BookFinder.com Journal

Mike Resnick mention

Neat. BookFinder.com was mentioned in "Travels With My Cats," a 2005 Hugo Award-winning short story by Mike Resnick. In the story, the protagonist searches BookFinder.com, trying to find an incredibly rare book.

Posted by Anirvan

Publishers ponder the Long Tail

The New York Times Book Review published an article on publishers' reaction to the Long Tail last weekend (which, coincidentally, mentioned BookFinder.com).

The verdict? Some of the largest American publishers are confused:

"'The costs associated with printing small quantities of many different titles and of warehousing those many different titles and of fulfilling single-copy orders...are so onerous that it's not a model that I feel works for publishing today,' said Terry Adams, the director of trade paperbacks at Little, Brown. Susan Moldow, the executive vice president and publisher of Scribner, agreed. 'It only works if you're employing some kind of print-on-demand,' she said, referring to a technology that allows publishers to print a few books at a time, as they are ordered. Although Anderson and some others believe print-on-demand will change publishing history, the technology is still imperfect and costly."

But contrast that attitude with that of NYRB Classics, a fabulous young press that thrives on long tail bestsellers:

"'We're like scavenger birds on the back of hippopotamuses,' said Edwin Frank, the editorial director of New York Review Books Classics, which was founded in 1999 and is affiliated with The New York Review of Books. Top sellers among the imprint's 200 titles include Richard Hughes's dreamlike novel 'A High Wind in Jamaica' and historical novels by J. G. Farrell that revolve around Britain's colonial rule. 'We're happy with any book that sells over 5,000 copies' during its sales life, Frank said."

Donadio writes that:

"Paradoxically, the online sales technologies on which the long tail depends may actually be undercutting backlist sales by squeezing them between the two poles of the market: new frontlist titles and used books, which are easier to find than ever thanks to the rise of online booksellers and search engines like BookFinder.com."

BookFinder.com certainly makes used books easier to find, but it's an overstatement to suggest that we negatively impact backlist sales--and by extension, long tail sales--in any appreciable way. To the contrary...

We help sell new backlist titles. Long tail book sites like Amazon.com and BookFinder.com are some of the best resources out there to find, research, and buy backlist titles; BookFinder.com has worked with new booksellers carrying backlist titles ever since its launch, over nine years ago.

Publishers have always dealt with the existence of used books, and they seem to have been doing fine. According to the article, publishers "rely on backlist sales for a significant part of their business," but goes on to list a wide variety of backlist bestsellers widely available in virtually every brick and mortar used book store in America (e.g. The Lord of the Rings, The Joy of Cooking, books by Beatrix Potter). The online component doesn't change the nature of the game; it just means that consumers can search brick and mortar bookstores in multiple communities, and not just their own. The most profitable of the backlist titles were always easily available used, and there's no change there.

In-print long tail sales are robust. According to Chris Anderson's figures for 2004 (presumably American) book sales, out of 1.2 million books surveyed, 78% of titles in print sold 99 or fewer copies, and 95% sold 999 or fewer copies. The publishing industry as a whole is already delivering the long tail. For every frontlist title or backlist bestseller (e.g. Lolita, The Things They Carried, and A People's History of the United States, each of which have sold about 100,000 copies per year in recent years), there are thousands of also-rans, chugging along with a handful of sales per year. The increased trend toward print-on-demand micropublishing, as covered in another recent New York Times article bears testament to the growth of a vital long tail powered by the publishing industry.

Our tail is longer than that of the publishing industry, lessening overlap. BookFinder.com users' average search "center of gravity" is further down the long tail than the wider publishing industry (which is why we're able to report on the most sought-after out of print books with some authority). Potential overlap between new and used copies of in-print backlist titles might be an issue, but our users' used book purchases don't always compete directly with the offerings of the in-print new book industry.

Worried New York publishers dominate much of the discussion around the future of books and bookselling, but the situation's not always as dire as it's made out to be...

Posted by Anirvan

Swedish magazine interview

I was interviewed about BookFinder.com in the June issue of Diego, a Swedish career and lifestyle magazine.

We just got a copy, and tried translating the article from Swedish back into English (the language sounds a bit hokey, as my responses are translated from English to Swedish, and back to English):

BookFinder.com is the world’s largest gathering place for bookophiles. It works as a search engine for more than 100 million new, used, cheap, expensive, ordinary and peculiar book titles and lists all hits in price order. The site is connected to over 100,000 booksellers all over the world. A few years ago, BookFinder.com was only a small school project, begun by technophile and book nerd Anirvan Chatterjee and his friend Charlie Hsu.

