BookFinder.com Journal

Manley on Bezos

Marty Manley, former CEO of Alibris, blogged about Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and his recent decision to spend a week working in an Amazon warehouse:

"I competed with this guy for a decade and frequently thought he was nuts. I questioned almost everything about Amazon, from their international expansion, acquisitions, Kindle, customer obsessiveness, 12 million square feet of DCs, debt load, savage discounting, corporate paranoia, the UI, capital expenditures, the acronyms programs like AWS, S3, FBA, EC2, and even Prime when it first launched...Now I make the predictable comment that more CEOs should spend a week as an hourly employee looking at their company from the bottom. But then I have to ask the harder question: in ten years as the founding CEO of Alibris, how many weeks did I spend packing books in our warehouse or staffing a customer service desk? None. I always had more important priorities." (more...)

[Now reading: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein]

Early online bookselling ads

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

See them all…

Posted by Anirvan

Manley steps down as Alibris CEO

Marty Manley, CEO of Alibris for the past ten years, will be stepping down at the end of the year; Brian Elliot, the current President and COO, will become the new CEO. Marty and Brian are long-time friends and supporters of BookFinder.com, and we’ve enjoyed getting help, advice, and industry insights from them over the past decade; they’re both really bright guys.

More details:

• “Martin Manley steps down after 10 years as Alibris CEO” (San Francisco Business Times)
• “Alibris Names Brian Elliott CEO” (Alibris press release)

Posted by Anirvan

Alibris launches UK site

Alibris has retrieved its lost domain name, and relaunched their British site, Alibris.co.uk.

According to the press release:

“Alibris customers around the world can now purchase books with their local currency. Alibris accepts the British pound sterling, the euro, and eleven other currencies. Alibris has also reduced prices for U.K. and European shoppers by thirty to fifty percent. Alibris U.K. offers fast, direct shipping on orders destined for British or European addresses. With this direct-shipping upgrade, parcel delivery times have been cut in half.”

An Americana Exchange article describes the pricing model on the new site:

“Currently, UK and European sellers ship their orders to Alibris’ warehouse in Sparks, Nevada. While a reasonable enough procedure for American orders, it is monumentally inefficient for a UK dealer selling to a customer down the street. The British customer must not only wait for the book to make it back and forth across the Atlantic and most of the American continent, but pay for all of that unnecessary shipping…So how do you resolve this? Step one, obviously, is to allow British and European sellers to ship directly to customers in their own market. Now a book shipped from a London seller to a London buyer two miles away need travel only two miles, instead of over 10,000…On the new Alibris UK, shipping charges to England/Europe will be lower, to America higher (a reversal of regular Alibris), the assumption being the seller is located in Europe. The upcharge will be added to American sellers’ prices, to take into account their extra cost of shipping to Europe. This will not increase the cost of American sellers’ books to European customers, the upcharge being balanced by a reduction in the listed shipping charges to European destinations.”

Posted by Anirvan

Notes from all over

Bookselling news:

• The San Jose Mercury News reports that deals at local bookstore sales can be even cheaper than prices online
• The story of yet another textbook swapping site (every US college campus probably has one or two) — and why a Silicon Valley blogger calls textbook exchanges “stupid frat-boy business ideas”
• BellaOnline reviews eight different online book buyback websites
• Nigel Beale’s podcast interview with Abebooks COO Boris Wertz, dealing with changing policies, search functionality, and the LibraryThing investment
• The strong Canadian dollar is causing Canadian booksellers and buyers to complain about high prices, relative to those in the U.S.

New blogs:

• Jeff at Using Books posted a big list of bookseller blogs back in April
• Joyce at the Bibliophile Bullpen links to members of the Bibliophile mailing list who also blog
• Alibris has a new corporate book blog, featuring book reviews and U.S. book news

Funny book jackets:

• “Read It Before Hollywood Does” ad campaign for the Association of Librarians of the Czech Republic (via Bibliophile Bullpen)
• “The Pulp Canon: Lurid new covers for The Iliad, Little Women, and other classics” from Slate (also via Bibliophile Bulletin)
• Abebooks’ “not” book ad campaign

[Now Reading: Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson]

Posted by Anirvan

Alibris sold

Wow. We just got news that Alibris has been purchased by private equity firm Oak Hill Capital Partners. Current President and CEO Marty Manley will be stepping down as CEO President, and will become the CEO and chairman of the board. Current COO Brian Elliot will become the new CEO President and COO.

