The internet is one of the best sources for books of all types. No retail bookstore can match the selection of books available from online bookstores. Buying books online can save you money. Fiction books, non-fiction books, audio a course in miracles even school textbooks are often available both new and used at online book sites at a substantial discount over paying retail. Many online book sites offer free shipping on the items they sell, allowing them to be delivered right to your doorstep at no extra charge. Some sites also allow reviews of books by readers giving feedback, which gives the opportunity to decide if the book you were thinking about buying is worth your hard earned cash. The internet also allows for authors to publish books themselves, without a publisher at all.
Some online bookstores offer instant delivery through ebooks, which allow you to download and read books right from your computer, or download them onto another device such as a PDA or dedicated eBook device such as Amazon.com’s Kindle. More and more ebooks are offered every day, everything from classic works of fiction to the latest non-fiction technical manuals.
Amazon.com is the largest online book site, selling not just books, but everything from pet food to video games. They not only sell new books, but also used and have a reseller program that broadens their base of both fiction and non-fiction books.
If you want to save on shipping costs, the best place to check for books would be an online bookstore in your country. In Australia for example there are quite a few online bookstores and many of them sell more than just books, and because they ship locally the shipping is much cheaper than buying from an international store – some books are quite heavy and attract a large shipping cost.
Many books that are in the public domain are actually offered free over the internet. If you are looking for the works of famous authors such as Charles Dickens or Mark Twain, odds are you can find them at sites such as Project Gutenberg or Google Book Search. These sites are not just for fiction books, as many classic non-fiction books such the works of Charles Darwin and Henry David Thoreau are also available for free download.
While these are the largest, there are also many other online book sites. They generally specialize in a particular market, such as used college textbooks, books in foreign languages, or especially old or difficult to find books. Some of them are listings of inventories of thousands of small bookstores all over the world.
