I've recently begun to look into building a small home library without spending an arm and a leg on the price of new books. My immediate inclination was to hop

I've recently begun to look into building a small home library without spending an arm and a leg on the price of new books. My immediate inclination was to hop onto Amazon and find as many used titles at $1 or less as I could. Only after filling my cart did I discover my $24 worth of books would cost $80 to ship. I was disappointed but continued searching for a better solution. I'm in the process of writing an article about this search but I can reveal that so far Half.com has been the most affordable at $1.89 shipping for most books. It seems that shipping cost per book is unavoidable but I'm glad these gigantic sorting operations like Thriftbooks are around to repurpose stuff that'd otherwise be decomposing in a landfill. With regards to pricing the actual books, I wonder what kind of info is out there when it comes to the same book costing $1 or $.01, which is more likely to sell. For non-trade paperbacks I'd say my upper limit per book is $5, but I feel just as ready to buy a good book for $1 as I would for $.01 (and in some cases having the price so low gives me a second thought that I might want to avoid purchasing said book because it might be in awful condition compared to one at $1). I wouldn't mind if these sellers ended up with 75 cents of my money rather than 7 cents per book.