Another vote for bookdepository.com in order to avoid problems with the Swiss Customs. They send everything out separately, so if you order 8 books they will arrive in 8 separate packages.
The tax rate is very low on books in Switzerland. You need to buy around 200chf worth of books from abroad before you have to pay any tax on them and it's not often people do that.
And if you order from amazon they will take care of the tax (subtract german/uk sales tax and add swiss tax if applicable) so you don't have to worry about this.
I used to buy a lot of English books online but now I am saving a lot of money by using the Central Library in Zürich.They have masses of books in English fiction and non-fiction.Almost every village library in Switzerland has a section with English fiction as well.Try it out-you'd be surprised.If you are registered as living in Switzerland you can get a reader's ticket at any library.
erm...yeah..... The one in my village has a great selection but really ridiculous opening times, worse than the post office. It is so difficult to return books and I have been fined enough times, so I've gone back to Amazon and bookdepository.
Something else that I know Amazon UK is doing is that you can pre-pay the customs on an order. Don’t know if it applies to book orders, but if Swiss Customs don’t stop your order and charge for it you’ll get the pre-payment refunded by Amazon.
And the nice thing about the UK stores (I love Bookdepository) is that they often offer the UK Airport size of soft cover (in addition to the hard-cover and paperback).
It is about the same size as a hard-cover but much less expensive. Great to read without the magnifying glass.
It's possible to order English books on all the European Amazon web sites, not just amazon.co.uk . Is there any difference in the shipping charges to Switzerland for any of them?
The absolute best site I have found is bookfinder.com
You set the currency and your location, type in the author and/or title and then it brings up a column for new with delivery and a column for second-hand with delivery.
Websites that come up in the list include all the amazon sites, bookdepository, abebooks and lots of others.
I've bought lots of secondhand books and sheet music from it and it's fantastic for finding those hard to find books.
I use it all the time for my music teaching business and also for my phd studies (history, literary criticism etc) just to give you an example.
Yes, if you go to Amazon.de for instance, you can order English books, however the postage is usually higher and delivery times longer, so I'm presuming that most English books (the ones i buy, anyway) are sent from the UK. Maybe they keep stocks of the more popular titles in Germany which could be cheaper.
For Kindle books I have to buy through amazon.de. I'm presuming there are copyright complications.
Audiobooks -- from Audible anyway -- can be bought from any of the various country sites.