BookFinder.com Journal

BookFinder.com continues to offer huge savings on mainstream current bestsellers. We periodically run price surveys to get a sense of prices across our bookseller network. Here’s what we found during our most current survey:

Posted by Anirvan at 8:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BookFinder.com searches the inventories of a wide variety of European book sites, including fnac, the large French book retailer. I was looking at the fnac site today, when I noticed that they were running a site-wide promotion featuring an upraised fist in their site header. It turned out be an ad for a 40th anniversary microsite featuring books and CDs associated with May 1968, a series of left-wing student protests that helped bring down the De Gaulle government.

And what a promotion. They’re pushing books, flogging CDs, running a blog, and organizing an “I Sing 1968” contest, where participants can win a trip Prague by submitting a YouTube video of themselves singing a song from 1968.

I know very little about France and its postwar history, and how May 1968 is remembered forty years on. What I do know that in the US, mass market retailers tend to shy away from politics, and that we have very conflicted views of 1960s/1970s political movements.

I just can’t contemplate Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.com doing a sitewide promo on the Kent State shootings and strike; the events seem to remain too divisive, too unresolved, for there to be a reasonable safe national consensus. Could a mainstream American ecommerce retailer safely do a site-wide promotion centered around the history of the Summer of Love? Yes. Roe v. Wade? No. Woodstock? Yes. Stonewall? No. The March on Washington? Yes (but no flippancy allowed).

So what’s going on here? Have the French come to a national consensus on May 1968? Is fnac being brave, or foolhardy? Is the promotion in good taste? This curious American wants your opinions.

[Now reading: Other Colors by Orhan Pamuk]

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Writer and bookseller Kevin Sampsell posted a great story about “the tribulations of a marquee changer” at Powell’s Books in Portland. Suffice it to say that it’s harder than it seems:

“Quite possibly the worst job at Powell’s is changing the marquee. I’m not one to complain usually but each time I go out there to change it, something horrible and life-threatening happens. You see, our marquee is old. And dirty. And the gutters where the letters are supposed to sit are often warped or totally broken. I’m lucky if I can fit more than a couple words on each line. It’s like writing haiku, but with less syllables. Somehow, yesterday, I was able to put a web address on there to promote our poetry contest. I was amazed at my achievement. But these rewards do not come without cost.”

More…

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Chrislands, a service that offers white-label ecommerce websites for booksellers, has been acquired by Canadian book marketplace AbeBooks.

We’ve known Lance and Jim from Chrislands since their days running Bookopoly, an online marketplace they ran from 1999 to 2003. Congrats, guys.

The Chrislands team will remain at their current location near Washington, DC. They’ll be following the same model as us. BookFinder.com was acquired by AbeBooks two and a half years ago, but we remain an independently managed subsidiary. We’ve enjoyed being able to draw upon AbeBooks’ resources, treating them as a consulting firm we can call upon as needed (e.g. we brought in their designers to help us do a big visual redesign). I expect Chrislands will be able to do the same.

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Asante Kahari, an “author of several urban fiction books” is suing Amazon.com and eBay for $500 million for helping sell used copies of his works. He claims that used bookselling is similar to illegal P2P piracy of music; he’s clearly betting that the judge has never heard of the right of first sale. (It’s a good thing nobody’s ever told him about libraries.)

Kahari’s complaint is rather amusing.

(via Techdirt)

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I was very disappointed to hear that Amazon.com’s print on demand subsidiary BookSurge has been suggesting to publishers that if they use a competing print on demand supplier, their books will no longer be offered for sale by Amazon.com.

A publisher’s choice of printing technology or supplier is a private internal decision. If this policy were to take effect, it would constitute shameful anti-competitive behavior of dubious legality. It’s as if Wal-Mart refused to stock a product unless the vendor used only a certain Wal-Mart subsidiary for outsourced customer service.

The story was broken by Angela Hoy at Writer’s Weekly:

“He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge’s system would be ‘taken down.’…Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the ‘buy’ button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we’d heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives…Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.” More…

More from PW Daily:

“Over the last year, BookSurge has been trying to cut into the market share of pod leader Lightning Source and is using the selling clout of Amazon to generate more business. ‘I feel like the flea between two giant elephants,’ said the head of one pod publisher about the upcoming battle between Lightning Source and BookSurge/Amazon. He said although the deal with BookSurge will be more expensive, he has no choice but to make the move since most of his authors expect their titles to be for sale on Amazon. He added that his company will also continue to use Lightning Source for printing as well. Amazon’s BookSurge mandate extends to traditional publishers as well as to online pod houses.”

(via Clive Keeble on the BookFinder Insider)

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Biblio.com just turned 5. The plucky little ecommerce site, the third largest used/rare book marketplace in the US, has gone through a series of recent technology and design upgrades.

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Canada-based marketplace AbeBooks has an AbeBooks.ca Canadian microsite now, along the lines of the Abebooks.com.au and Abebooks.co.nz sites.

