| Comment | @Nicole:
If you order from amazon.de, they knock off the value-added tax (16%?), and if you order six or eight books at a time, they wind up costing about the same as if you bought them in Germany.
I order from them roughly every month. In about one in five cases, the package either disappears, or shows up completely mangled. When a package gets lost, amazon sends a replacement for free; if it's mangled, they ask me to send the bad items back. (Amazon.de stupidly uses some umweltfreundlich, flimsy cardboard to send their packages overseas, even though the packages usually arrive with 30-40 meters of environmentally unfriendly plastic tape applied during their journey.) They reimburse me for the return postage, and if I spend $8 to return something terribly damaged, they credit me 8, EUR, which is a deal!
Hint: if you want to read a trilogy, order it as one item (if available). Then you pay only the shipping for a single item. Be careful about being greedy: if you try to order 25 books to lower the per-item shipping cost, you may go over the $200/day allowed by US customs, and wind up paying more (10% duty applied to the *entire* amount). The limit applies to the cost of the merchandise only, not the shipping.
I've been enjoying novels by Andreas Franz and Charlotte Link lately. Even though I read less than half as fast in German as I do in English, it's improving my German greatly. (Mal sehen -- ich fahre am 24.5. fuer drei Wochen nach Deutschland.)
Happy reading. |
|---|