Guest Post: I Buy Online (It's Not a Crime) by Anysia of BookLorn

(This is the last in a series of posts about how avid readers get their books. I've enjoyed reading each perspective as I greatly respect each of these bloggers...as readers and important bloggers in our community. Today I'm thrilled to have Ann/Anysia of BookLorn and also the brains behind HereBeReviews
She buys online and wants you to know why)

What I want from a bookseller is fairly simple: I want books. The
fewer hoops I have to jump through to get those books the better. I
want to find what I'm looking for with the least fuss, the least time
spent and, yes, the least money spent (although I'll pick the first
two over the last one any day of the week). For me that means buying
online either from booksellers or directly from the publisher.

I have been buying books online as long as there have been online
booksellers. A bricks and mortar
store introduced me to buying books online. They installed kiosks in
their stores so that customers could browse their whole selection,
order, and have their books delivered to the store for pick up--all
without having to pay shipping fees or deal with an employee (the
kiosks also let you find where something was shelved in the store
instead of trying to track down an employee).

Until then, I never knew of all the books that were out there but
weren't on bookstore or library shelves. Suddenly I had access to all
of them (or at least more than I ever had access to before) and I
wasn't giving that up. When the kiosks were removed from the stores,
customers were encouraged to go to the website directly. I went and
didn't come back.

I shop online for a number of reasons, but the biggest is that the
bricks and mortar chain store (we only have one national one in
Canada, though it goes by at least four names) and independent stores
don't give me what I want or need as a customer: selection, service,
and price (in that order, just in case you were wondering). They never
have, so for me it was never a matter picking online stores over
bricks and mortar stores so much as finally finding a bookseller that
suited me.

Before there was online, I didn't buy that many books--at least not
new ones. I read a lot, but mostly it was from the library or books
that I picked up at the used book store. It wasn't a matter of price
(although that was a nice side benefit), but a matter of selection.
Libraries and used bookstores had the most interesting and eclectic
collection of books.

Whenever I have tried to get a bricks and mortar bookstore to order a
book in for me I have always run into issues: the book doesn't exist
(they couldn't find it, but it most definitely existed), the book will
take more than a month to come in, the book must be paid upfront (that
one went with the one month wait), or there'll be a premium charged
for the service of ordering a book not already on the shelves. You can
bet I jumped at the chance to do it myself when online buying came
along.

Online I can search by keyword, author, and now even content. I don't
need to get someone to show me where it is, guess where the bookseller
decided to shelve a hard-to-categorize book, or have someone stare at
me blankly. If it's not available online, I can find that out in less
than five minutes and I can do it in between doing the laundry and
making lunch. I don't have to wait on hold with every bookstore in
town or spend an hour traipsing to and from a single bookstore only to
find that they don't have what I want.

Price is not what drove me to online booksellers. Selection and the
ability to serve myself did--price was just a nice fringe benefit. I
still go into bricks and mortar stores occasionally, but they haven't
really changed much. I have, though. I know what's out there now and
it doesn't fit into any store I can walk into.

(Be sure to check out BookLorn and HereBeReviews!)