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Comment by octopus | Hacker News Reader

You should always search for the best deal for your money. For e.g. I prefer to buy books from Amazon, but I always check Abebooks where sometime you find the international edition of the same book at 20% the price from Amazon (this doesn't really work for literature, but for Math or Programming books you have a good chance to find a better deal).

As a side note, you should probably check Amazon.ca where you have free shipment for Canada for order over $25.

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That could be a lot of research. Given the nature of the books I tend to buy (usually no single item over $15-20, but in bulk orders up to $400 sometimes), I have little incentive to spend much time researching for "good deals" across multiple sites, possibly making multiple orders instead of a single order.

I'm sure if I spent an hour or two finding the lowest price on 20-30 items I could save a bit of money on the order(s), but I don't think it's really worth my time for my default use case.

Now, if I were looking at items like text books or reference books, I would likely do the research. Such materials are often sold at huge variation in price across retailers ...

If you tend to buy books in the $15-20 range doesn't make much sense to do an extensive search using a lot of sellers, but you can give Amazon.ca a try. I've found that it is cheaper to buy from Amazon than directly from a Canadian online seller and the effort is minimal.

For reference books you should definitely check alternative sellers, I've seen programming books priced at $120 in Canadian bookstore at $20 (or less for the international edition).

Actually, AbeBooks has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008, so you're still buying from Amazon:

http://www.abebooks.com/books/CompanyInformation/?cm_sp=Ftr-...

As long as the price is better it is not really important to me if I buy from an independent Abebooks or from an Amazon subsidiary.

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