President’s Report
Which Listing Service is Right for You?
Online Fraud Prevention
Descriptions that Sell
Auction descriptions for fun and profit
Bookselling on the Internet: On Writing Descriptions
Committee Reports
Each day the newspaper, television news anchors, and our own industry email lists are full of events that impact our industry, our income, and our lives. Our business world is changing so fast that trends are impossible to predict from history.
How do we survive, much less thrive? Virtually all IOBA members are small businesses, dependent on commerce with unseen customers, most of whom we have never met. We depend on these strangers to pay us in advance for books, depending upon our honesty for delivery, for the accuracy of our descriptions, for fair treatment in case of damage, shipping delays, or other problems.
How do we let these customers know that we really are honest, dependable, knowledgable, professionals? That when we do make mistakes, we will correct them without delay or complaint.
IOBA is part of the answer. As an IOBA member, you have promised to conduct your business honestly and professionally. You agreed to follow a published set of standards in describing your product. You also agreed that if you did not uphold these principles, IOBA could end your membership.
These are important committments. They provide a basis for trust between a customer and an unknown bookseller. A customer should be confident buying from a member of IOBA. Buying from you!
Last year IOBA established a basic framework to differentiate our members from the general population of booksellers. We promulgated a comprehensive Code of Ethics. We published standard definitions of book conditions. We included a committment to ethical behavior in our Bylaws and our membership application, with sanctions for violations. We began regular publication of this newsletter, to keep you informed about our industry.
We will continue and expand upon this work this year. We will be working on educational programs for new and experienced booksellers. Neil is continuing publication of our outstanding newsletter. We will continue work on our Ethics Code and enforcement provisions. Membership in IOBA will increasingly mean you are part of the elite in online bookselling.
Of course, if the customers don’t know about us, or what we stand for, these differences don’t really help our individual businesses. This year we plan to begin letting the customers know, and to help those customers find us when they are ready to buy.
The board has approved funding a significant and continuing advertising/publicity campaign. This will be one of our largest investments over the coming year. Our Public Relations Chair is an experienced professional in this field. We will be promoting both IOBA as an organization, and each of you, as IOBA members. We are still finalizing plans for this campaign, but you will be kept in the loop as this comes together. Interested members are needed to add their knowledge and ideas to this effort. This campaign will include both trade publications, national media, and the local media in your community. We know you’re good. We’re want to help the buying public find out about you.
Once the customer knows about IOBA, they also need to know how to find you. We’re working on that too. One year ago I announced an IOBA member only search engine. This engine was similar in concept to Bookfinder or Addall. A customer would enter search parameters, then be presented with a list of books that matched those parameters. The difference is that only IOBA members books would be shown. The customer could then click on the link, and buy the book directly from you.
When I announced this program the engine was in the testing phase, and we expected it to go live last summer. It has taken a little longer than we planned.
The work on this project became a major task chewing up countless hours of work. All of this work was contributed at no cost to IOBA by Deanna Ramsay, our former Internet Operations Chair. The programming hours made major inroads into Deanna’s professional and personal time. These demands were in addition to her Committee Chair responsibilities. Like most computer programming projects, unanticipated problems were met and solved, chewing up additional time. We are still not there, but major progress has been made.
The board has committed additional funding to this project. Deb Graham is now our Internet Operations Chair. Deanna is assisting Deb with the search engine project. While we still don’t have a final launch date for this service, we have committed significant resources to its completion. We believe this major project can be a tremendous asset to each of our members. We’ll keep you informed of the progress.
Deb has also begun planning enhancements to IOBA’s website that will allow increased visibility to our individual members.
We know you’re good! You are doing important work! Let’s work together to spread the word.
Jim Hart
In the beginning, there was AB Bookman’s Weekly. For years the bookselling and buying community awaited its weekly arrival and flipped through the pages of Books for Sale and Books Wanted advertisements and sent off quote cards and phoned or mailed in their orders. Many a bookseller’s eyesight was ruined by poring over the tiny print by the flickering candle light. And then Interloc came along and the world started to change.
