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]

Amazon roundup

Jeff Bezos and company in the news:

• Amazon completed the acquisition of AbeBooks, our tremendously hands-off parent company; as discussed earlier, no changes are planned at BookFinder.com as a result
• Amazon’s pitching simple “frustration-free packaging”, a smart green move, as well a possible source of cost savings; will more retailers push vendors to offer packaging like this?
• The Times of London reports on Amazon.co.uk employment controversy; more details from the Seattle P-I blogger and commenters

[Now reading: Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson]

Posted by Anirvan

Amazon to include seller-generated editions in catalog works

For the catalog geeks out there — Amazon.com recently announced that they’ll be including seller-generated edition pages in their work groups, what they call “Edition Sets.”

Posted by Anirvan

Amazon.com purchasing AbeBooks

Amazon.com is purchasing AbeBooks. As a long-time industry-watcher, I think this is pretty big news, certainly the most significant acquisition in the online used/rare book space to date—and yet not a lot may change.

AbeBooks will join the list of standalone Amazon.com subsidiaries, including Audible, shopbop.com, the Internet Movie Database, and Digital Photo Review.

When AbeBooks acquired BookFinder.com, there was some concern from well-wishers that they’d shut us down or make us skew our results—but neither happened, or was even an option. We’re still a small independently-managed operation, but now with more resources to draw upon.

It’s interesting seeing AbeBooks go through the same process as we did, but with Amazon.com. I know enough about the deal to be very confident that AbeBooks will follow a similar model: being run independently, but with the ability to draw on Amazon.com for help when they need it. And as for BookFinder.com? For better or for worse, the change doesn’t impact us at all. (Though personally, I wouldn’t mind if we got some free Audible subscriptions out of all this.)

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More coverage…

From AbeBooks and Amazon.com:

• Press release
• AbeBooks blog

Reactions from AbeBooks friends and family:

• Boris Wertz, former COO, AbeBooks
• Tim Spalding, Librarything

In the media:

• Seatle Post-Intelligencer blog
• Victoria Times-Colonist
• Vancouver Sun
• Motley Fool
• TechCrunch
• TechVibes
• ReadWriteWeb

Posted by Anirvan

Book retailer customer satisfaction

ForeSee Results’ Top 100 Online Retail Satisfaction Index tries to quantify customer satisfaction at various ecommerce sites on a 100-point scale.

The five online book retailers listed in their May 2007 release are:

• 83: Amazon.com
• 79: Barnes&Noble.com:
• 74: AbeBooks.com
• 74: Overstock.com
• 72: Buy.com

The aggregate satisfaction score for the 100 measured retailers is 75. The book sites do fairly well for themselves, in light of the competition:

• 86: NetFlix.com
• 90: Apple.com
• 83: Amazon.com
• 79: Barnes&Noble.com
• 77: CrateandBarrel.com
• 76: VictoriasSecret.com
• 74: AbeBooks.com
• 74: Overstock.com
• 73: Target.com
• 72: Buy.com
• 71: FTD.com
• 69: HomeDepot.com

Per the release, this data is based on feedback from “over 24,000 respondents who had visited the top 100 online retail sites within the previous two weeks but didn’t necessarily make a purchase” during spring 2008.

Posted by Anirvan

Amazon POD lawsuit

Print-on-demand (POD) publisher BookLocker.com has filed a class action lawsuit against Amazon, in response to its threat to stop selling POD books published by third-party vendors. The lawsuit accuses Amazon of illegal [tying](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)).

More details at O’Reilly TOC…

Posted by Anirvan

Amazon.com's POD land grab

I was very disappointed to hear that Amazon.com’s print on demand subsidiary BookSurge has been suggesting to publishers that if they use a competing print on demand supplier, their books will no longer be offered for sale by Amazon.com.

A publisher’s choice of printing technology or supplier is a private internal decision. If this policy were to take effect, it would constitute shameful [anti-competitive behavior](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)) of [dubious legality](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)#Tying_in_United_States_Law). It’s as if Wal-Mart refused to stock a product unless the vendor used only a certain Wal-Mart subsidiary for outsourced customer service.

The story was broken by Angela Hoy at Writer’s Weekly:

“He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge’s system would be ‘taken down.’…Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the ‘buy’ button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we’d heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives…Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.” More…

More from PW Daily:

“Over the last year, BookSurge has been trying to cut into the market share of pod leader Lightning Source and is using the selling clout of Amazon to generate more business. ‘I feel like the flea between two giant elephants,’ said the head of one pod publisher about the upcoming battle between Lightning Source and BookSurge/Amazon. He said although the deal with BookSurge will be more expensive, he has no choice but to make the move since most of his authors expect their titles to be for sale on Amazon. He added that his company will also continue to use Lightning Source for printing as well. Amazon’s BookSurge mandate extends to traditional publishers as well as to online pod houses.”

(via Clive Keeble on the BookFinder Insider)

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

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

How Amazon.com launched OP books in 1997

Before Amazon.com launched Marketplace and zShops, they used to have a somewhat convoluted human-powered system to fulfill requests for out of print titles. Glenn Fleishman--fabulous tech columnist, former Amazon.com employee, and the man behind isbn.nu and ISBlogN (a blog about book-related metadata)recounts the story of how how his team at Amazon.com launched the original framework for out of print titles. Interesting.

[Now Reading: Salt and Saffron by Kamila Shamsie]

Posted by Anirvan