I needed less than a buck for free shipping and in the past I have used the Dover Thrift Edition paperbacks which usually run $1.00 - $2.00. Well, now Amazon has added to these paperbacks a $1.99 sourcing fee. What the hell is a sourcing fee?!? ... other than amazon selling a $1 book for triple the price? Does Amazon charge a sourcing fee for anything else?

I asked the same thing a while back...I was able to find a few that didn't have that [recently The Ugly Duckling, and a book of poetry by Rudyard Kipling]

here's my thread, it didn't get a whole lot of traffic.
http://www.dvdtalk.com/forum/showthr...light=sourcing

To me, sourcing is part of running a business--that should be taken into account when determining a sales price. The ironic thing is, I ordered 1 DVD [preorder] and those two books which were in stock. They shipped me the two books via Airborne, they arrived in like two days. Must've cost five bucks. But then they have to recoup their costs on the sourcing fee? [I placed the order using Super Saver, and took whatever shipping option was the default for that.] So it seems like Amazon is trying to make money on one hand, yet waste it on another.

Thanks for the link. Good to know there are still a couple without the bogus added charge. Still, it was better when I could pad the order with something I might actually read. Sometimes you just have to shake your head in disbelief at Amazon.

They could have also added this fee to many of the books to stop people from padding their orders with the books to get over the free shipping threshold.