BookFinder.com Journal

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

Order cancellation rates

Blogger Robert Nagle posts that he tried to purchase an Abebooks title via Half.com, but got his order canceled because it was out of stock. Incensed, he discovered that 15 of the past 50 feedback entries on Abebooks’ Half.com listings page were for cancelled orders.

Abebooks’ eBay/Half.com program’s statistics indicate that 12% of feedback for transactions over the past 12 months has been negative or neutral. (Most of that feedback is for cancelled orders; in fact, even some of the positive feedback ratings cite cancelled orders.) One out of every eight customers appear to be walking away unhappy.

Alibris’ numbers indiate that they’re doing almost twice as well. Over the past year, only 7% of Alibris feedback over the past 12 months has been negative or neutral. Alibris seems to be disappointing only (only?) one of every fifteen customers. (Some of the non-positive comments are about product quality, though most are still about order cancellation.)

These numbers are disappointing, and though they reflect difficulties involved in syncing data between a listings service’s own database with eBay/Half.com’s inventory management systems, they also highlight how far we are from reaching 100% deliverability for all the used titles listed for sale online.

Robert Nagle’s not alone. Nobody likes ordering a book and having the seller tell you that he or she doesn’t have it in stock. On our side, we’ve been discussing bookseller rating mechanisms with our listings service partners, and are working to help ensure that BookFinder.com’s users can feel certain that the book they order is from as reliable a seller as possible. We’ve been pushing for tighter inventory management for yearswe can do better.

Have you had issues with cancelled orders on BookFinder.com? What steps should we be taking to address the problem? As always, we appreciate comments.

Posted by Anirvan

Interloc wiretapping case back on track

US vs. Councilman is back on track. The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that an ISP reading its customers' mail can be tried on federal criminal charges. (More from Yahoo/AP, and Declan McCullough of News.com).

Here's how it happened:

In 1998, Interloc (the first major Internet-based listings service) was caught snooping on emails sent by Amazon.com to booksellers using Interloc's ISP business, which provided @interloc.com bookseller email addresses. Alibris, the company that acquired Interloc, quickly pled guilty, and divested itself of the ISP business.

The case continued in 2001 as US vs. Councilman, in which the government tried to prove that a former Interloc VP violated criminal wiretapping laws by having directed the email interceptions. Councilman's lawyers argued that existing federal criminal wiretapping laws did not directly apply, because the filtering did not occur during transmission, but rather, took place while the Amazon.com emails were on the Interloc email server. The District Court judge agreed, and the case was dismissed in 2003.

A three-judge panel of the Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal in June 2004, ruling 2-1 in June 2004 that the Wiretap Act did not apply. Online privacy advocates were concerned that the ruling weakened Internet users' privacy rights. The Court voted to rehear the case in October 2004, presumably in reaction to widespread concerns about the ruling.

Yesterday, the Court ruled 5-2 that the Wiretap Act can apply even to email messages temporarily stored during delivery on an email server, allowing the government to move ahead with its original charge, and effectively leaving us back where we were in 2001.

Update: I fixed my mistake and clarified the description, as per Seth's suggestion. Thanks!

Posted by Anirvan

Bookslut editor compares services

Jessa Crispin, editor of Bookslut (a publication we've touted here before), reviews buying books at Abebooks, Alibris, and eBay in The Book Standard. Looking for cheap books, she preferred Abebooks' inventory for the availability of sub-$5 deals.

(via Blog of a Bookslut)

Posted by Anirvan

Globalized bookselling

I ran across some data indicating that at least a half dozen of Alibris' customer service staff work out of India, presumably outsourced through a third party. (These are probably the "third-party vendors to...provide customer service on demand" referred to in their S-1.)

More than anything else, it amazes me how small that number is. It says a lot about the sophistication of business process outsourcing when a mid-sized business like Alibris can turn to offshoring to augment their customer service team, particularly when it involves so few people. It used to be that BPO made sense only for giant businesses dealing with hundreds of employees at a time.

Bookselling has always been a business built on globalization, and the Internet's accelerated that trend across the industry.

The US may be the biggest online bookselling market in the world, but our biggest online listings service is Canadian (Abebooks), and our most prestigious booksellers' association (the ABAA) turns to a Dutch company (Rockingstone) for all their technical needs.

Conversely, as far as I know, the biggest online bookseller around the world is still Seattle-based Amazon.com and its international subsidiaries.

Heck, even BookFinder.com (a small business based out of Berkeley, California) serves book shoppers in 140 countries every month.

For all its faults (and indeed, there are so many), the new globalized information economy is still truly mind-boggling.

Posted by Anirvan

Alibris CEO on OpenIPO attempt

In an article from Reuters, Marty Manley, CEO of Alibris, expresses dampened enthusiasm about the OpenIPO (auction-based offering) process that his company chose when attempting to go public last year.

(Previously: 1, 2)

[Now Reading: Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties by Tariq Ali]

Posted by Anirvan

Guardian on used books online

If you haven't seen it already, the Guardian recently ran an overview of the online used book market. The article refers to the big A's (Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon.com), and interviews two British online booksellers. Not particularly interesting, except as an indicator of general press interest in the field.

Posted by Anirvan

Interloc case coverage

The Interloc case has garnered widespread attention in the media.

For example, you can read coverage from the New York Times, Associated Press, Wired News, and Politech.

The overall gist: it's a poor ruling, but it may not be the death knell of online privacy.

[Now Reading: Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosley]

Posted by Anirvan

Interloc case affects online privacy rights

How would you feel if your ISP were secretly monitoring the contents of your email?

The results of an old legal case from the world of online bookselling is bothering online privacy advocates.

Six years ago, Interloc (the predecessor to Alibris, and the first major contemporary listings service) was involved with a case of electronic espionage -- they were caught snooping on emails sent by Amazon.com to booksellers using Interloc's affiliated ISP. As the case unfolded, the young Alibris quickly pled guilty, and divested itself of the businesses involved in the case.

The case continued as US vs. Councilman, in which the government tried to prove that that a former VP of Interloc (not an Alibris employee) violated criminal wiretapping laws by directing the capture of emails from competitors sent to booksellers on Interloc's affiliated ISP.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit just decided that the case was not a violation of criminal wiretapping laws. Online privacy advocates are worried that this weakens Internet users' privacy rights.

Read the full ruling (PDF format).

[Now Reading: The Hazing Reader edited by Hank Nuwer]

Posted by Anirvan

New books everywhere

Abebooks and Alibris, the Coke and Pepsi of the online used bookselling world, are both loudly touting their respective forays into the world of selling new books.

Abebooks is in the midst of a press push around their new program in which publishers can sell new books directly on the site. They say they work with 50 independent publishers and 100 new book retailers, and (per a Globe and Mail interview), "about 10 per cent of Abebooks.com's books are already new." Who knew?

Alibris just struck back with a release describing how they've been working directly with publishers for two years now, and how they sell new books directly. And indeed, they've been selling new books on their site (fulfilled directly, via Ingram) since at least mid-2002 or so.

Abebooks and Alibris' attitudes towards new books seem to reflect their market positioning. Abebooks doesn't sell books themselves; they're attracting new booksellers and publishers interested in direct fulfillment into their marketplace. Alibris has always sold some proportion of the books on its site through its own warehouse, and it's the same with new books; as far as I know, most of the new in-print titles are fulfilled via Alibris, rather than being farmed out to third parties.

The battle over used-book-site-selling-new-books mindshare rages...

Posted by Anirvan