BUYING BASEBALL BOOKS: A GUIDE

The web has made it easier than ever before to buy baseball books. But it still pays to know where to look. This page is devoted to providing enough information for readers to find the baseball books they want as easily and cheaply as possible.  The first part of the page focuses on purchasing new in-print books; skip down if you're only interested in finding remainders or used and rare books.

It's not that hard to find new and in-print books these days thanks to Amazon.com and its many imitators. Amazon remains the online bookstore with the widest selection of books of all types, and is still the best place to look for information on and reviews of books. Amazon also has the best search engine of any online bookstore, by far. Amazon.com may be the biggest and the best, but it is not always the cheapest. However, after a period of lower discounts, Amazon is now offering 30% off all mainstream titles priced at $15 or more. Most books priced between $10 and $14 are discounted 20%, and cheaper titles (along with many non-mainstream titles) aren't discounted at all. Shipping charges are $3.99 for the first book and 99 cents for each additional book, though Amazon is now offering a free shipping option for orders over $25. Barnesandnoble.com usually discounts hardcovers 20% and paperbacks 10%. They offer free shipping if you order 2 or more titles (shipping is $3.48 for one book).  B&N does offer a Readers Advantage program for $25 a year which gives members 5% extra off at BN.com and 10% extra off at B&N stores. Booksamillion.com, a book chain based in the southeastern United States, has recently sought to increase the attractiveness on the web outlet by offering membership to its Millionaires Club for only $5 and by giving Millionaires Club members an additional 10% off each book on its site (most of which already are offered at discounts slightly lower to Amazon's).  Besides Amazon & B&N, they are the only online bookstore which actually stocks most mainstream titles itself (as opposed to ordering from major book distributors).  Shipping is $3.98 for the first item and 99 cents for each additional item. They currently have a free shipping offer for orders over $25. All Direct Books offers between 38% off most hardcovers and paperbacks.  It offers UPS shipping based on the weight of the items, which is hard to figure out until you see your shopping basket, but my experience is that while their shipping charges for smaller orders may be a little more expensive than those of other net bookstores their charges often turn out to be cheaper for larger orders. USPS media mail shipping for $2.60 plus 85 cents per book is also available for small orders.  Currently they have a free shipping offer for orders over $99. Buybooks.com is currently claiming to offer books at prices 10% cheaper than Amazon's prices, and for most books that claim seems to hold true.  Most books that are discounted 30% at Amazon are discounted 37% at buy.com. Currently, buy.com laso offers free shipping on most books.  Buy.com is also the only net bookstore which usually discounts direct-to-remainder titles.  Alphacraze.com is a net bookstore with a pretty standard selection of about 500,000 titles. Mainstream hardcovers appear to be discounted by at least 30% while paperbacks are discounted more than 20%, but the store's exact price policy is hard to pin down at this time. USPS shipping charges are $3.88 for the first book and $1.09 for each additional book. Alphacraze has a repuation for listing out-of-stock books as available, so be wary if Alphacraze is the only store on the net that says it has a specific title in stock. Book Sense allows you to order from a local bookseller.  Discounts vary by bookseller, but they tend to be small or non-existent. What Book Sense does do is make it easy for local booksellers to offer a very large selection which compares favorably with virtually every bookseller on the net besides Amazon. Wordsworth is one independent bookstore that deserves special mention, partially since I spent so many hours of my youth poring over the store's bookshelves.  It discounts many hardcovers 15% and some paperbacks 10% - as it did long before the Web came along- and its shipping charges are $4.95 for the first book and 95 cents for each additional book. The Scholar's Bookshelf is a specialty bookseller which has long made new and closeout baseball books one of its specialties.   They have a very wide selection of baseball books, including some bargains, but you can find most books cheaper elsewhere on the web.  Some expensive baseball books from small presses, such as Scarecrow Books, are considered textbooks and are thus rarely discounted at any bookstore, including those on the net.  It's sometimes worthwhile looking for these at textbook specialty dealers.  Four such dealers on the net are Classbook.com, Big Words, VarsityBooks.com, and Ecampus, all of which offer small discounts - or free shipping - on virtually every book they have available. Online coupons are a great way to save money when buying from Amazon and other online stores, especially when you're placing a large order. The best places to find information on the current coupons for online booksellers are CouponCraze, eDealFinder, DailyeDeals, and DealofDay.com.   Yahoo! Shopping's books department usually features several of the above vendors - but I've found that prices there aren't always the same as at the home store, so Yahoo's mall is definitely worth checking out. The best price search engine for books is probably Dealtime, but even it doesn't search everywhere it could. Here is a list of all the useful price comparison engines for new in-print books. Dealtime AddALL Best Book Buys Pricescan mySimon Online Bookstore Price Compare AllBookstores BestEDeal BestBookDeal Pricegrabber