“Some of last years most sought after titles were Madonna’s photo book Sex, Taylor Caldwell’s novel about the evangelic Luke, Dear and Glories Physician, R P Hunnicutt’s Sherman: A History of the American Medium Tank and June Hemmons Hiatt’s The Principles of Knitting, which has become somewhat of a cult book among knitters”, says Anirvan Chatterjee from his office near the University in California, Berkeley. Oh, that is an interesting blend. “Yes, our readers are interested in sex, religion, violence, and knitting…Try to interpret that if you can!” He himself reads over 100 books a year. Salman Rushdie and Samuel Delany belongs to the favorites.

“Books make it possible to step into someone else’s head and experience someone else’s experiences, to me, the best books are those that reason with the readers and make them think in new ways. But it is difficult to divide books into ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Everyone is entitled to his or her own taste. Right now I’m mostly looking forward to reading Philip Roth’s new novel Everyman. I discovered him in high school when a teacher lent me Portnoy’s Complaint. Since then I have slowly but surely worked my way through many of his novels, which often deals with culture and masculinity. If there is any American who deserves the Nobel Prize, it is he”.

But you know what. It is said that the paperless society is on its way to take over - so is there really a future for someone like you? “The talk about the paper copy dying out has been going on for decades, but still nothing has happened. The e-book system has so far been a big failure. There are very few people who want to exchange their paper copies to digital versions. I would certainly not want to pay very much for a book that I neither can lend to someone else or read again after ten years when the technique is exchanged and the soft copy already has passed its prime—best to be used before date”. But it does not mean that the electronic text does not have a future, to the contrary. The digital revolution is definitely here and it is possible that the role of the traditional book in our culture will change.

Posted by Anirvan

Ugly as sin, straight to the point

Like most online operations, we’re always excited to see our name in print offline. Last year, we were excited to have our site mentioned in Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today, Publisher’s Weekly, and a lot of other publications I’ve actually heard of — on top of mentions in places we had no clue about.

The Georgia Straight is one of those publications I’d never heard of before, but the free Vancouver weekly just ran what may be my favorite BookFinder.com review of all time. Writes tech columnist Dave Watson:

Web sites? Ive got a few. First, unless you get a time machine and hop back to 1996, you wont be too impressed with the Web site design over at BookFinder.com (www.bookfinder.com/). Its a great place to find rare and out-of-print books and has a central search engine that boasts access to 100 million tomes listed by 100,000-plus booksellers (skewed toward the rare and out-of-print stuff), but its not very stylish. It actually cheers me up to see it, partly because it lets visitors get right down to the business of searching for a particular book and partly because I look at that page and thinkas a person who was rejected from the art world back in Grade 3 ‘Wow. Compared to that, I feel like Leonardo de Monet!’ (I was also booted out of art-history class.) BookFinder has been open since 1996; perhaps the executives decided that updating the database engine driving things behind the scenes was a bigger priority than adding spinning graphics, Javascript doohickeys, Flashy animations, or, I dont know, a sixth colour. Score one for efficiency over aesthetics. (Georgia Straight, “This year Ill definitely spend less time on-line,” Jan. 5, 2006)

What’s the opposite of a backhanded compliment? (A fronthanded insult?) Dave sums it much more colorfully than we ever could—BookFinder.com’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. We spend most of our time working to improve access to the bajillions of books findable through our system, and to bring in more of those that aren’t. Stunning web design just isn’t our forte. We’ll probably get around to making things look a bit more professional at some point in time, but it’s not at the top of our to-do lists.

Posted by Anirvan

BookFinder.com Report in the London Times

The London Times book section takes on the latest BookFinder.com Report:

Remember Madonna’s book, Sex? Of course you do (stop pretending you don’t). One of the things you’ll recall, I’m sure, is what a huge, embarrassing flop it was. Poor Madge! But there’s some consolation for the hapless equestrian diva: Sex has once again come top in BookFinder.com’s annual check-up of out-of-print searches.

The bestsellers you’ll find on the charts at the back are the books that — to some extent, anyway — the publishers want you to buy and want you to like. You can’t miss the ads, you can’t miss the stacks of books in the shops. But what about books that readers want all by themselves? In the United States, at least, you can get a good idea from BookFinder.com, which analyses aggregate search trends for out-of-print books. Reading its latest report, just released, sometimes you wonder if publishers aren’t missing a trick.

