The Pros and Cons of Biblio.com for Buyers and Sellers

This is the fourth in a series of articles taking a brief look at the pros and cons of the various multi-dealer book listing databases. The others in the series discussed AbeBooks.com, Alibris.com and Amazon.com and can be found in the three previous issues of the Standard. This article takes a look at Biblio.com, which is in some ways the “new kid on the block.” While the “3 A’s” still dominate online bookselling, Biblio.com is trying hard to compete with them, and it has grown impressively in the last few years.

Despite its late start—Biblio did not launch as a search service until 2003—it has recorded impressive gains in size. By 2004, after only a year and a half, Biblio.com had 11 million books and 1,800 sellers. Now it claims 55 million books and over 5,500 booksellers, and it is certainly possible that it will pass Alibris in the number of booksellers and books in the not too distant future. It is notable that Biblio.com has achieved this growth with a very small staff. Even now, when it is almost half the size of AbeBooks.com (in terms of dealers and books), it has ten staff members versus 120 for AbeBooks. Yet Biblio’s customer service is almost always fast and responsive.

There is another way in which Biblio is unique among multi-dealer websites. In 2004, Biblio and some of its member booksellers contributed to the building of a community library in impoverished rural Bolivia. In 2005, BiblioWorks.org was founded as an independent non-profit association, although it is still supported to a significant extent by Biblio through financial aid, voluntarism, and publicity. Since its founding, BiblioWorks has built and stocked five more libraries in South America, and has forged partnerships with several other organizations. In addition, Biblio has introduced a program called Ecosend that makes contributions (based on the impact of shipping books ordered through the site) in support of NativeEnergy, an organization which helps Native Americans, Alaskan Native villages, and small family farms to develop alternative energy sources (especially wind and methane). Biblio covers the cost of this program itself and does not charge either buyers or sellers on the site for it.

Biblio is both growing and succeeding as a business, and yet retains a strong sense of the importance of improving the world we live in—from the unexpected gesture of sending all its (US) subscribers a free year of the magazine Fine Books several years ago, to its work for literacy in South America (and locally) and its support of the Ecosend program.

FOR BUYERS: PROS

For some consumers, the fact that Biblio.com is a socially aware independent business which is providing a marketplace for other independent businesses is in itself a strong reason to shop there.

However, there are a few other specifics I can add.

• With over 50 million books, there is a wide variety of titles available. While fewer in sheer numbers than on AbeBooks or Alibris, there are some sellers who list on Biblio but not on those sites.
• Offers a simultaneous multiple search for books with ISBNs. The buyer can enter several ISBNs in a box, and the results will be sorted by the booksellers who have the most books from that list (four from one bookseller, three from another, etc.). A link to this search is available from the home page and from the advanced search page, but not from the “quick search” box. This makes for efficient searching and possible savings on shipping.
• Easy to see shipping rates. If the buyer is logged onto his/her account, each listing shows a full display of shipping rates—standard and expedited—for the first book and for additional books from the same seller, based on the buyer’s country.
• Option to limit searches to books in “very good” or better condition only.
• The price of a particular book might be lower on Biblio than on Alibris or AbeBooks, since the fees paid by booksellers are often lower than on those sites.
• A very good want matching system (second only to that of AbeBooks and far superior to that of Alibris).
• Offers gift certificates starting at just $5, which are very easy to purchase.

FOR BUYERS: CONS

In general, most of the negative aspects of the site are fairly minor, and perhaps are partially due to the lean staffing mentioned above. For example:

