Where do you buy books?

[Scribe Ineti]

I'm buying pretty much just 4e product right now, plus the occasional SW Saga book, so all my purchasing is coming from either Amazon or Borders when they have a 30-40% coupon in any given week. I'd buy more from my FLGS, but they don't discount their products and I prefer to maximize my gaming dollars.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

I rarely buy RPG books nowadays (and only a scant few pdfs), but when I do it's almost exclusively online, with cost being the main factor (things have been tight last few years!). FLGSs (and even BigBox stores) also tend to be few and far between wherever I am, and I won't travel a long way just to visit a shop that typically has very little I'm interested in anyway.

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[Lanefan]

I voted "mostly at my FLGS" but more true would be to say "always in person regardless of location", given the amount of gype I brought back from last GenCon.

I look at gaming stuff online sometimes but have yet to buy any of it that way...some local friends of mine even ran an online dice-and-minis business and I still went over to their house and bought things from them in person.

Lanefan

 

[Vicente]

I use amazon.com for new books and Noble Knight Games for everything else (old books, books that amazon.com doesn't have,...). Shipping costs from NKG to Spain are very good.

I like also Troll&Toad, but I only get things there when I travel to the USA, or when I really want one book and no one else has it, their shipping to Spain is very expensive

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

95% of my book purchases- novels, textbooks, RPGs, CDs etc.- I buy in my local stores. The same goes for my other purchases. There are many reasons for this.

1) I live in the Dallas area- if a book exists, odds are good that I can get it that day.

2) In my work as an attorney, I've developed a distrust for online commerce. Sure, most transactions go through just fine, and most databases are secure, but I've handled enough ID thefts (due to misdirected transactions or database hacks) and fouled-up transactions that were more difficult to deal with than similar problems I've solved talking to local managers that I simply don't care for online shopping all that much.

3) It serves as a speed-bump for my purchases. With my credit and my tastes, I could easily see myself going on shopping binges for books, guitar pedals, obscure recordings and all kinds of things if I didn't consciously limit my online purchases...thus ruining my credit!

About the only thing I do buy online is the occasional extremely rare CD, or things that are simply not available in any other way- direct-sales guitar pedals or specialty picks, unique jewelry options, and so forth.

The advent of the new e-readers may change some of that...though less for me than for my Mom. Her eyesight isn't the best, and she likes those read & forget thrillers these days. That means she has to buy them as hardcovers for the print size...and then try to sell those except the few that she wants to keep. Electronic copies, with their resizable fonts, may be the solution for her in terms of print size, storage, and the like.

I don't see myself buying e-books for anything I want to keep, though, except possibly as duplicate RPG books for a precious few games. And I don't forsee that happening for some time.

 

[Knightfall]

I buy most of my RPG books from local stores. I have a plethora of options including one main FLGS, one comic book store where I special order certain books, one speciality store that has a lot of used RPG books and boxed sets, and numerous used book stores, which often have RPG books for half the listed price.

I have bought a few things through Amazon. However, that isn't always available since I always have to use a family member's CC.

 

[Stormonu]

I buy my RPG material almost exclusively online (usually through Amazon, sometimes FRPGames). I also do buy at a local Con, but that's a once-a-year thing. I'm trying to condition myself to use PDFs wherever possible, but screens just can't quite match the display area of a book (yet) - or the portability.

I don't read novels anymore; I listen to audio books while I'm doing something else.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

I buy mine locally - the guy who owns the FLGS is a good friend (and was before he got into the business of running a game shop). He gives me 25-30% discounts so I get it as cheap as online, but get to support my friend (he still makes some money off of me, and I'm cool with that).

 

[drothgery]

This is actually a two fold question. First off I wondered what proportion of gamers that use EN World purchase from an actual game store and what go online for the cheaper options?

I've purchased almost all of my gaming books online since 2001 (almost entirely from amazon.com), and the few that I didn't were almost all from big-box bookstores, not gaming book stores. It's both cheaper and more convenient to buy online.

Secondly Bill Slavisec (Think I spelt that correctly) recently spoke about getting the novels on sale for use with ereaders/ipods etc. and I was wondering which stores one could buy these from as from today and do we know which stores these would be available from in the future.

I just got an Amazon Kindle a couple of months ago, but have yet to buy any books from the Kindle store. Each publisher seems to be handling e-Books in their own way. Baen Books has great policies (they make electronic advanced reader copies available early, don't use DRM, and sell bundles of books to entice you to take a look at new authors), great prices (they sell e-books of new hardcovers at paperback prices), and only sells through their own store (which has a terrible UI design). Otherwise, there's the obvious Kindle store, I think Barnes & Noble owns Fictionwise, Sony's got something, and Apple will soon.

I don't see myself buying very many more printed novels; probably just the last two Wheel of Time books for completeness sake (I've got hardcovers of all the others). The Kindle's just too convenient.