Online Book Shopping - The Frog and the Scorpion

[IronMike]

Thanks for resurrecting this thread. It's really a travesty what's going on with the used book world. Stock photos that do not accurately reflect the item you will receive, vague condition descriptions that all but absolve the seller of properly inspecting their inventory ("may contain highlighting" "may not include dust jacket" - two make-or-break conditions for myself), and a clearly malfunctioning pricing algorithm that ascribes obscene and baseless values to used books.

This has happened to me rarely in the decades I've been buying books online. In every single occurrence, I've contacted the book seller to tell them what the issue was, and each time they've refunded my money and told me to not send the book back. This includes getting a beautiful art book with two rips in the middle of two photographs, as well as receiving a book that was a print proof instead of the actual pb pictured. So far for me, these sellers have been so protective of their feedback, they've taken the loss instead of taking a negative review. I'm talking maybe a dozen out of hundreds of used books my family and I have bought online since about 2002.

The ONLY time I've had any issue with a book seller is when I ordered a book I had had on a "watch" list for over a year. It was a linguistics text on Indo-European languages and I could never find it cheaper than $100. It showed up in my email one morning for $19.99. I immediately bought it. 24 hours later I was refunded the money with the reason: Book not in stock. 24 hours after that, the same seller had the same book on the same service for over $100. Obviously, s/he had discovered they listed the book too low and canceled my order to relist it. I complained to the website, and they responded that they couldn't technically do anything except caution the bookseller to not do that in the future, i.e. they couldn't force them to honor the original sale.

So, have I been lucky? Who knows. But I would recommend if you get bad service from a bookseller, whether from Amazon, ebay, Abe, Alibris, whomever, write to the bookseller immediately and see what they say.

[IronMike]

Adding onto the above, brick-and-mortar used booksellers are still not rare things, and the used language materials are definitely available if you persist. I live in a small city in the American south, a region not known for its cosmopolitan character, and in the used stores here and in neighboring areas have found items like:

Assimil French Without Toil, Teach Yourself Welsh (1st ed), Teach Yourself Welsh (2nd ed), Colloquial Rumanian (Trubner's), Colloquial Turkish (Trubner's), Teach Yourself Beginner's Hindi Script, Colloquial Icelandic, etc. etc. all for very reasonable prices, with the added satisfaction of having been able to preview the item yourself and ensure the dustjacket exists and there are no highlights, etc.

Most recently, I was floored to find an early hardback copy of John Mace's Teach Yourself Modern Persian in my local bookshop. I have been specifically scouting this item due to its more clear printing of the Persian script, and was ready several times to roll the dice on a $20+ copy on Amazon or eBay and hope that it was a good copy. But I got it for $6 at a local hole-in-the-wall instead. Of course, if time is of the essence, then sometimes you do just need to bite the bullet and order online and hope for the best. I recently ordered Assimil's Arabic and even though I meticulously matched the listed ISBN's and page count with what was on Assimil's site, I was nervous up until I opened the package - luckily this worked out. On the other hand, I once ordered a Chinese reader meant to accompany the DeFrancis series and was greeted with a Japanese novel.

I hear ya! I found Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse in a used book store in a tiny Missouri town for a great price. You simply never know what you'll find where!

[aokoye]

Most of my issues have been with sellers not shipping the book in a timely manner and/or not being transparent about where it's shipping from (or just flat out lying). It's funny because part of the reason I don't sell books on amazon for the most part is because I hate going to the post office and don't want to deal with sending things late. This isn't dissimilar to the handful of issues that I've had buying things on Etsy, but reporting issues on Etsy is very easy - same with Paypal.

I've only had the wrong book shipped to me once. That was by a small independent bookseller. I called them shortly after they had closed and they basically told me to tape up the package, mark it as return to sender, and then they sent me what I had ordered no problem. They were very apologetic and fixed the problem quickly. Mind you, I'm pretty sure postal rules were broken because the package had been opened, but it worked out.