Battle of the booksellers

Now I dont know about you guys but when im in a book-shop I could honestly spend hours browsing and never get bored.

Angus and Robertson, Dymocks, Borders......They are like my second home, which in a way, is quite sad when you think about it ....

Having said that, there is quite a bit of competition between the leading book-stores. Although they are totally different from one another the one thing they have in common is the pricey value of their books.....

An example is this: You want to buy a book, let's just say your getting a little too obsessed with the world of vampires and are thinking of buying the final Twilight book in the series, "Breaking Dawn". So you walk into Angus and Robertson, you see the book, you hold it, you turn it over and sooner than you can say "RIP OFF" you've put the book down again and walked out of the bookstore. Probably towards Target where you can get the book for a cheaper and more reasonable 35% off.

Angus and Roberton retails the book at $25.99 and Dymocks at a slightly higher $29.99. It doesn't seem like much, but the fact is, us book-lovers will go through a novel sooner that it takes for our lazy boyfriends to watch the movie and therefore, we go through books pretty quickly. So we buy more books. Probably an average of two books a month. So when we add it up, by the end of the month we would have spent over 50 dollars on two novels.

But what about the times when we see a novel that catches our eye from a far distance and you just KNOW that it's going to be AWESOME and reading this book will make you COOL (somehow) and you will be filled with knowledge and great conversation starts due to the information that it will feed to your brain.....what about the random splurges you get, when your not actually planning on buying anything but you see this book and just KNOW it will change your life? This happens to me pretty much every time I walk past a book-store......It's like an epiphany.....like i've met my soulmate......like destiny.........

Ok maybe I'm getting carried away....but the point is, people that love books are willing to pay for them even though sometimes we feel that it is a tad of a rip-off. But what are some other alternatives that can enable us to save some money but still manage our doses of literature?

I was lucky enough to discover the answer to this question just a couple of weeks ago when I went shopping with my boyfriend to Newtown. After much pestering and pleading, I finally got him to walk the slightly back-breaking walk all the way to the end of King Street (towards Broadway) to this amazing second hand bookshop that I always used to go into as a younger teenager. (Newtown was quite literally my favorite place in the world as a thirteen year old goth chick).

Now this is book-store is amazing. You can basically find any book you want, and it's HUGE. It's even double story! There are magazines from the 80's with frizzy and perm haired women on the front cover, novels, essays, speeches, enclyclopedias, books on anything from german history to english literature to various breeds of cats and other completely random crap. And the best thing about it............ITS CHEAP! Sure it's second hand but who really gives a shit?

About a month ago I decided I wanted to read the book "Interview with a vampire" (after all this sudden vampire phenomenon who could blame me?) So i walked into Angus and Robertson but was dissapointed at the tag underlining the overly priced cost. So I thought "eh screw it. I'll buy it from K-mart"

But tragedy hit and I soon discovered K-mart didn't stock the book.

My plan B had failed.

When I felt like there was nothing more I could do than simply purchase the book for thirty dollars at A&R I remembered the bookshop in Newtown.

So I found the book, and paid $7.95!! Is that a bargain or is THAT A BARGAIN!!!!!

In conclusion, here is my advice for saving a bit of cash when it comes to buying books..........just go to a second hand store......it prolly has more meaning knowing it was owned by someone else and it has it's own history.......

Heres a list of heaps cool and trendy second hand stores in Sydney:

• Sappho books and cafe - Glebe
• Elizabeth's secondhand Bookshop - Newtown
• Gertrude and Alice Cafe Bookstore - Bondi Beach
• T's Book Shop - Randwick
• Moores Bookshop - Newtown (the place I found my bargain!)
• George ST book and CD Exchange - George ST, Sydney