Another way to save at net bookstores is to make your purchases thru ebates.com (Please click on the banner ad at top of page to get there), which offers to refund affiliate fees it earns on your purchases back to you every quarter. Many of the bookstores mentioned above participate in this program. Sometimes it's quicker and easier to buy a book directly from the publisher. Here are twelve publishers who feature a significant line of baseball or sports books and sell directly to individual customers. Scarecrow Press McFarland & Co Rowan & Littlefield University of Nebraska Press University of Illinois Press Southern Illinois University Press University of Missouri Press Arcadia Publishing Sports Publishing Inc. The Sporting News Triumph Books Temple University Press One way to build a large baseball book collection is to buy a lot of remainders. Remainders are the books left over from print runs that distributors and booksellers decided they can't sell at the regular price. So these books end up being sold as remainders at substantially reduced prices, often as much as 80% off. Contrary to what you might think, you can find many excellent books and old bestsellers, some still in print and others out of print, available as remainders. I've bought many good baseball books off remainder tables or from remainder outlets. There are now several excellent remainder outlets selling on the Web, and you can also find remainders in some bookstores, including some lesser known book chains that deal exclusively in remainders. The best is probably Hamiltonbook.com, which is now in charge of the web sales of the well-known cataloguer Edward R.Hamilton.   Hamiltonbook.com now features almost all of Hamilton's stock online, and takes credit cards. Prices on remainders are always at least as low as other outlets', and postage is $3.50 plus 95 cents per book.  You can still pay only a flat $3 per order shipping charge if you send your order in by mail and pay by check. Hamilton also offers a limited number of new books at 30% off, and a free copy of their latest catalog is available upon request. Bookcloseouts.com is probably the largest dealer of remainders on the net. They claim to offer more than 5 million books. Prices and shipping costs are a bit higher than Hamilton, but they do take credit cards over the net, offer international shipping, and have a very large, worthwhile selection at most times. Barnes & Noble also has a decent section of remaindered baseball books. Half.com is a unique site which allows various companies and individuals to sell new and used books at a discounted price.  In reality, many of the books available seem to be remainders, some from the dealers we've already mentioned.  It's a site worth a look.  Shipping is $2.95 for each hardcover book, $1.95 for every other item. Many of the best baseball books are, unfortunately, out of print. Someday, when proposed systems that enable publishers to easily and cheaply print books on demand are readily available, this may not be much of a problem. But for now, it is. Fortunately, though, the Web has revolutioned the used and rare book business, providing a place for search engines and databases which enable customers and dealers to find each other much more easily. The easiest of this services to use, Albris, formerly Interloc, serves as a middleman in order to ensure your satisfaction. This makes ordering used books easier and safer, but also somewhat more expensive. The other major used book search services, including the huge Bibliofind (now part of Amazon) and Advanced Book Exchange databases, and the smaller Tomfolio.com, Used Book Central, and Antiqbook.com sites, expect users to order the books they find directly from the individual dealers. This is more complicated (for example, many small dealers don't accept credit cards), but on average a bit cheaper. Meanwhile, the best individual general used book store on the net is almost certainly Powell's Books of Portland, Oregon, which is currently offering free shipping on orders over $50.  The legendary Strand Books in Manhattan, New York is also worth a virtual visit.  Elephantbooks.com is another online used bookseller that may be worth a stop.  And if you're in a rush, Bookfinder.com will search thru Powells, Amazon.com, and many of the used book search services mentioned above, while AddALL features an excellent search thru the used book sites in addition to its other book search capabilities. (Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com both offer used and rare books. In B&N's case, the books offered are the exact same copies you'll find on other services but at significantly higher prices. It used to be that way at Amazon too, but these days you can find some bargains on used books and even new books in their zshops) .It's also quite worthwhile to check in occasionally at the auction site ebay (and Amazon.com Auctions if you want to be really thorough) to check which baseball books are being auctioned off at the moment; you'll often find very good values there.

