Buying Bargain Books!

If you plan to give books for Christmas gifts, be sure to shop around, because a quick search can produce a 50% discount.

A quick tip for you today: if your Christmas shopping list includes a few books, be sure to shop around for deep discounts.

Various high-street retailers, particularly WHSmith, are trumpeting their discounts and price cuts, but these tend to be restricted to a few books, rather than their entire range. What's more, some of the deals come with strings attached, such as 'buy 3 for 2', which is a saving of up to a third off, but could involve you spending twice as much as you intended to.

For the record, few booksellers on the high street can match the keen prices on offer at branches of Sussex Stationers and British Bookshops. In my experience, it's not hard to find half-price books at these bookshops; there are 52 branches in the UK, which you can find via the firm's website.

Then again, if you don't fancy tackling hordes of frantic shoppers, but would like to get the latest bestseller at a bargain price, then sit back and shop online in the comfort of your own home. Naturally, it doesn't make sense to search hundreds of online booksellers yourself, because that's what price-comparison websites and shopbots (shopping robots) are for.

As a keen bookbuyer, I have a number of websites which I frequently use to find bargain paperbacks and hardbacks. To put these to the test, I checked the Top 50 bestseller list at The Bookseller to see which tome is selling like the proverbial hot cakes. Top of the chart was The Sound of Laughter by comedian Peter Kay, which has a recommended retail price (RRP) of £18.99.

When searching for books, be sure to search using the ISBN (International Standard Book Numbering), as this is much more accurate than searching by author or title. The ISBN for the above book is 1846051614, so let's use this to go hunting for cut-price comedy.

I begin by searching four well-known price-comparison websites: Froogle, Kelkoo, Pricerunner and Shopping. Here are the lowest prices from these four websites:

Waterstone's £9.49 + £1.50 P&P = £10.99 (free delivery to store and on orders over £15)

WHSmith £9.31 + £2.59 P&P = £11.90 (free delivery to store)

Play.com £11.99 + free delivery

Tesco £9.39 + £2.74 P&P = £12.13 (free delivery on orders over £20)

Amazon.co.uk £9.49 = £2.75 P&P = £12.24 (free Super Saver deliver on orders over £15)

Note: if you apply for an Amazon credit card, you can earn a £15 gift certificate following your first purchase, plus loyalty points on all of your spending!

Next, I checked these four specialist book-comparison websites to see if they could do any better: Best Book Price, BookBrain, BookButler and BookkooB. None of them could, which is unusual in my experience.

So, there you have it -- with a few minutes' effort, you can get £8 off this bestseller, which is a 42% saving. Alternatively, if you're prepared to place a bigger order or have this book delivered to a local branch, you can pick it up for as little as £9.31, which is less than half price (51% off).

Finally, if you want to go even further, you can finesse the price even further by using cashback websites and credit cards, as I explained at the end of this article.

Happy shopping!

More: Use the Fool to find cracking credit cards!