Anirvan: saying goodbye

I've been working on BookFinder.com for almost 13 years now, but even the most amazing experiences come to an end. I'll be exiting BookFinder.com in August, heading out on the very best of terms, and after years of planning to ensure that our users aren't impacted by the transition.

BookFinder.com started off as my class project in 1996. My best friend Charlie built the 486 computer that it ran on, and we teamed up in 1999 to rewrite the software and run the site as our small business. We've been together every step of the way, designing, building, and managing BookFinder.com (and debating books and politics over lunch every day). I'm delighted to be able to pass my role on to him; the site's in incredibly good hands.

I've been planning to step back for several years now, to work on other projects, travel, and explore new opportunities. Please stay in touch:

• via my homepage and weblog
• via email, to anirvan (at) chatterjee (dot) net

I'm deeply grateful to the bibliophiles, booksellers, and marketplace operators I've worked with over the years. I've heard some pretty amazing stories, and I always promised myself that when I had some time, I'd try to collect and share them with others.

That's why I'm launching the Online Bookselling History Project, an effort to collect first-hand accounts of the online bookselling trade before 2000. If you were involved with the trade pre-2000, then I want your stories: bookseller BBSes, UIEE conversion nightmares, changing cataloging practices, the bricks vs. clicks debates, etc. You can help put together a patchwork history of our trade during a time of great transition. More on this soon.

— Anirvan Chatterjee

P.S. Thank you to everyone who's been part of BookFinder.com since 1996 -- Alison, Asok, Barbara, Boris, Bryan, Chaitee, Charlie, Christine, David, Fredrik, Garner, Giovanni, Hannes, Scott, Shaku, Shauna, Thomas, Tushar, Vanessa, and Wendy. I'm lucky to have friends like you.

[Now Reading: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh]

Comments

[prying1]

Know that you are much appreciated and will be missed. I, for one, hope that you return on occasion for a guest posting. Thank you for being you.

[Hankk]

I've been using Bookfinder (aka MX Bookfinder) for more than a decade, finding a handful of obscure books every year. It wasn't too many years before this that finding an out-of-print book meant placing an actual ad in a newspaper circulated to used bookstores -- and yes, I did that.

The site has always been great, and I like that the emphasis is on content, not flashiness. Enjoy the new pursuits...

[Scott Lahti]

Jeez. This is like hearing Lou Gehrig is retiring from the Yankees. As a lifelong booklover turned veteran bookseller, I have found in Bookfinder, beginning in 1998, a godsend, and have a hard time imagining my life these last 11 years without it - the Holy Grails found at last in the teeth of hopes long since abandoned, the money saved after digging for bargains, the information harvested from thousands of listings, the encyclopedic range of topics explored in the journal entries, the surprise emails from ABE alerting me to new finds I'd not have seen without your aggregating function, the memories of such vanished engines as Interloc (if memory serves) and Bibliofind...sigh. You were an everyday hero to many of us, even if our only contact with you was through an email or journal comment twice a decade. The site will function, I'm sure, in the technical sense as well as before. But its heart and soul will be elsewhere, on to greener pastures new, we hope, but still missing from the home at whose hearth we had come to take you as given much after the fashion of the proverbial lady who, upon seeing Hamlet for the first time, pronounced it to be "so full of quotes". Now we shall look for you as for Tiny Tim at table in the imagined future, and, seeing only an ownerless crutch, fall to our knees in plaintive hopes for redemption after seeing the transitory fragility of all we thought would live before us forever.

Goodbye, friend. Be well. And when next you see The Bride of Frankenstein, think of us as the blind man for whom your arrival in our modest hovel was a brilliant gift of light amid otherwise night. "Friend. Good." Anirvan: Friend.

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