I live in Argentina and I always buy books from an online bookstore located in England, it is much cheaper. And I have a subscription to a local library to read novels written in Spanish. The article is wrong when it says that "import restrictions make it a bureaucratic nightmare to purchase books from international internet sellers"; since books are not subject of import restrictions nor taxes. Capital controls are why people cannot transfer money to international bookstores and that's why they buy books from the more expensive local bookstores. The language is another barrier.
If it is a big package (5 large books or more), I have to pick them up at the Postal Office (nothing to pay or sign), that is 3 block away from my house. They even call me by phone to notify me that the books are there. If it is a small package, I receive them at home.
It's not bureaucracy, it's politics. Books don't pay taxes and the current government routed all of them to the customs office to make it more difficult to buy things from abroad and send dollars outside the country.
Before this government you can receive the books at your home.
Argentinian here. Yesterday i received a package of six books from Amazon at home. The package arrived 2 weeks later than Amazon's estimation, but besides that everything went smoothly. No extra charges or anything of that sort.
This is merely anecdotal, and the results are really quite random.
You might get it two weeks later at home, or you might have to pick it up at the customs at Ezeiza (about 3 hours trips from where I lived last time in happened) six months later with a 50% tax. Other packages simply never arrived.
Between the randomness, and the huge taxes added, average people don't even consider things like buying in Amazon. And definitely not even close to a scale of how it's done in the US.
Yes, it totally is. And i didn't mean for it to have any statistical significance.
But anecdotal data can help. I took the "risk" of buying books on Amazon only after asking other people about their (totally anecdotal) experiences with it. And now that i've had a good experience, i plan to keep using it despite the known problems. YMMV.
