Bookworld

Web Site: www.bookworld.com.au

On price alone Bookworld is the only competitive online Australian bookstore. A number of top-selling books have special online prices which are extremely low. However the site falls down in other areas.

The one advantage that Bookworld has is price. Combined with a lower price differential between Australian and US stores and higher postage costs for books, an Australian online bookstore begins to look competitive. Bookworld has enhanced this advantage by having prices in the store at least 10% below recommended price, and offers a superb $6 postage rate all over Australia.

The Bookworld site design is acceptable, albeit a little amateurish however it serves its purpose well. Generally there is about a paragraph description for each book, so on the information front Bookworld falls severely behind it's US counterparts.

Payments are made through Telstra's SureLink service, which is a secure system that can save your credit card details. This means that if you have previously used SureLink you won't need to fill in your information again.

Searching in Bookworld is by way of an advanced search allowing you to fill in author, title and keywords at the same time. It is a good idea to do this as using a single search term by itself can lead to some less than successful results.

For some reason once postage is taken into consideration Bookworld is generally cheaper for hardback books but more expensive for softcover than the US stores. You have a greater chance of getting books by local Australian authors, but less of a chance of getting books written by US authors. However after postage is taken into consideration there isn't a huge amount of difference between the Online price and the normal street price.