Amazon to close Book Depository online shop

[activitypea]

There are no words for how much this sucks. If you are outside the US/EU, reasonably priced books in english aren't easy to find. CompSci literature in English? Forget it, buddy. Book Depository had decent prices with free international shipping to most of the world. Sure, I have to wait a month and sometimes they have to reship because it got damaged in transport, but if I need a book immediately Library Genesis is right there. Book Depository built out my home library for both fiction and non-fiction, and I will miss it dearly. Salute o7

[user-4-4-2023]

+100

I'm really pissed off. I live in Europe outside EU and this is the most convenient way to get books in English. Often a translated book does not exist here at all, so Book Depository was a blessing in these situations.

Seems like nothing is sacred to the corporate quarterly reports. If a corporation made a little less profit this year compared to the last one (did not have losses!), it apparently justifies shutting down an online book store that ships a ton of titles at reasonable prices with free shipping to 160 countries in the world!

[perch56]

I'm inside the EU (Ireland) and "reasonably priced books in English aren't easy to find" unless you're buying pre-owned books and in most cases I can't find what I'm looking for specially when it comes to tech books. As an island, we're very much dependent on Amazon.co.uk for books.

[open-source-ux]

Book Depository had decent prices with free international shipping to most of the world

wordery.com (based in the UK) also gives free worldwide delivery.

[netcyrax]

I located in the EU, but from a small country, and still Book Depository was the only way to get English books at a reasonable price.

[memsom]

Book Depository is still the best way to get reasonably priced books not in English too. I have managed to get a number of books in Swedish that were stupid money from other vendors or would not ship outside of Sweden (Adlibris, I am looking at you!)

[Veen]

Probably a bit nitpicky, but there is at least one place outside the US/EU where it is very easy to find books in English.

[barbariangrunge]

It's not so bad. I used to order from book depository in an attempt to use an amazon competitor. Then I found out amazon owns it. Closing it down makes it more obvious to everybody that there is none, not in a really serious way, for online books outside the USA

[rvba]

In Poland there is a whole ecosystem of resellers who sell various books on Allegro (which is basically polish equivalent of Ebay + Amazon). I am not sure exactly how do they get the book info, but it is quite clear that they get the inventory off Amazon, who ships the books to the resellers first, who repack them and send them to direct customers. Of course you can ask, "why not buy at Amazon (or Ebay) directly"? Well, for many years Amazon was simply not available in Poland, it also required a full credit card (not only a debit card), while Allegro allows many more payment systems.

I tried buying some really obscure books on Amazon - and the interface is pure garbage. When I looked for random items, those often looked like cheap knock-offs?

Generally once per year I try to look at various "best books of 2022" lists [did hacker news have one?] and then try to get the obscure books. Often it feels easier (but not cheaper) to get them through those third party sellers than search on Amazon that offers 10 options of used books, semi-used books, PDFs - I genuinely dont know how to exclude the things that I dont want.

This reminds me how EBAY tried to enter the Polish market and their launch was so damn bad and the website so damn poor, that after 2 years they licked their wounds and simply exited the market.

I wish more people know Allegro, which has its own share of problems, but is so much better (I think most problems came when venture capital came, bought it and now tries to squeeze money out of it).

In Poland you buy something on Allegro and usually in 1-2 days you get it to a parcel locker machine. Which is like a machine that stores the packages for you in a safe way. I never understood why those dont exist in USA. As I understand the delivery drivers throw the packages on your garden, where they can be stolen, damaged by rain or so on.

I think Germany also has parcel lockers + the concept was introduced to UK due to all the Polish diaspora ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parcel_locker ), but when it comes to number of machines per capita Poland probably wins.

[TylerE]

Sucks for some of us in the US too. Many of the niche military history books I buy come from BD.

PS: Print tech books are dead in the US anyway. They're out of date before they're ever edited, never mind hitting paper.

[electroagenda]

What about abebooks?

[gregdoesit]

I do wonder if Brexit and customs to be paid for all of the EU has anything to do with this decision.

