the corner office

An event that marks this time of year for me is textbook-buying. It's always exciting because you add a pile of new books to your bookshelf, and the promise and anticipation of all that new and arcane knowledge has not yet turned to the dread that will supplant it, as the year drags on. The pressures of assignments and exams are still far away, and for now, you get to feel very intellectual while in fact you're doing little more than crack open pristine hard-cover books and thumb through them going "oooh lookee, nice pictures" and whatnot, and all is right with the world.

The downside, of course, is the cost. In years past I've always just tootled off to our local Armstrongs university bookdealers and bought m'books, and been done with it. This year, I thought I'd break with tradition and conventional wisdom, and take a gander at online booksellers too. I've spent the last hour or so trawling the usual haunts. I looked for books on Amazon, as well as the local booksellers: Exclusives, Kalahari and Loot. Traditional textbook dealers Juta have a website with online pricing (albeit a really shoddy search interface), while Armstrongs are well, about a decade behind the times.

The results weren't exactly what I'd expected. When it comes to common-or-garden-variety IT books, my limited experience has been that purely-online Kalahari is cheaper than clicks-and-mortar Exclusives Books. I have a few IT books on order with them and they beat Exclusives, hands-down. What's more, by the time I added shipping fees onto Amazon prices, Kalahari was even cheaper than Amazon (long live the strong Rand and weak dollar!) Not so when it comes to textbooks, it seems. Are Exclusives a little smarter when it comes to pricing, knowing these are prescribed books? It doesn't seem likely, but I can't help but wonder. For all but two of the nine books I was looking for, Exclusives was a good R100-R200 cheaper than Kalahari. The remaining two books were the same price. Juta was a joke - more expensive for all books but one, which they had for half price. Loot... well, they're also-rans in every category.

The clear winner for these less-popular books though, is Amazon. With cheap shipping, which has roughly the same delivery times that local shops offer, I can lop nearly a third off of my textbook bill. Even with expedited international courier which gets the books to me within days, I can still save over a grand on my books. The gamble though, is what happens if the Guvmint decides to pick on me and nail me for customs duties. Anecdotally, some people say they've paid next to nothing, others say they've been nailed badly. I can't risk "cheap" turning to "ouch" on this scale, so I think I need to go bug the people at the local post office and see if I can get a definitive answer on just how much it costs to import books into the country. That's going to be fun...