where do you get your RPG books?

[DaveMage]

Amazon and frp games for me, mainly.

I'll go to my FLGS occasionally, but generally they don't have the selection that I can get online.

 

[JesterPoet]

I pretty much exclusively buy online. It's tough for me to pay full retail for a book when they are SO much cheaper online. I'd pay a few bucks more to support my FLGS, but not as much as $10-$12 more.

Besides... I buy minis in my FLGS, and paints.

 

[Wyn A'rienh]

Not to hijack but Im thinking about ordering some stuff from overtock.com, has everyone had pretty good luck using them? Are they fast or really slow to send? Tells us, my precioussss...

I've bought a couple of different books from Overstock. They're not the speediest people in the world but for the price, it's worth it to me. I think everytime I bought a book it took about a week, maybe more to get it.

 

[thol]

so far it looks like either people buy online for the price, or they buy from the local game store for the immediate gratification. interesting.

 

[Altalazar]

I stick with Amazon most of the time - partly because I order a bunch of other stuff at the same time, like far too many DVDs.

But also because it is convenient, it is fairly cheap, and I simply don't have time to go to a real store.

If I were rich and had plenty of free time, I'd go to the gaming stores - and probably buy exclusively from there unless they didn't have what I needed.

 

[thol]

i understand when people add books to their DVD orders for convience, but i don't know why people continue to get everything at Amazon, when their prices (with shipping) are consistantly $3 to $5 more than places like buy.com and overstock.com. even with Amazon's occasional "free super saver shipping" it can't make up for the savings.

and i'm not sure how barnes & noble even stays in business online.

check out these comparisons. the last one is crazy.

FRCS
Book of the Righteous
Player's Handbook
Mutants & Masterminds

i guess i lack the same understanding as when i see people pay $17 for a CD.

 

[Desdichado]

i understand when people add books to their DVD orders for convience, but i don't know why people continue to get everything at Amazon, when their prices (with shipping) are consistantly $3 to $5 more than places like buy.com and overstock.com. even with Amazon's occasional "free super saver shipping" it can't make up for the savings.

and i'm not sure how barnes & noble even stays in business online.

check out these comparisons. the last one is crazy.

FRCS
Book of the Righteous
Player's Handbook
Mutants & Masterminds

i guess i lack the same understanding as when i see people pay $17 for a CD.

Can't seem to find the Conan RPG at overstock though.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

My view is this... Amazon and Overstock sell for cheaper than any game store and you know they still make a profit on their RPG book sales. RPG book prices are marked up too much. The 3.0 splatbooks are the perfect example of that for $20 of almost nothing. They need to bring the prices back down to Earth and then I MIGHT go back to shopping at walk-in stores.

Overstock sells for cheap because they buy bulk overstocks from the publishers and the distributors. Thats why their prices are so low. Local stores could never buy in bulk like they do, so it's rediculous to think that they could ever approach the same prices.

Amazon sells in such large quantities that they can mark books down to only a few % over their cost, and still make money. Plus, most people don't buy just one book at Amazon, they buy several books at a time. So even though the profit per book is small, on large orders Amazon makes a good amount of money.

Books come with a preset price, usually printed on the book. That price is set by the manufacturer, and the discount the store gets when buying the book is usually around 45% of that cost (so they buy the book at 55% of retail). This is less of a price discount than almost any other retail product. The more books you buy (large quantities of books, not 10 or 20 copies), the better the discount. Obviously, a small store isn't going to be able to by anywhere near the quantities that Amazon buys in, so they get a smaller discount than Amazon.

Having worked for a major publisher several years ago, I got to see first hand how much $ was made on books by the publishers. A profit of $1 per book sold was a very good profit (I'm talking about your typical $25 hardcover novel). This is after all costs are figured in-paying the author, designer, copyediting, editing, artist, printing, etc. That's not a big profit.

On RPG books, the profit is most likely even less.There are RPG companies that are publishing one book just to pay off the production costs of their previous book, never mind make a profit. Thats not a good business plan, but they do it. Keep that in mind when talking about the cost of RPGs books being too high. If they were lower, they probably wouldn't exist at all.

 

[thol]

Can't seem to find the Conan RPG at overstock though.

get it at buy.com. $33 (free shipping) to amazon's $54.

Conan

 

[Henry]

I would like to buy online, but I mostly buy at the local Books A Million. It's mainly because RPG books are carefully researched by me online, but the actual buying of that carefully researched book is more of an impulse buy, because I have to talk myself repeatedly into spending the money.

I'm a cheapskate at heart, but when I spend, I generally blow a gasket.

I need to just budget X bucks and month and spend it online, hesitations be damned. I'd probably save more money that way.