Book Depsitory is based in the UK. I have inadvertently ordered from them, to the Netherlands, as they had a “Bookdepository NL” store, which made it seem like they are an EU entity.

However, when the book arrived, I was hit by unexpected customs charges that were half the price of the book. Looking at recent reviews, there was a surge of these complaints from all customers in the Netherlands [1]

Perhaps the timing on these customs surges are accidental, of course. But I can’t imagine that Brexit helped with their EU sales.

[1] https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1638824647390003206

[Symbiote]

I think books should be exempt from import taxes into the EU -- at least, the ones I ordered from the UK a while ago had a yellow sticker saying that, and Denmark didn't charge me any fees.

However, if even 1% or 0.1% of orders gets incorrectly taxed that could lead to negative reviews and put people off.

[Hamuko]

I've never ever had to pay VAT at the customs for Book Depository orders in Finland. My most recent order came in March and I had a pre-order for June.

[thomond]

Are books VAT free in NL? If not that's probably why.

[poloniculmov]

It might be a UPS issue, i've bought books from BD and didn't have to deal with customs or pay anything extra.

[paol]

Wow, didn't see this coming. Though, in retrospect, it's not obvious what value Amazon was getting from running a parallel store.

As a customer this sucks. The website was a much better experience than amazon, and the free shipping everywhere was nice.

[almog]

Hopefully this will put regulator on track to pursue anti trust when Amazon attempts similar acquisitions in the future.

[newbie578]

Definitely disappointed, I used them regularly for the last 6/7 years, ordered from them over 70 books and this feels like a punch in the gut. My country is not served by Amazon Prime, so basically for a single book I have to pay a delivery fee of 10 euros... While on the other hand Book Depository offered a free delivery, although you waited a month or two.

Shame, it really sucks, never should have allowed Amazon to buy them.

[orangepurple]

Library Genesis knows no borders

[shever73]

It's a pity they were ever acquired by Amazon. I managed to get some quite obscure stuff from Book Depository before they were assimilated.

[_trackno5]

Goddammit, I had no idea Amazon owned Book Depository. Their service was great and it was the best way I had to buy technical books when i lived in Brazil.

[ernsheong]

I'm surprised but not surprised. Books get delivered 2-3 months later, if they ever get delivered at all. Need to contact support for replacement. End up preferring to pay the premium at local booksellers than buying from Book Depo. How do they even make money like this.

[ycombinete]

This is really weird, where are you having the books delivered to?

I’ve never once had this experience and I’ve ordered at least 100 books from the book depository, for delivery to the Middle East.

[barbariangrunge]

I've never had these issues

[Hamuko]

I've never had that issue. My pre-orders usually arrive within a couple of weeks of release date.

Too bad that I have a pre-order for a June release with them.

[robjan]

Regularly order to HK and they usually come within a week or so.

[ernsheong]

sorry, I'm from Malaysia

[unmole]

From the comments I got:

1. It was a good place to buy English books in non-English speaking countries.

2. The shipping was free (Actually, folded into the price of the book and location dependent)

3. Delivery could take anywhere between a few weeks to months.

I'm wondering if it would be viable to offer an alternative service out of India and I'm willing to try out an experiment: Post the title of a book you would have bought via Book Depository and I'll try to send it out to you for free. Just let me know when the book arrives and in what condition so as to gauge how reliable the postal network is. I don't have a budget in mind but I'd like to ship at least 5 books to different geographies.

[JamesAdir]

At least to my country, BD shipped envelops with books and declared them as print media, it seems to have a international very low postage tariffs. When I get books from Amazon they are always shipped in boxes and that is packages and subjected to much higher tariff and customs fee if above a certain value.

[activitypea]

How do you get a vast catalogue of physical copies of English books in India?

[mabbo]

Seems a simple plan to address a competitor.

Buy it. Invest nothing major into it. Wait for the economy to take a downturn and shut it down because it isn't profitable.

[lethologica]

At least half of my library came from BookDepository so this makes me really sad. It’s so expensive to get books shipped to Australia.

