The book depository often cheapest for new book titles;

07 September 2018

 But not for older publications!

Here at Find-book we are committed to providing books at the cheapest prices. I often hear that people go to certain retailers in the belief that they always offer the cheapest prices and so we set about trying to determine which, if any, retailers providing more consistently cheaper prices.

Today we have randomly sampled books within the following categories: New fiction; biography; children's books and best sellers. In the first part of the survey we have concentrated on this year's book releases as there is a tendency to see provision of these across all the retailers. Additionally, we looked at older titles in the best-selling category, to see if there were any consistent themes emerging that would indicate certain retailers provided more reliably cheaper prices for older, less recently published (back catalogue) stocks of books.

It is important to bear in mind that our published prices take account of any cost of postage and packaging. In this survey, we did not include second hand books as clearly this is a huge market and undoubtedly the results here are likely to be very mixed.

Our survey looked at 10 titles per book category. Where totals add up to more than 10 it is because we counted the retailer if more than one matched the cheapest price.

As you can see from the following table, the results were mixed across the book categories but it was clear The Book Depository was consistently cheapest twice as frequently as nearest competitive rivals Books etc. However, the book depository and books etc did not fare at all for older popular titles and not everyone is looking for a new book publication.

Hive, which didn't fare particularly well in the price stakes on new books managed to be the cheapest in 1 in 2 searches for older popular best-selling book titles. This is an outstanding result for the UK book seller. Surprisingly, Amazon, the global retail giant who started as a book seller in the 1990's was fairly average with only 16% of the cheapest offerings.

Waterstones fared pretty badly on price but this has to be levelled against the fact that they provide a very good high street service which we would not want to be without. They are often placed highly on price even if they do not appear at the top of the results.

Alibris also was low in the ranking on price but their uniqueness comes in the comprehensive availability of rare books. Often a book that has long since gone out of print is available through Alibris but prices may reflect the limited supply.

We don't pretend this is a comprehensive study but we do hope that our survey encourages you to continue to shop around for your books. It is clear some retailers focus on particular areas of interest, for example, Books etc had 50% of the cheapest children's books. The important thing to bear in mind that the difference in price can be several pounds per item and this adds up, especially if you are shopping in bulk for gifts for Christmas.