Congrats, guys.

More details from:

• Publishers Weekly story:
  “With the backing of Oak Hill, Alibris is planning for rapid growth through the addition of more booksellers, publishers and distribution partners. Although Manley declined to discuss specifics, significant investment in likely in the international market. Alibris does some business abroad, but has not yet established any overseas Web sites, something that will likely be addressed soon…While Manley said he expects the majority of Alibris’s growth to come organically, the online used market is highly fragmented and could be ripe for consolidation by a company with Oak Hill’s resources. The only stand-alone online book market larger than Alibris is Abebooks.”

• Oak Hill Capital Partners press release:
  “According to Bill Pade, a Partner with Oak Hill Capital Partners, ‘We have conducted extensive research on the used/hard to find/rare book market and related ‘long tail’ businesses. We are impressed with the position that Alibris has built in this market and with the quality of its management, technology, and business partnerships. We are excited about helping this company grow and prosper.”

• VentureWire Professional:
  “Alibris has gotten some $50 million in the last seven years from backers Aberdare Ventures, Bedrock Capital Partners, CMGI @Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, formerly known as Weiss Peck & Greer Venture Partners. The last $3 million round of funding came in September 2004, after the company withdrew a planned public offering, citing pricing weakness…Alibris, whose gross sales were up 20% to 30% to more than $70 million last year, isn’t a start-up any more, Manley said…Oak Hill is funding the all-equity transaction with money from its $2.5 billion Oak Hill Capital Partners II LP, which closed in September, said Bill Pade, a partner with the firm…Oak Hill is providing an undisclosed amount of working capital that Alibris will use to set up Web sites in Europe and Asia. The company also aims to expand its network of 8,000 booksellers with smaller publishers and also wants to get more music and movie dealers on board, Manley said. Alibris might also make add-on acquisitions.”

• Alibris’ letter to booksellers (via FrauBucher):
  “This is terrific news for our sellers because it enables us to invest more in marketing, accelerate our international expansion and rejuvenate our music and movie business. We will continue to grow our distribution channels, improve our Web site and deliver tools and innovations that benefit our premiere network of sellers.”

(I’ll be updating this post with more details as they emerge.)

Posted by Anirvan

Domain name annoyances

The Alibris.co.uk domain seems to have been acquired by a British domain hoarder on or around February 10. Alibris has owned the domain since 1999, and I believe it’s been in use in business for most of that time.

So what happened? According to the current domain registration info, the domain is owned by one “D Ostashko,” a “UK Individual,” via a British domain registrar named “Mr Denys Ostashko” (likely the same person). I presume the domain registration lapsed by mistake, and was snatched up by Ostashko, who clearly hasn’t done the honorable thing of returning the domain to the original owners. I’ve known the folks at Interloc and Alibris for almost ten years now, and I’ve seen how hard they’ve worked to develop their name and reputation. It’s a shame that they should have to deal with this.

Of course if our friend Denys isn’t being courteous, there’s always the legal option. Ostashko is a registered member of Nominet, the organization that manages .uk domains. (Amusingly, his registration indicates that he’s involved in “Internet marketing and innovation.”) Nominet’s policies on .uk domain disputes indicate that they often deal with cases like “Using the name of a well-known company or trademark in a domain name”. If Alibris uses the domain dispute process, they may have a decent chance of getting their name back.

The lesson here? Don’t let those domains names lapse. The Denis Ostashkos of the world are always happy to take them off your hands.

Posted by Anirvan

Marty Manley, blogger

Alibris CEO Marty Manley’s started blogging on technology, books, and public policy issues. Check out Jam Side Down.

Recent book-related posts refer to Christopher Hitchens, David Remnick, and Paul Berman on Francis Fukuyama.

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