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