BookFinder.com Journal

Abebooks invests in LibraryThing

Abebooks has acquired a 40% stake in LibraryThing, a hip, well-designed, online service to help readers catalog their books easily. The site has social networking and recommendations built in, like all good Web 2.0 products.

There are more details over at the LibraryThing blog.

LibraryThing is a great project run by fellow high-tech book geek Tim Spalding (user profile, homepage). The site only went online in August 2005, but it already has significant buzz among online bibliophiles. We really like Tim and his work. Charlie and I have several friends who swear by LibraryThing, and we’ve been recommending it to people left and right over the past several months.

If any LibraryThing users are reading this, the continuing independence of BookFinder.com should serve as pretty good reassurance that Tim will be able to better serve his users with the support of Abebooks as a minor investor.

Welcome to the extended family, Tim.

[Now Reading: Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson]

Posted by Anirvan

The Long Tail of books

Chris Anderson points to the Book Industry Study Group’s recent Beyond the Bestsellers event, a one-day conference on “growing sales opportunities in the ‘long tail’ of the book market” — what most booksellers know as midlist, backlist, and out of print titles.

The presenters’ slides are online in PDF format, and rather interesting. Of particular interest are the presentation from Abebooks on marketing long tail titles, and from Cambridge University Press and Lightning Source about print on demand publishing.

You can download all the presentations from the conference’s presentations archive.

Posted by Anirvan

Abebooks bookmark fun

Members of conservative online forum FreeRepublic are criticizing a new Abebooks promotional bookmark that makes light of President Bush’s reputation for single-mindedness and/or not admitting mistakes. I find myself agreeing with the Free Republic posters. It seems a bit culturally tone deaf to promote the service using an ad like this (given that views on Bush are so polarized, and that Abebooks has customers all over the political spectrum).

One of the posters also points out that the city of Berkeley—where BookFinder.com is located—is misspelled “Berkley” on the back of the bookmark.

It’s clearly time to call our friends at Abebooks marketing…

Update: I heard back from Abebooks. The “Berkeley” typo was present only in the example image, but not in the version that went to print. And it looks like there are several creatives beside the two samples pictured (the ones about Bush and Henry VIII); as I understand it, different creatives will be used in different situations.

Posted by Anirvan

Abebooks acquires FillZ

Abebooks has acquired FillZ, a B2B service for booksellers that allows them to easily manage their inventory on multiple online marketplaces. FillZ, like us, is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.

More details at PW Daily and the San Francisco Business Times.

Welcome to the Abebooks family, Miron. (Grab some lunch sometime?)

[Now Reading: Dark Matter: Reading the Bones edited by Sheree R. Thomas]

Posted by Anirvan

German click and mortar network

While catching up with booksellers’ opinions on Abebooks policies (e.g. Jest, Colonel Colonel), I ran across Abebooks.de’s “Buchexperten-Netzwerk” (book expert network). It turns out that Abebooks’ German operation has been building up a network of bookstore partners, offering walk-in customers free appraisals and the chance to order Abebooks titles without having Internet access (i.e. taking the e- out of e-commerce).

A good number of North American click-and-mortar bookstores did the same thing, back before Internet/ecommerce access was common. This reminds me a bit of the new wave of eBay stores, except that you have the online marketplace actively promoting the offline sellers. Is this interesting? Does anyone familiar with the German-speaking book market have any predictions about how effective this might be?

[Now Reading: Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain edited by Andrea L. Bell and Yolanda Molina-Gaviln]

Posted by Anirvan

BookFinder.com acquired, will remain independent

BookFinder.com has been acquired by Abebooks, and will continue to be an independent and unbiased resource. But let’s start at the beginning:

I first started working on BookFinder.com nine years ago, as the final project for a class at UC Berkeley. I put it online in 1997, and relaunched it in 1999 with my best friend Charlie. Over the years, we’ve received tremendous support from online book shoppers, collectors, sellers, and listings services, who have helped us develop what we believe to be the best book search service online—whether you’re looking for new, used, rare, out of print, or international titles. We work very hard to get the details right.

BookFinder.com is a small operation, with only two full-timers (and the support of a few friends). We work to do more with less, but have sometimes had to make compromises because of our size, leading us to scale back or shelve some of our more interesting projects.