There are a number of specialty used bookstores around the country that specialize in sports books and/or baseball books, and these are definitely excellent places to look for both specific titles and to figure out what you're looking for. In general, though, you may pay more buying from these specialty dealers. The most prominent dealer of out-of-print baseball books is R. Plapinger Baseball Books, P.O. Box 1062, Ashland, OR 97520, phone number (541) 488-1220, e-mail baseballbooks@opendoor.com. He offers a catalog of his non-fiction baseball books  (usually covering about 1000 books in 60 pages) for $4; catalog costs are refundable with an order. SABR members get 10% off each order. In addition to baseball books, he stocks baseball scorecards (and virtually anything that can be described as "baseball" and "print") and a separate catalog of non-baseball sports books is also available. He encourages want lists and will search for books he doesn't have in stock. Plapinger has sold his inventory of baseball fiction to Mike's Baseball Books, which is run by Mike Wickham.   You can obtain a catalog from Mike of either his non-fiction baseball books or his fiction baseball books for $2; both are $3 (refundable off first purchase). Each catalog lists approximately 1000 titles. He sells on the Internet thru Advanced Book Exchange and can be reached by e-mail at melbawick@aol.com. You can send mail to Mike's at PO Box 211483, Chula Vista 91921, or reach him by phone at (619) 267-4828 evenings. Archer's Used & Rare Books, located at 104 S. Lincoln St. in Kent, OH 44240, by Kent State University, is another used book dealer who deals in baseball books. He stocks about 2000 titles and issues a catalog listing approximately 650 books 3 times a year.   You can be put on the mailing list for this catalog  (please specify the baseball catalog; Archer's has several) by e-mailing the store at pbauer@core.com or by phone at (330) 673-0945. The Georgetown Book Store, at 7770 Woodmont Avenue in Bethesda, MD 20814, has a huge stock of reasonably priced used baseball books.  The store is open from 10am to 6pm seven days a week, and is near an inexpensive (free on weekends) parking lot.  If you're looking for a specific title, you can call the store at (301) 907-6923, and ask for the owner, Andy Moursund, who says that only he knows where all the baseball books are buried in the nooks and crannies of his store. Another store well known for its baseball books is the Austin Book Shop, at 104-29 Jamaica Ave, Richmond Hills in New York, phone number (718) 441-1199 (store is open to the public on Saturdays from 10am to 4pm).   You can now browse their selection of over 2000 baseball titles at their web site.  Wayne Greene Baseball Books has a catalog available of its over 800 offerings for $3.00.  You can order a catalog from Greene at 945 West End Avenue, #5D, New York, NY 10025. He can be reached by phone at 212-662-2104 or by email at greensparks@worldnet.att.net.  SABR members are entitled to a 10% discount . If you still can't find a specific book that you're looking for, your last best hope is to put the word out by telling a book search service that you want this book. There are many places on the net; three free ones that I've heard of are the BookSearch Big Link, Out of Print, and Abracadabra Booksearch To Baseball Book Survey, Part 1 To Suite 101:Baseball Comments and suggestions are welcome. Last Updated 11/11/2003