Charlie and I laughed when we discovered the microsite — shouldn’t a Canadian company have a full-on Canadian site? This is what happens when your home market is one-tenth the size of your neighbor; I presume the same dynamic applies to Austrian companies with large German customer bases. It helps that Austria and Germany share a single currency, though I suppose it’s gotten much easier for Canadians to shop at US dollar-denominated ecommerce sites ever since the two currencies hit parity.

Previous: “Abebooks’ international marketing”

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The state of Indiana just passed HEA 1042, which requires dealers of sexually explicit materials to register and file a statement with the secretary of state. It also imposes a $250 filing fee and requires the secretary’s office to notify county officials of the “sexual” business. Indiana booksellers are deeply concerned that the law is too broad, and may target bookstores that sell books that deal with sex or sex education.

Should bookstores stocking racy romance novels, the Bible (the Song of Songs read literally), or Dr. Ruth’s Sex for Dummies have to become state-registered vendors of sexually explicit materials? The law seems arbitrary and unconstitutional.

BookFinder.com’s a member of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, which works to protect the rights of readers and booksellers. The ABFFE’s been working on an industry-wide effort against the law, with the Borders book chain, the Great Lakes Booksellers Association, and 15 Indiana independent booksellers. It may turn into a legal challenge down the road.

More details:

• “Sexual content law irks booksellers” (Indiana Star)
• ABFFE letter to governor last week
• Full text of the law (PDF)

[Now reading: Silverfish by Saikat Majumdar]

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I’ve been a big fan of the Open Library project since I first heard about it last year. I enjoyed participating in the Open Library Developers Day last week, where a group of library- and book-industry friends-of-the-project learned and brainstormed about the project. Two attendees posted writeups:

• Eric Lease Morgan, University of Notre Dame
• William Denton, York University

I’m particularly impressed by the Open Library team’s ability to work with a wide variety of university and national libraries to collect book data, as well as their deep thinking around identifiers, open data exchange, APIs, etc. Expect good things from them.

[Now reading Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder by David Weinberger]

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I just finished reading local graphic novelist Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter, a noirish 1970s library action-detective story loosely based on an actual high-profile 1996 rare book theft. While Bookhunter works best in print, Shiga also makes it available to read online, either via a page-at-a-time interface, or as a single long page (best for high-bandwidth users).

The Stranger book editor Paul Constant writes about a somewhat less interesting brand of book thief in his article “Flying Off the Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves”, based on his encounters with book thieves while working in Seattle independent bookstores:

“In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting ‘Drop the book!’ I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, ‘Here are your fucking books!’ and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.”

Posted by Anirvan at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Chris over at Book Hunter’s Holiday recently put together an interesting, chatty, series of blog posts on “Introducing Antiquarian Books to the Newcomer,” addressing several interrelated topics:

• Part 1: are the kids reading at all?
• Part 2: the relationship between reading and collecting
• Part 3: how to keep collecting relevant

[Now reading Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts published by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’ Sarai Media Lab]

Posted by Anirvan at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

BuzzFeed is running a roundup of stories about innovative bookshelf design.

I’ve been keeping an eye on alternashelves ever since a friend bought a love seat with book storage built in (sort of like this); it was a minor revelation that shelving didn’t always need to look like, well, shelving.

Maybe they’re not as exciting as the flexitubes or the brace case, but I’m mostly lusting after more-efficient-than-pretty solutions like ceiling bookshelves, or maybe a couple of Sapien bookcases I can use to clean up those piles of books around the house.

So little space, so many books…

Posted by Anirvan at 12:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just ran across an amazing Ask MetaFilter thread, where hundreds of users answer the question “What single book is the best introduction to your field for lay people?”

Respondents answer with solid introductory reading recommendation on a wide variety of topics, including firefighting, typography, law, biology, journalism, parenting, crime investigation, homebrewing, graphic design, lexicography, and more. Very highly recommended.

Posted by Anirvan at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

We’re delighted that Cody’s Books, our favorite Berkeley new bookstore, is moving to the middle of the city’s downtown arts/business district:

• San Francisco Chronicle story
• Cody’s note to customers

After the widely publicized closing of their flagship Telegraph Avenue store, and the recent closing of their San Francisco branch, they’ve been living out of the single store in the 4th Street high-end shopping area, nestled between Restoration Hardware and a variety of expensive boutique stores — a far cry from their grittier Telegraph Avenue roots.

We do have mixed feelings about the move. Unfortunately, it’ll entail shifting to a significantly smaller space, and dropping some of the categories that we’ve known and loved; I’m disappointed, for example, that they’ll be cutting the computer section; Cody’s used to have one of the best technical book inventories in the area, outside of Silicon Valley and San Francisco proper. On the other hand, we’re also looking forward to having the store (with its great readings series) be much closer to the center of town, and blocks away from our office.

This move also consolidates our downtown’s reputation as a book district, home to Cody’s Books, Pegasus Books, The Other Change of Hobbit, Comic Relief, Half Price Books, Eastwind Books of Berkeley, and Berkeley Public Library’s central branch, all packed into six downtown blocks.

[Now reading The New Kings of Nonfiction edited by Ira Glass]

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