One of the sites I always link to in my ‘Where to Buy’ section is the Book Depository.

They fast established themselves as a rival to Amazon for cheap books. So what they have to say about themselves:

About The Book Depository
The Book Depository was founded in 2004 with the aim of making "All books available to All" through pioneering supply chain initiatives, republishing and the digitizing of content. It is a continuing project, still in its infancy, and one of the most ambitious ventures in the book industry.

All books available to All
Currently, The Book Depository is able to ship 1.8 million unique titles, within 48 hours, from our fulfillment centre in Gloucester, United Kingdom. This figure is increasing everyday. Apart from publishers, distributors and wholesalers, we even list and supply books from other retailers! Amazingly, we are also able to arrange the reprint of over 300,000 out of print titles which, again, we can dispatch from Gloucester within 48 hours.

Free Worldwide Delivery
The Book Depository is an international bookseller shipping our books free of charge, worldwide, to nearly 90 countries. By working with various world postal authorities and other carriers, we are always looking to add more countries to this list and will work to do so in the future.

When I first read that statement I was impressed, though that has since dwindled a lot. Also the digitization mentioned has never come about, yet, hopefully some day.

When they first launched their site was plain, a bit ugly, easy to navigate, but a nightmare to find anything. In fact if you typed in the full title of a book you were after, chances are you’d get several hundred results, and yours would usually be on the last page. That’s how bad their search function was.

Near eight months since I raised these points with Mark over there, we’ve had changes. In fact the reason it’s taken so long seems to be because they’ve revamped the entire site. They’ve made a lot of improvements, and a few back slides as well.

The first thing is the site design theme, gone is the slim and flat design, we have a more rounded, quasi 3D design now. And I feel it looks a lot better. Sleeker, cleaner and sharper. Though the increased load time is a bit of a draw back I feel. The old site would take barely 10-15 seconds to load, this one is taking an average of 30-35 seconds.

The one aspect of the new design I hate is Google maps. I do not like the idea that what I’m buying, and the location I’m at is being plastered on the website home page. Sure it’s only a few seconds, but I still find it a bit unnerving. This should be an option, where the account holder can either opt in or out, not something that’s set in stone.

Moving into the accounts section, we get to the bit a lot of people don’t seem to like much, and I concur, The Wish List.

The way this is set up isn’t very good IMO. The thumbnails and titles are all that’s needed. They should have carried over the old wish list into the new design. I do like how they’re now allowing you to make the list open, so it’s more like the Amazon list now. I do think a widget for blogs would be a good addition as well. The notes box, just feels like wasted space to me.

Where they have made a huge leap forward is the search functions. In the old one you could put in a book title (lets say Aria) and you’d get pages of out of stock books, utterly unrelated to the search term.

Now however you put in a term it brings up titles actually relevant to the search term. For example put in Aria and it actually brings up the manga Aria straight away. They also have a detailed search, allowing you to properly search for specific titles only, So put in Aria and Kozue Amano, and you only get the Aria manga, which is brilliant.

The other great aspect is that finally Manga has it’s own category, something I’ve been bugging them for for ages. This makes spot buying so much easier, especially with the new Editors Picks, and Top 20 list.

Looking for manga there has just gotten so much easier.

One area they’ve failed in, and may ultimately lead to me stopping linking to them, is their pricing. Recently they’ve increased their prices considerably. what’s more on several new releases I’ve found they’re charging more than the cover price. I’ve seen titles with a cover price of £5.99 being sold for £7.40-7.90, which is way to excessive.

Overall, the new look is better and it’s easier to navigate and find stuff. The little niggles I have should be smoothed out over time, I hope.