Booksellers

Well, the new Terry Pratchett is out (Wee Free Men), and I've been scouring the local bookshops looking for it. So far, I've checked Dymocks, Page One, Swindon, Bookazine. They're all the most likely places to find a new book, and none of them have it.

I decided to look online, and decided to compare prices between the various online booksellers. As it's generally better, in my experience, to order a few books at a time when ordering online, I decided to do that. I priced buying and delivering three books, one of which is a new hardcover, and two are mass market paperbacks. The three books were Wee Free Men (Pratchett), King Rat (Miéville) and The Curse of Chalion (Bujold). The results were somewhat surprising:

(The currency rates were taken from the SCMP Currency Converter.)

Now, the question is: am I willing to pay an extra fifty bucks (Hong Kong dollars) for the UK cover below? Yep, you would too, huh?

USA Cover
UK Cover

(See what I mean about ugly as sin? And that's one of the better USA covers.) Both images are, of course, copyright by the artists involved (although I use the term very loosely in the USA cover) and their use here should fall under fair use. If that's not ok, let me know and I'll sort something out. The UK cover is by Paul Kidby, more of whose work can be seen at paulkidby.com. Paul is an excellent artist and has a great view of what the characters form the Discworld really look like. Go buy his stuff! Now! (I have a set of his Hogswatch Cards (The bottom four on that page), and they are truly wonderful. Just looking at his site now, and he has t-shirts, mouse pads, mugs, everything. Check out the mousemats!

In the end, I decided to wait until the end of next month, the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out. It's been a long wait for that, and the hype has been tremendous, but I realy liked the last one (Goblet of Fire) and I'm looking forward to the next one. I think it'll get very, very dark.