• On the advanced search, tab order from field to field goes from author to publisher (instead of to title)…an annoying quirk.
• When you add a book to the shopping cart, there is no link to “continue shopping.” You have to use the back button.
• Bookseller information is two clicks away. On the search results, the bookseller name is not clickable, so you have to first click the title, and then the bookseller name . Also, in order to email the bookseller from a book listing, you not only must go through the website, but you also have to enter a security code, and the system used is more difficult to read than most such systems. It is only after the buyer has done this that the email address of the bookseller is shown. It is, however, much easier to contact a bookseller from a “bookstore search.” In that case, “email the bookseller” opens up a blank email form.
• Keyword search is only a keyword search (unlike AbeBooks which searches almost all fields), but at least it searches the actual keywords entered by booksellers (unlike Alibris which only searches keywords assigned by its database to a particular book).
• While Biblio.com promotes ordering more than one book from the same seller to save on shipping, there are several flaws and problems with the bookstore specific searches. First of all, it is not possible to search “all books” if the seller has a significant number of books. The search times out and returns incomplete results. This is true even if the search is narrowed somewhat. In addition, the only way to do multiple searches of the same seller’s books is to use the back key. All of the options for “new search” bring the buyer back to the complete database.

FOR SELLERS: PROS

Biblio offers several benefits when booksellers on the site act as buyers. Chief among these is the fact that trade discounts, if offered, are automatically shown. These discounts can be unrestricted—offered to all other Biblio dealers—or reciprocal only. In addition, Biblio offers cash back to all of its booksellers on all purchases from the site.

There are also several other excellent features offered by Biblio.

• Choice of fee structures. Booksellers can opt for commission only (currently 15%) making listing there “risk-free” or they can select a combination of flat monthly fee plus lower commission. Both the flat fees and the commission rates under this option are lower than those charged by AbeBooks, making this an economical choice. In addition, on the seller dashboard, sellers can look at an analysis of their past sales to see which is the best option for them, based on those sales.
• Financial rewards for maintaining a high fulfillment rate. The fulfillment rate (for the past 90 days) is shown to the seller on the seller dashboard, and the fees are discounted for rates over 90% (with a larger discount for rates over 95%).
• A seller dashboard with several interesting graphs and statistics: a pie chart showing your inventory by price bracket, the total value of your inventory, graphs tracking inventory totals, orders by numbers and by dollars, referrals from the site and more.
• The option for booksellers to either process credit cards themselves or to have Biblio process them (for an additional fee).
• Generally pro-active in trying to reduce fraudulent orders through the site. Holds are placed on “suspicious” orders. While I am including this as a benefit, it could also be considered over-protection. Generally, the holds are released quickly, but sometimes there is a delay and this makes it difficult for a seller to fill an order expeditiously. The majority of orders which trigger a hold do turn out to be valid (simply ordering many books at one time seems to be considered suspicious).
• Options such as putting all books on sale temporarily.
• Fast uploads with a sample of the results showing on screen immediately.
• Communication with sellers is generally quite good (although I mention some exceptions below).

FOR SELLERS: CONS

• Catalogue names are not those selected by the bookseller, but rather more generic names to which the seller must “attach” his/her specific catalogue. The process of doing this is rather time-consuming, and often the “best” match for a catalogue name is not very accurate.
• The individual bookstore searches are not “sticky” (that is, new searches take the buyer to the main database, instead of remaining limited to the one bookseller), and the results are often incomplete.
• Barriers between customers and booksellers. As discussed above, bookstore information attached to search results is incomplete (the font is also very small, so the name of the bookstore does not stand out), and it requires several steps for a customer to contact a seller directly.
• There is no automated process for canceling an order once it has been accepted (if, for example, a credit card is rejected). The only way to recover the commission paid on these incomplete orders is to email bookseller support.
• Sometimes changes are made in the site or in the searches without prior notification to the sellers. An example of this was the addition of searching based on condition. AbeBooks has been promising this to sellers for over two years now, but still does not offer it. Biblio.com rolled it out with the option to refine listings by “very good or better” condition without a word. The only problem is that in order for your books to be included in this refinement, “condition” has to be uploaded as a separate field, so a change like this sometimes requires that booksellers change their uploads or databases, making prior notification a good idea.

[Editor’s Note: Scientists estimate that Biblio.com is approximately 3.5 million times more likely to understand and
act on these types of suggestions for improvement than the 3 As are.]

Chris Volk operates Bookfever along with Shep Iiams out of the Sierra foothills of Amador County, CA and can be contacted at http://www.bookfever.com.