They do a fantastic job, if you live in Australia, of scraping all the information from all the available online book stores together with the shipping costs, and then convert it all from the original currency into Aussie dollars, so that you can do price comparisons and of course take the cheapest option.
I was looking for a book today that seemed interesting and noticed that when I did a search I got two results for the book that looked exactly the same. (You have to confirm that the title you are looking for is correct before it displays the price comparisons).
On closer inspection I realised that the two options were for a version of the book I was looking for published in the US and one published in the UK.
Interesting to look at the price comparisons - presumably caused by the variations in the pound and US dollar.
The number one result for both versions came from The Book Depository who really nail it with free shipping. I have purchased from them and they have a great service - very friendly...
Anyway check out these price comparisons:
Here is the salient information - hopefully easier to read... prices on the left are for the UK published version and on the right for the US published version.
In terms of the relevance of this for Australian consumers and also for retailers and publishers, it shows that price difference between books printed in one jurisdiction or another clearly can have impact on purchase decisions. The irony of all of this through is that Australian online stores often have international fulfillment houses do deliveries. So if you buy a book from an online store that has a .com.au domain name it is just as likely to be warehoused and shipped from Scandinavia as it is from Sydney. So you would have to think that these stores can purchase at approximately the same price if they are selling on line. It gets down then to what the acceptable margin is for the retailer. Australian retailers just aren't competitive enough.
