Skip to main content 

Owing to the screen size of your device, you may obtain a better viewing experience by rotating your device a quarter-turn (to get the so-called “panorama” screen view).


Great Science-Fiction & Fantasy Works

  Science-fiction & fantasy literature: a critical list with discussions.

(click for menu)
You are here:  Home  »  Buying  »  Buying ( = this page)
(Click on any image above to see it at full size.)
You are here:  Home  »  Buying  »  Buying ( = this page)

You can get a site directory by clicking on the “hamburger” icon () in the upper right of this page.
Or you can search this site with Google (standard Google-search rules apply).
(Be aware that “sponsored” links to other sites will appear atop the actual results.)

Search term(s):


About Buying Books On Line


Quick page jumps:


“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
– On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft ,
Stephen King


Buying Books On Line, New & Used

If you want to buy a book currently in print, and want it new, and live within reasonable proximity to a good bookstore, well and fine. If you want to buy a used copy of a book—whether or not still in print—you can, if there are, near you, some used-book shops; but the odds of finding a given book in a given used-book shop are small to virtually nil. The answer to these problems is to buy your books on line.

My experience is that the best single source for books on line, new or used, is AbeBooks. Thus, throughout this site, whenever a book is listed with a link, that link is to the AbeBooks listing for that book. Note that such links are each one of two kinds: usually it is a search by book title and author name; but when it is for what I call a “preferred edition”—a particular edition of some book—it is a search by that edition’s ISBN. At times, books are listed here but not linked—typically because they are components of a recommended omnibus volume that is more convenient, and often rather less expensive, than acquiring each book separately. But, if you want to seek out unlinked individual copies of such omnibused works, you can use AbeBooks’ Search Page, which is also good for, obviously, searching out any books not listed here.

Return to the page top. ↑


About “Condition” for Used Books

There is a standard set of terms used by used-book sellers to describe the condition of the books they sell, and it behooves the potential buyer to be acquainted with those terms. While AbeBooks has a useful page describing all the many common terms, here is a quick summary of the essential ones (but see that linked page some possible modifying descriptors).

Return to the page top. ↑




Disclaimers  |  Privacy Policy

owl logo This site is one of The Owlcroft Company family of web sites. Please click on the link (or the owl) to see a menu of our other diverse user-friendly, helpful sites.
owl logo Like all our sites, this one is hosted at the highly regarded Pair Networks, whom we strongly recommend—click the link to learn more. (To get 20% off on hosting fees if you move to Pair, use code pairref-FyXypEEk)

(Note: All Owlcroft systems run on Ubuntu Linux and we heartily recommend it to everyone—click on the link for more information).


All content copyright © 2024 The Owlcroft Company
(excepting quoted material, which is believed to be Fair Use).

This web page is strictly compliant with the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) HyperText Markup Language (HTML5) Protocol versionless “Living Standard” and the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) Cascading Style Sheets (CSS3) Protocol v3  — because we care about interoperability. Click on the logos below to test us!




This page was last modified on Sunday, 4 February 2024, at 5:32 pm Pacific Time.