worldofbooks com to buy second hand books

As I don't want to support Amazon, (even though they have a broad range of books, among other things), I was happy to find out that worldofbooks.com is a website that saves books from landfills and resells them online. Apparently, they scan donated books, where the info gets automatically uploaded to the website.

For example, searching "storey's guide" we see that there are manuals available for chickens, sheep, ducks, dairy goats, meat goats, poultry, honey bees, pigs, rabbits, llamas, beef cattle, organic orchard fruits, and many more ...

It is not always the newest edition, for example the sheep guide is available in 4th and 5th edition.

The feedbacks I see online seem mostly positive, the negative I saw were mostly about scratched CD's and insufficient packaging. Not something I care about in a book I want to have handy in the barn...
And I don't get how the pricing works, probably an "optimization", and some books are not available in some countries, sadly.

Has anyone experience ordering with them?

I have UK experience to share - I've used them a number of times I think always through ebay, although I did notice that they will deal direct as well. They sometimes have very good prices for non fiction books if they have them, and cheap or free posting. I had no issues at all.

Hello Hans!

Thank you for posting this!

I have been wanting to read more Roy Bhaskar books.  I could not find them used and they are pretty spendy new.

World of Books has a whole page of Roy Bhaskar!

https://www.worldofbooks.com/collections/author-books-by-roy-bhaskar

Thank you!

Like Nancy I use them through ebay. There's usually a "deal" to be had, "buy 1 get 1 20% off" or "buy 2 get one free".

It's been great for rebuilding my fiction collection.

We've ordered from them many times, and have had mixed experiences, mostly to do with books being in far worse condition than stated, and currently a delivery delay. The expected delivery date keeps being pushed back on a book hubby ordered ten days ago -- today he received an email saying it would be yet another week, for a book that had a three day expected delivery time!

Because their book grading seems inaccurate, I'd suggest only paying the price you'd be willing to pay for an acceptable copy, even if the book is listed as very good. That way you can only be pleasantly surprised if it really IS in the stated condition! Too many times we've paid them more than we could have bought elsewhere because we wanted a copy in better condition, only to receive battered books or ex-library books.

But they do have a huge range of books, and the prices are generally good too.

Thanks for the replies. So it seems many people buy via ebay (which I try to avoid), and that the quality of the books is sometimes quite low. Good to know.

What I found out as well, is that the price of the same book is different depending on which country you shop from: One seems fair, as it depends on which books are available to ship in the country. The other, well it seems like maximizing the money that can be squeezed out of books.

I am for example looking for the books of Lloyd Kahn. As of today, there are different books available.
In the us:
https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-us
Many books available, cheap. Don't ship to Europe

In the UK
https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb
The half-acre homestead, 13.50£, Builders of the pacific coast 10.40£

In France
https://www.worldofbooks.com/fr-fr
The half-acre homestead, 89.-€, Builders of the pacific coast 12.50€

In Germany
https://www.worldofbooks.com/de-de
The half-acre homestead, 24.99€, Builders of the pacific coast 11.99€

In Switzerland:
https://www.worldofbooks.com/de-ch
The half-acre homestead, 30.- CHF, Builders of the pacific coast 15.-CHF

All the latter 3 options ship from the UK.

I've ordered from them a couple of times. Books have arrived quickly, and in the condition described.

I should probably mention my favourite place for finding books - http://www.bookfinder.com - just enter the title and/or author name, your country, and the currency you want to pay in and it will give you a list of places to buy from, either new or used, sorted by prices that include shipping and taxes. World of Books will show up in the results, and also a bunch of small bookshops selling through Abe Books and other places like that. I've ordered from several places through bookfinder, nothing has been lost in the mail, and the description has always been accurate.

Kate Downham wrote:I should probably mention my favourite place for finding books - http://www.bookfinder.com - just enter the title and/or author name, your country, and the currency you want to pay in and it will give you a list of places to buy from, either new or used, sorted by prices that include shipping and taxes. World of Books will show up in the results, and also a bunch of small bookshops selling through Abe Books and other places like that. I've ordered from several places through bookfinder, nothing has been lost in the mail, and the description has always been accurate.

Kate, just FYI, bookfinder was bought by Amazon. As a used bookseller, I had used them extensively but stopped after A bought them. For a while, don't know if they still do this, they were only featuring books at ABE, also owned by them. I do think they added Ebay a while back, not sure. As I said, I don't use them any more.

Following up on my husband's latest experience with WoB.

He ordered three books two weeks ago. One, he paid more to get a very good copy, what arrived was heavily worn, creased, tanned, and when I was a used bookseller, would have been listed as acceptable. Book 2, also listed as very good, looked fine at first glance, but had been wet at some stage and the pages were all stuck together along the upper edge making it unreadable without literally tearing the pages apart. Book 3, listed as a three day delivery, still hasn't arrived, 14 days after placing the order. When contacted, WoB have told him to wait another 12 days. None of these were cheap books, all cost in the range of £10-15

We've used WoB a lot in the past and it's been about 80% good. The 20% bad has usually been responded to appropriately by their customer service. But after this experience, unfortunately we won't be using them again.

Thanks for all the feedback.
Jennie, what a bummer that bookfinder is owned by Amazon, and (almost) only redirects to Amazon. I checked for books I ordered in a local bookstore, they weren't listed...

Jennie Little wrote:Kate, just FYI, bookfinder was bought by Amazon. As a used bookseller, I had used them extensively but stopped after A bought them. For a while, don't know if they still do this, they were only featuring books at ABE, also owned by them. I do think they added Ebay a while back, not sure. As I said, I don't use them any more.

Thank you for letting us know.

They still link to other sellers that are not Abe, but they stopped linking to Booktopia (Australia’s main alternative to Amazon) at some point so there is the possibility that they could get rid of other sellers bit by bit.

How I imagine Bookfinder runs is that it has affiliate programs with the websites it links to. If that is the case, you could use Bookfinder without giving money to Amazon by using it to find out which seller has a good price, and then manually going to that website (Alibris, Blackwell, WoB etc) and searching there rather than clicking on the Bookfinder link.

I finally bought 2 of Lloyd Kahn's books from worldofbooks.com. They arrived within the announced time, and the condition was, as stated, very good. Although one had a cut in the cover.

Kate, I really like your approach of NOT going through affiliate links owned by Amazon. But to manually search for the books independently. Thanks, I pick it up!

hans muster wrote:I finally bought 2 of Lloyd Kahn's books from worldofbooks.com. They arrived within the announced time, and the condition was, as stated, very good. Although one had a cut in the cover.

Kate, I really like your approach of NOT going through affiliate links owned by Amazon. But to manually search for the books independently. Thanks, I pick it up!

It's a good reminder to always do a search for price comparing any book. I just found one at world of books that was priced $6 higher than buying directly from the publisher.

A new online bookshop I recently found out about. Not sure if they have any second hand books, but they have all of my books new.

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