A good online bookshop
I have traditionally ordered books only in bookshops. Walking into them, reading the back-covers, the author bios, one or two pages off the content and maybe even the preface before I buy the book. But sometimes you want titles that are not in stock and there’s an inevitable promise of ‘We will get it,’ and then repeated enquiries.
So I decided to do some shopping online for a change. Started looking for good bookshops. There are a few like rediff bookshop, a1books.com, bookcafe.in and others. But all of them are crappy.
I was specially surprised to see how badly a1books.com is designed, after all they are supposed to be a 100% online agency. It seems they don’t believe in there own stuff. There’s no bestseller list, no categorized way to see top-selling stuff in each category, etc.
And bookcafe.in, it’s promoted by the guys who own the Book Cafe chain that I frequent so often, but their online website is really bad. It convinces me they don’t want to sell online.
I thought buying books online in India was a bad idea and was about to give up until I got to flipkart.com. This is one well-designed, user-friendly, nicely indexed online bookstore and I had fun browsing it.
So I ordered some books and hopefully in 3-11 days I will be the proud owner of:
1. Starship Troopers by R A Heinlein (at 19% discount!)
2. Business Stripped Bare by Richard Bronson
3. Entrepreneur Journey by Sramana Mitra
and my wife will own:
1. The White Teeth by Zadie Smith
