(MONEY Magazine) – How much fun is shopping? Let's say you want to buy a particular book. The nearby shop doesn't have it, the chain outlet at the mall has only the more expensive hardback version, and it's 20 minutes to the confusingly organized superstore. At what point does the investment of time trooping from store to store cancel out the potential for saving a few dollars? At what point, exactly, are you having fun?

I'm skeptical. I buy things, of course, and I always want the best deal. But I don't like standing in line, salesclerks bug me, cavernous retail spaces make me uneasy, and I'm invariably tempted by some object that I didn't set out to buy. (And so I own, for instance, too many books that I haven't read.) What's more, I don't think my attitude makes me some kind of deviant consumer. As evidence, I cite the spate of declarations that buying stuff via the Web is no longer strictly for tech hounds. Think about it: You can comparison shop without looking for a parking space.

But while these reports tell you all about the trend--how Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble Online are selling more and more books over the Internet--they rarely examine when it really makes sense to buy a particular product via the Web, and which site offers the best deal. After all, aren't there times when you'll do better at the store (or with a mail-order catalogue) than you will online?

Because online shopping seems on its way to reaching a certain critical mass, and because of the dearth of good consumer reporting about it, we at Money have decided to devote regular space to the topic, under the rubric Virtual Consumer. The goal is to separate the Web's real deals from the hype.

AMAZON VS. B&N

Our debut topic, book buying, stems from a simple question. So Amazon.com ("Earth's Biggest Bookstore") and Barnes & Noble ("The World's Largest Bookseller Online") are the top players on the Web right now. Which one is better?

My experiences, laid out below, have convinced me that it's Amazon by a nose--with the important caveat that, because of the shipping charges, you can sometimes save time and money by skipping the Web altogether. And along the way, I found a great Website for finding even cheaper used books.

First I came up with a list of several dozen titles--fiction and nonfiction, everything from current bestsellers to classics to titles that I'd had a hard time finding. Then I spent some time exploring both www.amazon.com and its newer competitor, www.barnesandnoble.com.

Both sites serve up a wide array of extras, from reviews to author interviews to spotlights on particular offerings. I say skip it all. If you just want to browse, even a jammed bookstore beats endless clicking around looking for something interesting. Besides, the mostly positive "reviews" can be about as useful a measure of quality as jacket blurbs are.

Each site has a search function, reachable by clicking a button in the upper left corner of your browser window. I started by searching for bestsellers and other recent releases. Both sites offered big titles like The Street Lawyer by John Grisham and The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas J. Stanley and William D. Danko for 30% off. Sounds great.

Really, though, practically every bookstore discounts blockbusters like these nowadays and keeps plenty of them in stock. The big Borders store near my office had both of these, each discounted 30%, and, of course, without shipping charges. So if bestsellers are all you want, there's not much reason to log on.

The Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites beat regular bookstores by discounting practically every hardcover or softcover book published in the past year or two. For example, The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank's critical 1997 look at advertising's role in the "rise of hip consumerism," cost about $16, or 30% off list, at both sites. At the nearby Borders, I got a clerk to track it down in the history section; it cost $20.65. Similarly, the 1996 paperback sixth edition of Burton G. Malkiel's well-known A Random Walk down Wall Street was about $12.75 on both sites--20% lower than the $15.95 cover price at Borders. (Borders and Bertelsmann have announced plans to start selling online in the near future.)

The two sites pretty much matched each other on a range of such titles. The few exceptions usually favored Amazon--such as Class Trip, a well-reviewed thriller from 1997 by Emmanuel Carrere (not in stock at my Borders), which was about $14 on Amazon and $15.40 on Barnes & Noble.

Small potatoes, I know. But like many book buyers, I don't limit myself to what's been published in the past two years, and it was among the older books and classics that Amazon really began to distinguish itself. For instance, I'd been wanting a copy of the 1899 economics classic The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous consumption" and would probaby feel a little uneasy in mega-stores himself. (So maybe I'm a slightly deviant consumer.) Barnes & Noble listed only a Penguin paperback for $8.76. Amazon, on the other hand, gave me five choices, the cheapest being a (pretty much identical) Dover Thrift paperback for just $1.60. Further experimentation convinced me that this was no fluke: Amazon invariably listed more choices for older books that have gone through many printings, offering lower-priced options than either Barnes & Noble's site or my local Borders.

Next I decided to go ahead and buy The Millionaire Next Door, A Random Walk down Wall Street and The Theory of the Leisure Class. Standard shipping charges on the two sites were identical: $3 plus 95[cents] per book. I ordered the titles from both sites within a half hour of each other. The Barnes & Noble order, which totaled $42.77, arrived via UPS second-day air three business days later. The $35.61 Amazon order came Priority Mail the day after that. (Totals include shipping but not sales tax, which Amazon charges Washington State residents and Barnes & Noble adds to orders from New York, New Jersey and Virginia.) At Borders I would have paid $42.30, pretax.

This raises two important caveats about shipping. First, if you order only one or two books, shipping charges can wipe out your discount. Second, if for some reason you really must have a particular book within a week, buy it at a store even if it means driving all over town. Case in point: We needed books to photograph for this article, so we paid Amazon extra for its "Next Day Air" option ($8 per shipment plus $2.95 per book). Our order was misrouted through Hawaii and took four business days to arrive.

BEYOND THE BIG NAMES

Usually, though, I'm willing to trade the time I saved searching for a book for time spent waiting for it to arrive. Which brings me to one last search. I'd been looking for a hardcover version of John McPhee's 1986 Rising from the Plains and found it at the sites of both Barnes & Noble ($19.95) and Amazon ($16.10). Then I went to www.mxbf.com, which lets you search a bunch of sites where used-book shops have posted their wares. This search can be slow by Web standards, but MX Bookfinder finally spat back a mammoth list of choices. Picking a $10 first edition from the Open Book in Mansfield, Mass., I e-mailed a query and got back a response later that day saying the book was on hand and would be set aside for me. Dealing with individual shops like this often means you can't simply punch in a credit-card number, and in this case I sent off a check for $15 (counting the UPS shipping charge); the book arrived about two weeks later.

Over the past several months, MX Bookfinder has helped me buy books from shops in Ohio, Georgia and Indiana, and I've yet to have a problem. So, along with Amazon, I keep MX Bookfinder bookmarked for future searches--after I read the books I just got. Then again, I saw a magazine ad for The Conquest of Cool calling it "an indispensible survival guide for any modern consumer." Well, that sounds hip. I think I'll buy it.

E-mail Virtual Consumer questions, comments or experiences to virtual_consumer @moneymail.com.