Would you be surprised to discover that the two dominant online booksellers, Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble, are nowhere near the cheapest online stores? They may have the lowest discounted prices, but when you factor in shipping and handling charges, they may not give you the best deals.

Whether you're buying books for pleasure or research, browsing the major online bookstores on the Internet can be a time-consuming effort. Fortunately, there are a few good online shopping services that donÕt sell books, but search through inventories of many online bookstores, all at once, to help find books at the best prices.

Best Book Buys, http://bestwebbuys.com/books/, was one of the first comparison-shopping agents on the Internet back in 1997. It searches a wide variety of almost 25 online booksellers, from Amazon.com to VarsityBooks.com. You can search by title, author, ISBN or keyword. A list of stores selling that book will appear in order by price, starting with the lowest price.

If you want to buy the book or want more information, just click on the "BUY" link next to the bookstore and the bookstore's Web site will open in a new window where you can order the book. Best Book Buys offers a "Customer Rating" guide for each bookstore so that if you are not familiar with some of the stores, you can see how others rate them in terms of on-time delivery and customer service. Check out "Hot Deals" to find additional money-saving deals when you buy online.

Another book-search and price-comparison service is AddALL, http://www.addall.com/, which searches and compares more than 40 sites. Not only does AddAll include the major online retailers, it also searches used, out-of-print and rare-book bookstores, such as Abebooks, Alibris and Bibliofind. A nice feature of AddALL is that is doesn't carry any annoying advertising.

DealTime, http://media.dealtime.com/books.html, is another free online comparison-shopping service. In addition to the standard searches of title, author and ISBN, DealTime features a “full search” to find any book by series title, keyword, publisher, publishing year or LCCN and an "advanced search" that uses Boolean operators. It even has a "Browse by Subject" category.

One of the biggest drawbacks of online shopping is costly shipping fees. All three services factor those "hidden costs" into the total price, giving you a realistic picture of how much the book will cost at each store. In easy-to-read tables, each site shows not only purchase prices, but also total costs, including shipping and taxes. They also tell you how soon you might expect to receive the book.

So compare and save, and cuddle up with a good book!