[Attention: International Readers of English Books]

So I have to pass this along: if you read English language books and have trouble getting access to the ones you want, there’s a company out of the UK that will ship books worldwide with…get this…FREE DELIVERY!?!  So they claim at The Book Depository.

Now, if you’re in the USA or the UK, it seems like the prices are slightly higher than other online retailers (and it’s certainly no replacement for the cool local independent book shop), but this is a great resource for those of you a bit further afield.  For example, we get English language books here in Romania, but I’ll never find the new debut poetry volume from Jennifer Kronovet.  If I order it from Amazon, the price gets steep with shipping.  Not the case when I ordered it and two other books from The Book Depository earlier today: three contemporary poetry volumes for a total of 30€.  As they say in Blighty, that’s cheap as chips.

Two other cool things about the site.  First, they link to other sites when they don’t carry the books you want.  Second, they have a neat animation / live cast of where and what people have been buying so you can see the reality of their long tail business model in action.

I still prefer to be cruising a well-stocked bookshop, and crusty old second-hand sellers; I love independent, local merchants — these are the tactile lands of discovery.  But in terms of the contemporary moment, I dig the idea behind this company: if anything should be widely shared, it should be knowledge.  Let’s see how it goes.

ps. Ezra Pound doesn’t feature in this post, but it’s a nice picture of a book, init?  Saving image of Kronovet’s book for when I get a chance to read it and write it up.