How to buy books cheaply online

In the world of online book sales, it pays to plan ahead. Having received three books for Christmas, I decided to order a fourth online so that I would have it to read when I was finished the others.

Given that the first present was 'Ross O'Carroll-Kelly's Guide to South Dublin', however, it was clear that I wouldn't be sorted for reading material for all that long.

I had had some success with Abe.com (above right) before, when the only copy of European Cinema by Elizabeth Ezra to be found in Dublin was on Eason.ie for some usurious sum like €70 or €80. Thankfully I went looking around the start of the semester, so the book was able to limp home from somewhere in the UK in time for presentations and essay.

This time around I didn't even bother browsing shops for Niccolo Ammaniti's 'I'll Steal You Away' (below left), the next novel by the author of 'I'm Not Scared', which was made into a sunny Italian coming-of-age/crime thriller by Gabriel Salvatores I particularly enjoyed. Great writer, though he probably sells fewer copies of his books here than Ross O'Carroll-Kelly does in Italy.

The Abe site allows you to trawl discount book sellers all over the place, so if it's a well-known book you can even pick how you would like it bound or the picture on the cover of a particular print. This is because of the Ryanair-style pricing in which everything is 50c or $1 and it all depends on the postage.

So order placed, processed and dispatched on one day, 15 January. The nearest seller is Lakewood, Washington. The confirmation e-mail says: 'Approximate Shipping Speed: 10 - 28 business days.' Grand. Except that by 7 March, still no sign of the book.

A customer service response by email states: 'International Standard mail usually takes 3-6 weeks to arrive, but can in some instances take as long as 8-12 weeks due to customs delays.' They suggest I get back to them after 12 weeks have elapsed, so I emailed them again last week. I got a much more conciliatory response agreeing my order should have arrived by now, and offering me any book I want from their stock as they have no more of 'I'll Steal You Away'.

But then this morning, a day after I reply suggesting a book, the first one arrives after some 14 weeks and one day. The next thing to arrive is an e-mail from them saying 'Delivery Status Notification: Failure' regarding my book request. I tried mailing them once more to make sure I wasn't going mad, and then decided it was a sign the matter was closed.

So the moral of the story is, for bargain books online, get ready to wait. It at least is something I couldn't get here, and for the princely sum of Stg£6.18 (€7.71 in today's money). I admit I could have done nothing and just got my book eventually. But come on, 99 days - a man once swam from Cape Cod to France in 73 days. The final irony is that I've since started reading the Harry Potter series from scratch - more about which another time - so I won't even be reading this one for some time yet.

Update
23 April 1651

It seems one of my emails to them did get through after all, and now I'm being sent the fifth Harry Potter book in apology. They also asked for positive feedback on the abe site about the seller, a request to which I obliged readily. If I was a gambler I would start a sweep on the number of weeks book number two takes to get here!

Update 2
14 May 1321

Replacement book in hand, arrived yesterday after just 20 days. Perhaps the first one was randomly selected for a customs check or something, as this was twice as large and came from the same place. The conclusion remains the same: if in a rush, don't buy discount books online!

The coincidence coin

Although, like everyone else, they happen to me all the time, I don't pay too much heed to coincidences. Still, it's great when they work in your favour.

Despite working full-time and all over the clock in rolling news, I was away for both the death of John Paul II and that of Charles Haughey, which from an Irish media standpoint were the stories of 2005 and 2006 respectively. (An aside: Agence France Presse always refers to the Haughey era as 'corruption-tainted premierships' - a catch-all phrase that rings so vaguely it would fit Mugabe equally as well, indeed it probably has.)

In the case of Haughey, I was halfway up the side of Sydney's Harbour Bridge (right) telling an older couple all about how the media had been planning for this event for at least the previous 18 months, and I had managed to circumvent a tonne of boring extra work. They thought this attitude was great!

Yet I must be improving, given that I dedicated two months' work to a special election website last year, and tapped up plenty on the recent coffee-starved morning of Bertie's bowing out that is already the story of 2008.

There's a flipside to this coincidence coin too, in that I have stayed at home when bad things happen in other parts. To start, I was questioned by Tim over a pint in O'Sheas [Clonskeagh] in November '03 about why I hadn't taken any city breaks despite saying that I would once I had a decent salary. I replied by saying I was looking into a solo trip to Istanbul. The next day, truck bombs killed dozens of people in the city in Turkey's biggest ever suicide attack. The following Spring, I had half-made plans with Ollie to visit Madrid in the same month as the train bombings.

I can think of a few other not-so-near misses, like London being first on my list for a trip in 2005, though I didn't have a specific date in mind and ended up going some months after the 7 July attacks.

But ultimately it's a fast move in my world from the thought of an apparent connection to the realisation that, for better or worse, it was simply random. And I'm sure the foregoing says as much about my newsjunkie tendencies as it does about coincidence!

Little shopping, mostly horrors

Nestling in at the IFI, Sunday afternoon. The movie was The Orphanage (right), a horror that could have been a great drama about living with the echoes of child abuse. Instead it played off the emotional potency of tragedies involving children, exploiting a ready excuse to round up the usual clichéd devices and dole them out at regular intervals.

You can picture the scene: a desolate vista of emotionally distraught characters whose lives have been permanently ruined by traumatic events in the past.

Except that actually describes Saturday afternoon, in Belfast. It was the most grisly tourist happy fun bus I've ever taken, even if the guide's patter was unintentionally hilarious at times. Myself and Megan had a great time seeing Jonatha Brooke perform candidly in front of a fraction of her usual crowd, but I have to say it seems the ten years I put off visiting Belfast to allow for the bad old days to disappear made for an overly optimistic timeframe.

I couldn't decide which eyesore was worse. There's the sectarian 'peace line' that uses corrugated fencing to separate the Falls Road and the Shankill Road, with the road between the two closed all weekend. The two roads themselves, which basically consist of a series of tit-for-tat, violence-glorifying acts of painted vandalism wedged in between dilapidated buildings and angry-looking men with no hair. Or the five-metre blast wall outside the old courthouse right in the centre of the city, a car bomb retardant that is so thick it doesn't even stick out at first glance because it looks big enough to be a subsidiary court building.

Of course the times are changing, as the tour bus lady says proudly and cheerfully, because we've got a 24-hour Tesco 'right here in the city' (on the side of a dual carriageway). You had to laugh at its inclusion alongside the rest of the travelling shop of horrors, and I can vouch that 6.55pm on a regular Friday evening was more like that of a Bank Holiday evening in Dublin, with only restaurants and pubs open.

So while one must be seen to be politically correct about Northern Ireland, I think they know most of us down here don't go there too often. We were practically cheering at the sight of Dublin unfolding before our eyes on the drive back down an empty A1/M1. For fans of Shakespearean imagery, it was grey and wet when we left Belfast, giving way to bright, bright sun due south. Enough said.