Andy Gutterman, the man behind the popular BookTrakker bookseller inventory management system, has been posting ads and emails from the early years of American online bookselling on the BookFinder Insider mailing list.
My favorites include:
- an ad for the BookBytes online service
circa 1992; dealers could update inventory data either via modem, or by mailing disks - an Interloc beta test letter
Interloc was the precursor to Alibris - an ad for AB Bookman’s failed “Automated Bookman” online service
AB Bookman’s Weekly was the must-read weekly for American antiquarian sellers, published from 1949-1999; it died with the coming of the Internet, when dealers no longer needed to rely on its ads and classifieds as their primary of market access
