BookFinder.com Journal

The pen is mightier

or at least this one is (Via BookNinja)

Worlds most interesting bookstores

Check out this great photo tour of some of the worlds most visually appealing bookstores.  I think my favorite might be the El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, which was converted from a Theater. (via. Quilblog)

                                   

[Now reading: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett]

Notes from all over

I’ve been waiting to do a big dump of links I’ve been enjoying…

Used books up, new books down?

• “Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It” (New York Times)
• “Second-hand book sales up” (London Telepgraph)

Library consortium OCLC changes policies, draws ire:

• “Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab” (Aaron from Open Library)
• “Why libraries must reject the OCLC Policy (part 1)” (Tim from LibraryThing)
• OCLC policy change overview (Code4Lib)

Bay Area indie bookstores, dead and alive:

• Stacey’s Bookstore in San Francisco shutting down
• But wait, not every Bay Area indie is dying!

Book rental in the news:

• Chegg raises $25 million round from Kleiner, others
• Chegg CEO interview

Yay, reading:

• New NEA study shows US reading rates on the rise
• Britons think reading is sexy

More notes from all over:

• Barnes & Noble does mild cutbacks
• Slate calls BookFinder.com “the Google of dead books”
• Ebook pricing arguments

Posted by Anirvan

German market news

I’m pretty interested in German used and rare bookselling market. It has one of the most developed ecosystem outside of the Anglophone market, and looking at what’s happening offers a great set of data points to understand where our industry’s at. I was excited to came across a number of great stories covering the space in boersenblatt.net, a German book trade magazine. Here are some of the pieces I found.

(All of these articles are in German. To translate them, use Google’s handy 1-click translate bookmarklet. For English, you can drag this link to your browser toolbar —> View in English. Then click the button whenever you want to see a page in English.)

ZVAB:

• New pricing model
• Early history
• Peter Zylla exits
• Interview on pricing model, etc.
• ZVAB on shipping regulations
• Site relaunch

AbeBooks:

• New Italian site
• Reaction to Amazon acquisition, parts 1, 2, 3
• New pricing model
• Gojaba launch
• Market positioning overview

eBay:

• eBay.de’s new shipping policies
• eBay business model changes
• More fixed price listings on eBay.de

Smaller marketplaces and services:

• Prolibri on shipping regulations
• Buchfreund pricing model changes
• Interview on Oxfam Germany used bookstores
• ILAB rethinking Rockingstone relationship
• Eurobuch redesign
• momox-books buying used books en masse

Market-wide news:

• Antiquarian year in review series
• Overall used book sales trends

Law:

• Booksellers and child porn laws
• AbeBooks comments on bookselling law
• Online content labeling requirements

Posted by Anirvan

Holt Uncensored returns

I used to be a big fan of Holt Uncensored, an email newsletter on publishing and independent bookselling written by former San Francisco Chronicle book editor Pat Holt. For years, she was one of the very few voices really telling it like it is. After a long gap, I’m happy to see Holt Uncensored return in blog form.

• Holt Uncensored blog
• “Holt Uncensored: The Beginning”
• “Holt Uncensored: Now”
• Archives from 1998-2007

[Now Reading: Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow]

Posted by Anirvan

Ohio rare book thieves caught

I just heard about the arrest of three Ohio thieves who stole two rare books from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, including a copy of the rare Maxwell’s Code, the first major legal code for the Northwest Territory:

“McCarty and Bays visited the library on June 27 and asked to see the Laws of the Territory of the United States North West of the Ohio, also known as the Maxwell Code…McCarty eventually was seen leaving the women’s restroom with the books and was confronted by a staff member. The couple left and the employee recovered what he thought were both books. It wasn’t until early September that staff members discovered that the Freeman Code, a 32-page pamphlet, had been removed from its cover…On Aug. 25, Scranton visited the library and asked to see the Maxwell Code. He was unable to provide identification, but he agreed to turn over his backpack as collateral. When library staffers were distracted by other business, Scranton fled with the book. The backpack was found to be stuffed with paper towels…Investigators said McCarty sold the Freeman Code to a collector in England for $35,000 through a rare-book dealer in Philadelphia. He told the dealer he also had a copy of the Maxwell Code.”