We’ve been in touch with the folks over at Abebooks (based in Victoria, Canada) since 1998, and in that time, we’ve come to respect the business and the people behind it. We face many of the same challenges: managing massive inventories, serving diverse groups of users, and balancing the needs of booksellers and shoppers. We check in with Abebooks regularly, and it recently became clear that many of our ideas and goals are related. One thing led to another, and…

I’m delighted to announce that BookFinder.com has been acquired by Abebooks. We will remain an independently operated and managed entity based out of Berkeley, but we’ll now also be able to draw upon our Canadian friends’ technology resources and industry expertise to help us develop our ideas, and make this an even more useful service for book buyers and sellers.

We’ve always been committed to doing what’s right for our user community, and our new affiliation with Abebooks won’t change that in any way. Both we and Abebooks are committed to ensuring that BookFinder.com remains a completely unbiased platform. Booksellers who list on Abebooks will not get any special privileges on our marketplace; we’re going to continue to connect our users to the best books out there, regardless of the source or vendor. We wouldn’t be able to work with such a wide range of booksellers and listings services if they didn’t trust us to be scrupulously honest.

Charlie and I have been friends since junior high school, when we’d spend many of our free periods in the school library, tinkering with computers and reading sci-fi. We’ve worked on a lot of projects together over the years (e.g. publishing zines, photographing subway stations), but we’ve always gravitated back to books and technology. We’ve been working with our users to build the perfect book search system for the past nine years; we think assistance from Abebooks can help us get there a little bit faster.

Thank you for your support.

(Here’s Abebooks’ press release.)

Posted by Anirvan

Amazon Marketplace shrinks

Amazon.com has changed their policy, preventing aggregators like Abebooks, Alibris, A1Books, and others from listing member booksellers’ titles on Amazon.com Marketplace; this is part of a shift toward ensuring that Amazon.com is always dealing directly with the final booksellers. One can presumably expect some reduction in some of their most interesting stock on Amazon.com as a result, as not all booksellers will choose to re-list with Amazon.com directly.

Unlike Amazon.com, we’re proud to work directly with these and other aggregators of bookseller inventory data (including Amazon.com’s own Marketplace), to help ensure that our users continue to have direct access to the broadest range of titles out there. If it’s out there for sale, we want you to be able to find it.

There’s been much discussion about this in the online bookselling community, on the Insider and Bibliophile lists, as well as in places like Abebooks’ community forums. The Bookselling Online weblog’s been covering this as information’s trickled out, discussing Abebooks’ initial announcement, Amazon’s announcement, and Amazon.com’s removal of Alibris.

Posted by Anirvan

Tech Ops heads in demand

Directors of Technical Operations appear to be in demand at online used book listings services.

Alibris is looking to hire a new Director of Technical Operations. Abebooks just hired John Davis, formerly of Research in Motion (the makers of the BlackBerry), for the same position in their company.

(Read more about career opportunities at Abebooks and Alibris.)

Posted by Anirvan

Auction sellers discover the big A's

Ecommerce-Guide writer Frank Fortunato tries to take a stab at explaining to eBay sellers why they should consider listing their book inventories on websites like Abebooks, Alibris, and Amazon.com.

He gets some details wrong (e.g. “ABE and Alibris offer their sellers ‘affiliate programs,’ wherein the seller’s books are computer listed for sale in all Barnes & Noble stores, library and international sites”), but it’s a clearly layed out pitch, and the Online Used Book Industry Marketing Association’s Seller Recruitment Team (were there to be such a thing) ought to send him a quick thank you note.

Do any of the listings services actively recruit major auction-based book sellers, or are the benefits of fixed-price used book marketplaces clear enough that most auction sellers figure it out for themselves?

Posted by Anirvan

Abibooks case

A German technology law journal called JurPC just published the November 2004 ruling of a regional court in Hamburg, regarding the legal battle between Abebooks (abebooks.com, abebooks.de) and a German bookselling site online at abibooks.com and abibooks.de. Abebooks appears to have won the case, though my inability to read German keeps me from parsing out any specific details of interest.

The text of the original ruling is online in the original German, via JurPC. I've also posted a copy of the text as parsed by Google's English-to-German translator below, after the jump. (The results aren't pretty.)

Could someone take a look at the ruling, and post something intelligent about it in the comments--the backstory or anything else of interest? Thanks.

(Quite tangentially, I remember being on the phone with Rick Pura, the founder of Abebooks, sometime in 1998 or 1999, when we both realized that the abebook.com domain was operated by a porn site. It was sad seeing domain typo squatters hit someone I liked.)

Posted by Anirvan