[koboll]

I wonder if Goodreads is next under the guillotine.

[LiveTheDream]

You can request your data here https://www.goodreads.com/user/edit?ref=nav_profile_settings

They will send a confirmation email. After you click the link to confirm, it says "We will provide your information to you as soon as we can. Usually, this should take no more than a month."

EDIT: you can export your book database as CSV (shelves, ratings, reviews, etc) here https://www.goodreads.com/review/import (there's a link towards the top to export...disregard that the URL says "import".

[stanac]

Hopefully not, maybe someone should scrape everything from there. I didn't know amazon owned book depo, maybe I should have guessed something has changed when they starting sending increased number of marketing emails a year or two ago.

edit: typo

[protocolture]

Goodreads is pretty shit imho.

[hgsgm]

Goodreads is an ad for Amazon. BD was a redundant store.

[jakub_g]

Living in France, to buy technical books in English for sensible money and without onerous shipping cost, I always used Amazon and the books were often delivered by Book Depository. Wondering how things will be after it closes.

[Aissen]

They are often cheaper than Amazon in the marketplace, and have a very good reputation. A bit of shame :-/

[Hamuko]

They also deliver worldwide for free. Meanwhile ordering a 13.18€ book from Amazon.de will incure 9.85€ in postage because my closest Amazon is an entire Baltic Sea away.

(Well, technically Amazon.de has free deliveries too – you just need to buy order at least 99€ worth of them at once)

[McDyver]

Amazon seems to be following Microsoft's EEE strategy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...), skipping the Extend

[manicennui]

This is every big tech company for the last couple decades. They buy up their competitors or potential competitors and either immediately or eventually shut them down. I'm sure this will lead to great things.

[lucasmullens]

EEE is about extending open standards in a way that extinguishes the competition, since they can't keep up. Amazon buying a competitor and shutting it down might be monopolistic, but it's not EEE.

[shever73]

Even the "Embrace" is a bit like the embrace of a sarlacc.

[rcarr]

This does suck for obvious reasons, but I also think we need to get a good, thin, eInk tablet like Remarkable or Boox Note down to the sub 100 usd/gbp price. Kindles are ok but they’re too small for textbooks and you’re also locked into Amazon. Plus they’re read only (apart from the latest one), and the new generation of tablets around atm can serve as paper like notebooks as well as eReaders. I like reading paper books as much as the next guy but it is hard to justify sending millions of books each year all over the world when we could send them over the wire for a fraction of the cost and pollution.

[rvba]

Until they decide to retroactively delete your book, or change the text, because someone didnt like it.

Or more prosaic "feature": ban the book in your region.

[kawera]

First dpreview.com, now this. I wonder who's next...

[operatingthetan]

Alexa? Have they ever made a dime on it?

[toastercat]

In case anyone cares, I started looking for online bookseller alternatives to Amazon a while ago, and have generally enjoyed shopping with Alibris.

[slyall]

International shipping at Alibris is around $US 20 per book.

[jnsie]

This really sucks. Use to ship books to family in Ireland and Britain. Amazon with an ever tightening stranglehold :-(

[masfuerte]

I use speedyhen for books in the UK. They are usually as cheap as Amazon and delivery is free. I don't know if they'll accept orders from abroad though.

[jcmontx]

This breaks my heart. I've found so many books which are imposible to find in my country.

[n2j3]

You can at least export your wishlist to a table-laden html file @ https://www.bookdepository.com/account/wishlist/print

[yardie]

It took longer than I thought. Amazon bought TBD over a decade ago. I figured they would have snuffed them out years ago. It was a sad day when they got bought by Amazon. Good luck to the team.

[yakubin]

That’s a bummer. Most of the technical books I bought on Amazon were supplied by Book Depository. Are they going to just disappear now?

[rapfaria]

AbeBooks next?

[L0in]

NOOO. C'MON... WTF AMAZON

[xjrp]

Good, of 4 books I ordered in two different order I received one. It was so poorly packed…