So I'd like to purchase a few chinese go books, but I have a few questions.

1) What are the best sites to use?

I found Tchan001's post on his blog which was immensely helpful, but are there any others which others recommend?
Amazon is definitely the easiest site for me because I"m familiar with it, but I will restrain myself from ordering until i learn a little more.

2) How much does shipping generally cost and how long does it take?
I heard some stories of shipping reaching anywhere between $25-$60. Can someone clarify shipping costs?

This post a bit old now, but I'll just give you my experience. I ordered a bunch of books from Amazon.cn. If you use google chrome it will ask if you want to translate the page. Choose "Always translate Chinese" and at that point you are basically viewing Amazon.cn in English all throughout.

I ordered every volume of Lee Chang Ho's L&D Tesuji and Tsumego series. The price of each book was something like $3. The total order (after shipping) came to about $180. Incidentally, it was cheaper to use Priority Shipping than Regular shpping. no idea what that was about, but whatever.

But they do take International Credit Cards and they do ship internationally, so you're pretty much all set, and they have a large selection. I would recommend going that route if for no other reason than that Amazon is a big company, and I suspect you're less likely to encounter problems.