After I posted earlier about the advantages of Amazon Prime, I got an email from one of the blog’s foreign readers, presuming that free shipping was only good for US addresses, which is correct. But that leads me to two thoughts:

• If you’re looking for free shipping everywhere, try The Book Depository. They’re a UK-based retailer that ships for free worldwide. I’ve used them when ordering British Peanuts books not usually sold in the US, as well as when ordering gifts for people overseas, and now that I think about it, should even use it when I need to get sample copies of some of the books which I publish into foreign hands. (And later tonight, I’ll be using it to order a German book… they don’t carry all books from everywhere, but there’s some foreign titles to be had.) And yes, the AAUGH Blog is now an affiliate of The Book Depository, so if you follow any of those links and order something, even if it’s not what we linked to, this blog gets a kickback, at no extra cost to you.
• I haven’t checked if you can actually sign up for Amazon Prime if you’re accessing from a foreign address… but if you can, even if they won’t ship for free to you, it may have some other uses. Think about it – let’s say you frequently have to send messages to people in the US, get some relatively short pieces of text into their hands, and they don’t all have email… well, you could send an international letter, probably run you a buck or so and take a week or two to get there. But if you use Amazon Prime to buy them a copy of My Dinosar Address Book and write your note as the “gift” message… it gets delivered in two business days for one buck! (Yes, that has nothing to do with Peanuts, and everything to do with the fact that I like to find ways to abuse systems.)

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