Book Buying Options – Seattle Mystery Lovers

Our book group reads 2 books a month, which can be expensive. We do not guarantee that the books we read will be available in the library. But we do make sure that all are out in paperback.

Here are some methods our group members have used to find affordable mystery fiction.

Abe Books
Independent sellers. Marketplace for new, used and rare books as well as art and collectibles. There are some great deals here, but don’t expect the delivery time to be as fast as Amazon. Order early to get the books in time to read for our monthly meeting!
abebooks.com

BookFinder.com
An e-commerce search engine that searches a huge number of online catalogues. Recommended by a group member!
bookfinder.com

BookGorilla
Similar to The Fussy Librarian. You subscribe, and choose your reading preferences. You get one email a day. Many books are offered at deep discount. This site is owned by Amazon so the eBooks are all for Kindle readers. Free and bargain books tailored to your preferences.
https://www.bookgorilla.com/

DiscoverBooks
This organization is committed to keeping books out of landfills. They sell paperbacks, hardbacks ,mass market paperbacks, school and library editions and spiral bound books. There are multiple ways to save. They offer very low prices, often much lower than Amazon. They have a subscription service where they distribute coupons. They have a refer-a-friend program which gets you a discount. They have a rewards program. They also have a “Bundle Pack” program where they give a special low price deal for purchasing bundles of 5 books. They have random, pre-selected sets bundled. They do free shipping in the USA.
https://www.discoverbooks.com/default.asp

Ebay
Did you know you can buy used books on Ebay? It never occurred to me, but here is what one of our members says, “There are a slew of online dealers who sell our books at many price points. The nice part is that there are also sellers that have enormous inventories and often do a buy 3 get 1 free or similar. Also, the deals with these types of sellers are great around the holidays. Two years ago I stocked up on almost all the books buying from just two sellers.”
https://www.ebay.com/b/Books/267/bn_1854946

The Fussy Librarian
Matches subscribers with e-books that match your interest, including cheap and free e-books. You are emailed weekly with matches and deals.
https://www.thefussylibrarian.com/

Half Price Books Online
New and used books. Their “marketplace” is over 20,000 individual sellers.
hpb.com

Open Library/Internet Archive
Internet Archive is a non-proit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites and more. Open Library is basically a massive book catalog for Internet Archive (archive.org) that also links to books for purchase (like to Powells and Amazon) as well as having many ebooks for borrowing. Ebooks are available sometimes as downloadable PDFs and sometimes as scanned versions of books. There are also links to external sources like WorldCat
https://openlibrary.org/
https://archive.org/

Appearing on this list is not an endorsement by the website author or the Seattle Mystery Lovers Book Group.