Interloc was an automated tool for booksellers to match their wants against others’ listings. It worked through a dial-up connection, was relatively expensive and was clearly designed for professional booksellers rather than their customers. And then the Advanced Book Exchange and Bibliofind started up more or less simultaneously and the pace of change started to skyrocket and the world of antiquarian and used books changed forever. These services were designed to link the actual customers (the civilians, if you will) with the sellers, rather than the closed bookseller-to-bookseller model of Interloc – and they were web-based on the logarithmically growing Internet. Both services are still going strong – ABE is still owned by its original founders and is one of the leading high tech employers here in Victoria where this article is being written; Bibliofind was sold by its founder Michael Selzer to Exchange.com who shortly sold it in turn to Amazon.com, in whose hands it remains.
Interloc belatedly moved its operations to the World Wide Web as well but remained a distant third compared to the original two. Metasearch services like Bookfinder and Addall appeared on the scene. Other services like Bookavenue and Global Book Mart started operations. Interloc morphed into the controversial Alibris – a sort of combination on-line bookseller and listing service. Partnerships began to be the order of the day with arrangements between ABE, Alibris and the giant Barnes and Noble and others, more obscure. Amazon encouraged sellers to list their used books first on zshops and then Marketplace. All the while the Internet auction sites (we won’t even touch upon them in this article) were injecting their own notes of insanity into the increasingly complex world of online bookselling. Ebay developed a fixed-price site to complement its wildly successful auctions and called it Half.com.
Booksellers are attempting to take control of their destinies by starting organizations like the IOBA and starting their own owner-owned listing service Tomfolio. Is it complicated out there? You betcha. Are there some decisions to be made? Yup. What’s the independent bookseller to do? Hopefully the following information will help you to make your decision on how and where to sell your books.
The following chart provides a comparison between all of the major and most of the minor listing services. One of the joys of Internet Publishing is that you can keep your information current and can fix your mistakes so if you see anything factually wrong in this table please let us know. We will try to keep it updated as services change and evolve.
Just as we were going to press Amazon announced that Bibliofind was being merged (read terminated!) with zshops and Marketplace and that Bibliofind subscribers were eligible for 6 months free listings on the Amazon services. So long Bibliofind and thanks – you were an important part of the Internet revolution in on-line bookselling and you will be missed. We have printed the survey information as is since it hopefully will provide a resource for the many Bibliofind sellers who now must find a new home. As for Amazon’s actions, perhaps the less said, the better!
The number of services used ranged from one to eight with 19 using just one service (13 ABE, 1 Alibris, 5 Bibliofind) and just one respondent using 8.
We also asked respondents to rank the services in terms of ease of use, support and dollar value of sales.
When we looked at people’s second choices Bibliofind was first with 37% of the respondents and ABE was second at 27%.
Looking at second choices, Bibliofind, interestingly enough was second at 28% and ABE pulled in at 13%. Several people said that they rated Bibliofind high here because they never needed support. A number of the smaller services showed well here considering the number of respondents that used them – Antiqbook book was at 4% on both first and second choice; Justbooks gained 1% as a first choice but was at 5% as a second choice and Bookavenue was at 3% for both first and second choices. A number of people specifically commented on the good support they received from Antiqbooks and Bookavenue.
The second choice follows the pattern with Bibliofind at 31%, ABE at 26%, Alibris at 12, zshops 7, Tomfolio at 2 and the rest at 1%.
We asked respondents to choose which service they would list with if they could list with only one and once again the results were quite clear. Many of the respondents who chose zshops said that they would have preferred to choose one of the other services but the zshops sales were simply too important to them.
In summary, it is clear that most booksellers use multiple services and will continue to do so. ABE has the greatest market penetration at this point and a high level of customer satisfaction. The situation is fluid with respect to Bibliofind and it is possible their share may have increased substantially in the brief period since the survey started.
Bibliofind’s future is shadowy at this point. More services, some quite specialized or with restricted memberships such as the ILAB and Bibliopoly are appearing all the time and they will be an alternative site for many sellers. We booksellers like to hedge our bets and in this market that looks like a very sensible precaution. Luckily there are enough alternatives that we will continue to be able to do so.