OK, so John Kerry didn’t get the presidency. But readers still sought out his anti-war book, The New Soldier, first published in 1971 — even though the cheapest copy you can find will set you back more than $150. Lynne Cheney, Dick’s wife, may wish to be known for America: A Patriotic Primer, but out-of-print buyers yearn for her frontier lesbian romance (really) Sisters, which will set you back a couple of hundred bucks. Mark Felt was unmasked not long ago as Watergate’s Deep Throat; and so there was a surge in demand for his 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid from Inside.

Me, I would pay over the odds for another oop hit (coinage: Out-of-Print Book Awards: The Oopsies), Ricky Jay’s Cards As Weapons, which includes photographs of this master sleight-of-hand artist’s Guinness Book of Records trick: throwing a single playing card 190 feet at 90 miles an hour. And I never knew that Bambi had a sequel, did you? (Maybe you never knew it was a book…) But in Felix Salten’s follow-up to his 1923 classic, Bambi becomes a family man (or family deer): the book’s another oop favourite.

[Now Reading: Courtroom 302: A Year Behind the Scenes in an American Criminal Courthouse by Steve Bogira]

Posted by Anirvan

Smart Computing mention

BookFinder.com's featured in the September issue of Smart Computing:

BookFinder.com searches millions of books online, so you can compare and shop for the best prices.

If you're looking for mainstream books, you won't have any trouble locating them at online booksellers, such as Amazon.com (www.amazon.com). But if you're looking for unusual titles or early editions of mainstream books, you might not find them via traditional booksellers, whether online or in the real world. Enter Book Finder, a massive and constantly updated database of books for sale at stores around the world. This free online search tool, which claims to catalog more than 70 million books, supports multiple languages and has an array of options that help you narrow your search.

Journalists have been writing about BookFinder.com for seven years now, but this is the first piece I've seen that actually takes the time to describe the workings of our reset button:

The tool has a Reset Fields button--if your search terms and special settings don't do the trick, you can simply click this button and start from scratch.

Thanks, guys. The issue's on the newsstands.

Posted by Anirvan

NYT finds bargains on BookFinder.com

Jeremy Norman's "Origins of Cyberspace" auction at Christies, consisting of about 1400 texts and artifacts related to the history of computing, has been getting quite a bit of buzz. Today's New York Times is running a story on the auction and associated hype:

"But some experts say Mr. Norman is being optimistic about the prices he will get for some of the more common items in his collection. For example, a book titled 'High-Speed Computing Devices,' a 1950 treatise on how to build a digital computer, has a reserve price of $800. Mr. Norman's copy is a first edition with a dust jacket. But at bookfinder.com more than two dozen copies of the book are for sale by various vendors, ranging in price from $60 to $275 (most without a dust jacket). " [More]

There you have it�collectible titles up to 91% cheaper at BookFinder.com than at high profile Christie's auctions. The next time you're looking at buying that one-of-a-kind collectible, check with us first; our booksellers' inventories may surprise you.

Posted by Anirvan

Lifehacker mention

I was excited to see a plug for BookFinder.com yesterday on Lifehacker, a weblog about personal productivity tools and tips. I've been enjoying reading Lifehacker since it launched in late January; my favorite entry to date is a list of resources on efficient packing for trips�very highly recommended.

Posted by Anirvan

BookFinder.com in the WSJ (Again)

We're in the Wall Street Journal again. From "Getting Your Own Book Deal" (Dec. 21, 2004):

"BookFinder.com, which is owned by closely held 13th Generation Media Inc., based in Berkeley, Calif., lists new and used books of the same title side by side. The price gap can be significant. Nelson DeMille's latest novel, "Night Fall" is $26.95 at Powell's Books, Portland, Ore., but Fairview Books, an independent book retailer in Hudson, N.Y., recently sold a used copy "like new" for $15.00."

Posted by Anirvan

BookFinder.com in the Wall Street Journal

From "Strangers in the Stacks: Google Removes One More Brick in the Library Wall. Good For Them" in Friday's Wall Street Journal:

"Amazon is also one of the major players in the Internet's burgeoning used-book market, along with others such as Half.com and Alibris, and meta-sites such as BookFinder.com. Taken together, these outfits have matched buyers everywhere with used bookstores and individual sellers all over North America. Never before have books been more readily and cheaply available. I recently bought Ann Marlowe's memoir of addiction, 'How to Stop Time,' for $2.96 and Thomas Mallon's novel 'Bandbox' for $2.82. Both were hardcovers; the second was even signed by the author. The Internet used-book market has also practically eradicated the tragedy--for authors and readers alike--of a volume being 'out of print.' A market offering very inexpensive (and often older) books serves a function that libraries once did." [More...]

Posted by Wendy