Sometimes you can find a merchant on Amazon, search for its name (they are not allowed to link), then buy from the merchant's own store.
For any readers from Germany, booklooker.de is great for books. You can buy used and new books with an extremely efficient, no-nonsense user interface. Fulfilled by large and small bookstores and even private sellers. You see the actual vendor before you buy.
I've bought a few books in a physical store... well, last year at least. My go-to place to buy books is online but not Amazon: booklooker.de has a very nice no-nonsense user interface to buy used (and new, but I prefer used) books from... mostly small bookstores.
By the way, small bookstores in Germany have incredibly good logistics and had them even before Amazon: Order a book until 15:00-18:00 (not sure / may also depend on location) and it's there for pickup next morning. Faster and more reliable than Amazon. Whether it's more or less convenient than Amazon depends.
In my case the local bookshop [1] two doors down the street offers the perfect compromise: You order online on said website, then pick up the book in the store the next day. Typically faster than amazon, same offers, obviously same prize (because it is fixed in Germany) and a generally much nicer experience.
Use amazon search/reviews and then use the ISBN to shop anywhere (I would promote Buch7 as a social book shop knowing its not the best for English books). Your local book shopde will also order most things for you. (Call them, they call you back when the book arrived). The big problem is that English books are not fixed price in Germany ...
Most large bookstore chains in Germany offer this service as well (e.g. Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel - not that their business practices are any better than Amazon's). I chatted with a few employees but almost nobody seems to use that service. Except for mine, all other books were either ordered in person or by phone.
If there was an independent bookstore here that offered that I would totally use it. But it's even hard to find any independent bookstore here (eastern Germany), so I'm back to Amazon.
The bookshops I know (in Germany) have an excellent ordering service, especially the academic bookshops in my university town.
I used to order everything via Amazon, but eventually I figured I wanted to support one of our lovely little local bookshops, so I buy all my books there now. They rarely have the books I want, so I still have to order (via them), but it's almost as fast as Amazon, if not always quite as cheap. But I love the old ladies that run it, and simply dropping in for a chat with them is worth the extra cost and effort :-)
A lokal bookshop in my hometown just opened a digital order mechanism. You can order your book there, have it available for retrieval within one, at the most two days.
I think, they even think about partnering with local delivery providers to make delivery possible.
But it is hard to beat Amazon on the "no cost for shipping" thing for books in Germany.
If I would still live there, I would totally use this instead of Amazon for books.
In Germany, book prices are fixed. Buying a book on Amazon costs exactly as much as buying it from the small shop at the corner. People still prefer Amazon and book shops are dying.
Amazon is absolutely dominating in Germany. Although what you otherwise said is true, we could also always order via ISBN Numbers from any small bookstore, there just wasn't a good way to search before the internet became mainstream.
I moved to Germany about two years ago from the US. I have used Amazon a lot to help me get settled here. I’d like to move away from them but English books seem like the hardest thing to find off their platform. Do you know of an alternative?
If you are interested in books from the German-speaking region you should also take a look at zvab.com (now owned by Amazon) which is the largest marketplace for professional used book sellers.
amazon.de is fine and the personal does speak English.
More also it's the EU, hence free returns and no questions asked (by law) for 2 weeks. plus 2y warranty.
I can't say bad words about the EU version of amazon when it comes to customer service. Yes the counterfeit stuff is there but the free returns mitigate that.
To the grandparent poster: you wont be able to order e-books off the uk version... and would have to use .com one.
Interesting. I was trying to buy a book in German from Amazon DE, and with my US account they would not let me buy it. Maybe I need a German account as well.
In Germany books on Amazon cost exactly the same as in the store by law. I still go to Amazon because it's much more convenient to get things delivered and because there is often a used version available that doesn't require killing trees (and is cheaper).
Yeah - I've used Book Depository, they're excellent. Also there is an Amazon subsidiary who I've ordered off as well - Amazon.co.uk - their official address is in luxembourg or something (obviously some tax dodge).
In Germany we have fixed book prices and people still shop books on Amazon. There is even online shops like Buch7 that distribute their profits to charities, but its even more difficult to support local book shops because they either become part of franchises or have no good online ordering. IMHO it is much a matter of affordance and UX and only secondarily price.
That is one of the reasons I don't buy a book at Amzaon.de or any other Amazon anymore. I use Amazon tho find a book, see preview pages and ratings, and then order the actual book by one of the, preferably local, bookstores, like wittwer, hugendubel or similar.
You can also go to bookshop.org, buy the book there (usually for about the same price as Amazon), and most of the profit goes to a local bookstore (which you can choose) instead of a big search engine with warehouses.
For non Amazon books, check out bookshop.org if it's in your country yet, they're created to provide an alternative to Amazon for brick & mortar independent retailers. They basically manage inventory & shipping for them and you can direct part of your sale to a specific shop or let be shared among all members.
I think the books I was getting were not directly available from Amazon, so they devloved into a web-service that more or less bought the things from UK book suppliers and fedexed them to me.
And then theres the shop itself. Hugendubel is a big chain and all its stores seem to have at least three stories. I guess boxes and boxes of overseas books fly every week to some distribution centre where they then get sent along to the stores along with the far larger bulk of German-language books.
For any readers from Germany, booklooker.de is great for books. You can buy used and new books with an extremely efficient, no-nonsense user interface. Fulfilled by large and small bookstores and even private sellers. You see the actual vendor before you buy.
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