One of my main gripes about living in the Philippines is how limited selections in bookstores usually are. Sometimes, release dates are even delayed. Unless a book is hyped up to a scary degree (e.g., Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, whatever book Dan Brown has pulled out of his ass), it will probably never see Philippine shores until way later. Don’t even get me started on poetry collections.
Another main complaint is that shipping out from online sellers like Amazon.com sets me back a bit because of the shipping and handling fees. Add to that the almost surreptitiously added customs fees and taxes, and it’s almost enough to stave me off of books. Almost. It’s kind of ridiculous how many hoops my friends and I have to go through to get to the books that we can never get here. I mean, we only want to read.
Enter Book Depository, a bookseller in the UK that proudly offers free shipping worldwide. When someone first directed me to the site, they hadn’t offered free shipping to the Philippines yet (which fed my already self-piteous outlook), but they opened their doors about two weeks ago, and I ordered books right away.
They said that books to be shipped to my area (‘elsewhere’) would take between 7-10 days and after obsessively checking my order (they offer tracking!), my packages arrived exactly 10 days after they’d been ‘dispatched,’ and except for a little warping that I can live with, I’m pretty darn happy with my books.
I got Sarah Manguso’s second poetry book, Siste Viator, Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories (which I got after listening to Chris Adrian read “The Indian Uprising” for The New Yorker podcast) and McSweeney’s No. 30. I’ve read a few from each collection, and I’m excited to get through all of them. Like I said, when the books got to me (delivered directly to my house, so NO CUSTOMS FEES, YES!), it was like getting manna from heaven.
Not that I would actually know what that felt like, but getting these books felt pretty darned magical to me.
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