Buying Books Outside the US

The book Depository logo

A while back I wrote a tip for getting money transferred between an American Paypal account and an Israeli Bank account, I have decided to add an other tip for lifehacking in Israel. Since moving to Israel a few years ago one of the biggest challenges that I have been facing has been getting good books to read. There is always the option to borrow books from friends but on occasion I have found that there are books that my friends and people around me just aren't reading. That's when I would turn to good old Amazon and order books to my parents house in America and wait for someone to bring them in for me.

The problem with the Amazon method was that it could take weeks or months to get my books and this was time that I just couldn't wait so I went on a mission to find a different way to get my books delivered. When I told a friend at school about the situation she told me that she has been using this site for a while that offers free shipping to Israel as well as many other countries around the world called Book Depository. So figuring what could be the harm I signed up for an account and placed an order for a relatively cheap book (just in case it never arrived I wouldn't feel like I had lost money one it).  Sure enough the shipping was free and the book came in perfect condition!

The service:

I placed my order around new years and according to their site it was supposed to take a little more than 14 business days to get to me. I received an email confirming that the order had been placed and the next day an email letting me know that the book was en-route. This was really exciting, I marked the calendar for the day that it should arrive so that I would be on the look out for it.  When the day that it was supposed to arrive came around it wasn't in the mail, I waited a few days and still no package, so I emailed the Book Depository and asked them where it was. I was surprised by how quickly they responded and they told me that if the book hasn't arrived yet it was probably lost in the mail. They offered my two courses of option, I could get a refund for the book or they could send me a new one on them.

I took them up on the replacement and sure enough 2 weeks later the book was here!  It was a small book so it came in a padded envelope (I have ordered bigger books that come in cardboard) with a bookmark inside. That first book was the only one that has had any issues and since then everything has been arriving on time.

Pricing:

I was impressed by the prices of the book on this site. All the books that I have ordered since joining the service have been at least 10% off some of them more. The books are priced very aggressively and with the free shipping spending $7-10 on a book doesn't seem so bad.

You have the ability to create a wishlist in your account that sets up an alert so when a book that you want drops in price they will send you an email letting you know. This is huge because no other site does this in house, you can set up a tracker like TrackIf that will let you know when a price drops but Amazon isn't going to alert you when a product goes down in price.

 Book Depository also has a newsletter that comes out every few weeks with books that are on sale and things that are trending now. So you can almost always get the book that you want at a very low price.

Other fun features that they have on their site are things like seeing what is hot now, and what people in your area are buying. You can see a live map of the world and see what books people are buying in real time and where they are buying from, they have competitions on the site that you can win all kinds of goodies.

When it comes down to it their service is the Zappos of Books.

** please know that the links in this post are affliate links, if you do not wish to use affilliate links you can access the site from here.**