Yecch. McCarty was apparently also convicted for forging a check stolen from Textbooksrus.com. Apparently it’s not clear whether the books have been recovered.

Read the whole story.

Posted by Anirvan

California Rare Book School feedback

I’ve been excited about the California Rare Book School ever since I first heard about it, so I enjoyed reading Chris Lowenstein’s description of her week at the school on her blog:

• Chapter 240: California Rare Book School
• Chapter 241: My Week in Book Paradise

[Now Reading: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America by David Hajdu]

Posted by Anirvan

Translated title lookup service

You learn something new everyday. I just discovered Index Translationum, a searchable archive of translated titles, operated by UNESCO. Give it an author or title, and it returns bibliographic data for matching translations.

For example, given author “Lahiri” and title “The Namesake,” it returns details on the following thirteen translations:

• De naamgenoot : roman [Dutch] (ISBN: 9029074078) / Ko Kooman / Amsterdam: Meulenhoff [Netherlands], 2003. 316 p.
• I synonymia : Mythistorima [Greek, Modern (1453-)] / Evi Vangelatou / Athina: Ellinika Grammata [Greece], 2004. 357,2 p. English: Namesake
• Imenjak [Croatian] (ISBN: 953-220-186-6, 1. izd) / Blanka Pečnik-Kroflin / Zagreb: Algoritam [Croatia], 2004. 274 str.
• Hamnam [Farsi, Western; Persian] / Amir Mehdi Haqiqat / Tehrān: Mahi; Tehrān: Markaz Beynolmelali Gofteguye Tamaddonha [Iran, Islamic Rep.], 2004. 360p.
• Hamnam [Farsi, Western; Persian] / Farideh Ashrafi / Tehrān: Morvarid [Iran, Islamic Rep.], 2004. 386p.
• Hamnam [Farsi, Western; Persian] / Gita Gorgani / Tehrān: Elm [Iran, Islamic Rep.], 2004. 384p.
• Sono na ni tinande [Japanese] (ISBN: 4-10-590040-4) / Takayosi Ogawa / Tokyo: Sintyousya [Japan], 2004. 350 p.
• Navnebroren [Norwegian, Bokmål] (ISBN: 82-05-33625-3) / Mona Lange / Oslo: Gyldendal [Norway], 2005. 285 s.
• Navnebroren [Norwegian] (ISBN: 82-05-32430-1) / Mona Lange / Oslo: Gyldendal [Norway], 2004. 287 s.
• Der Namensvetter [German] (ISBN: 3-442-73350-2, Genehmigte Taschenbuchausg., 1. Aufl.) / Barbara Heller / München: btb [Germany], 2005. 349 S.
• Imeto [Bulgarian] / Zornica Hristova / Sofija: Obsidian [Bulgaria], 2004. 318 p
• Kaima [Finnish] (ISBN: 951-31-3022-3) / Kersti Juva / Helsinki: Tammi [Finland], 2005. 413 s. English: Namesake
• Vārdabrālis [Latvian] / Ieva Lešinska / Rīga: Atēna [Latvia], 2005. 302 lpp.

(Are there really three totally separate Farsi translations? Hmm.)

via

Posted by Anirvan

Robot transit librarian

Just came across this—a nearby library system is setting up the Library-A-Go-Go, an automated library book lending system at the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART train station.

“A vending-like machine located at the station will hold some 400 books that can be checked out for free by anyone with a valid Contra Costa County library card. A patron will insert the card, get access to the available titles and check out up to three books. A robotic arm will retrieve the books. They must be returned to the book-lending machine within three weeks. The public will have access to the machine during BART’s normal hours of operation. The stock will include both fiction and nonfiction titles.” (BART press release)

More details from the Contra Costa Times…

Posted by Anirvan

Catching book thieves

I just finished reading local graphic novelist Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter, a noirish 1970s library action-detective story loosely based on an actual high-profile 1996 rare book theft. While Bookhunter works best in print, Shiga also makes it available to read online, either via a page-at-a-time interface, or as a single long page (best for high-bandwidth users).

The Stranger book editor Paul Constant writes about a somewhat less interesting brand of book thief in his article “Flying Off the Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves”, based on his encounters with book thieves while working in Seattle independent bookstores:

“In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting ‘Drop the book!’ I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, ‘Here are your fucking books!’ and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.”

Posted by Anirvan