site for cheaper-than-used books.

… and the cow goes moo