Thread:Zack Tan/@comment-208.190.39.157-20150831211231/@comment-27168967-20160524115254

50.27.4.198 wrote: Just checked, amazon.jp ships internatinoally as well, you'll need to pay $10 extra for shipping and other extra stuff. The total came out to be $20. No need to wait for your friend to go to japan man. Clearly you don't understand the trouble of international purchase for me.

If it's simply one book, then everything is trivial (Import Tax, GST, Card's service charges and the like). However, I'm a particularly heavy reader and the number can go up to about ten books per month (manga included). Add to the fact that she usually takes several months in between to go to Japan... Heck, imagine all the extra postal charges and tax money I have to dish out just to get everything from Japan if I order all those online. With my friend there, and she usually brings along several of her pals, I can forget about all those extra payment. Not to mention they usually have some extra luggage weight to spare to bring the goodies back. Though I would need to split the penalty with  her if the weight just went overboard.

Next, package condition. This is literally the cause that have me stopped using international transit to buy something. This is probably trouble on my end (my country's service agents). I can deal with some scrunched up packaging. However, I lost two packages before. Just went up and poof! Can't find where in transit did the things disappeared to. Though it's not exactly expensive (manga) but the trouble I have to go through (paying for another) kinds of let the heat runs cold.

There's also a merit in having a friend there on the spot. First, she acts as my surveyor. She's as much a book lover as I am, probably more so when I consider the number of books she buys overshadows mine by a margin of two to one. We usually catch notice of a certain series when it actually becomes an anime. However, this can have some dire consequences... as in when it's a particularly old series that it's hard to search for the books anymore unless you really dig into some second-hand shops. Not to mention some books had already been circulated when I was still a toddler. You won't really know about these unless you visit Japan.

Also, most animes nowadays just never really go all the way like how the original stories unfold... Or that some books are actually a good read but they were never noticed because it never garnered enough attention from the masses. Why wait years until I hear the names on the screen than to just chuck money into her account when she e-mails me a list of potential good reads.