Foreword

The Standard usually comes out on the first of January, April, July, and October, but here we are dropping the Fall issue down your chimneys in the last week of December.

We are doing two things with this slimmer special issue. One is pretty obvious—catching up on getting our online journal out on time. Shouldn’t be long now before that happens.

We are also taking a very close look at the ethereal connection between an extraordinary fine press publisher and the somewhat bibliomaniacal bookseller who is collecting, selling, and documenting his marvelous output a full century later. The artisan is Thomas Bird Mosher, and the learned devotee is Philip R. Bishop, and they team up here to present you with a richly inlaid holiday gift to be cherished in some quiet moments between seasonal activities. Needless to say, most of us would take any of these fine bindings and good advices over the gift of an ugly sweater or Jelly of the Month Club gift certificate any day.

The Standard has been pitching for more specialized content for some time now, and this is a spectacular example of same. If applying to the mercenary side may tip the scales a bit, our online journal seems to get pretty good search engine placement, and one specialist reports continued profitable leads and contacts from an article he did for us many years ago. Indeed, I have good reason to believe the IOBA Standard is an industry leader when it comes to greatly delayed feedback.

So, please give back. Here is what we say toward the end of each issue.

“The Standard can always use interesting, well-written articles on subjects of interest to the bookselling trade. Please query first, however, to editor@ioba.org. You will be supplied with submission guidelines, but to summarize, the material should be original, it is subject to editing, you retain copyright, and of course there is no payment other than most everyone’s satisfaction. You do not need to be a member of IOBA, except for the IOBA Bookseller Profiles section, though we would surely like you to join. [Only fifty bucks a year.] We are very interested in the book trade outside the U.S. as well.

“Currently we are also seeking short pieces for the following self-explanatory columns. House Calls; Yard/Estate/Library Sale Tales; Auction Action; Book Show Impressions; Book Store Lore; and Library File.”

Thanks everyone and we will see you sooner rather than later.

#standard

Foreword

In the online bookselling Dreamtime about a decade ago, there was Interloc (the larval stage of Alibris), Bibliofind (very clean of limb), and ABE (like fresh Canadian spring water). The Bibliofind list was a great place to talk privately about our profession, and we used to speculate on trends. We envisioned corporations buying these book-loving companies up, and we hoped that one or more of the search services would survive as strong independents and good partners.

Ironically, Bibliofind was bought out and exterminated first by Amazon in a roundabout but purposeful manner, the early Alibris centralized business model sought to hide booksellers from our customers, and the evolution of ABE could serve as a study of creeping corporatism, though to be fair many of our problems are based on The Glut (millions of books dredged up by an army of overnight booksellers), and not solely on the depredations of the 3 As.

And so it was on a quiet first of August before a three day Canadian weekend that we received notice Amazon had acquired ABE, pending final approval, and no it was not another April Fool’s-type jest. Over the years our ABE fees have doubled or quadrupled while our sales were halved or quartered, and we wonder how much of those revenues derived from our hard work and expertise went toward improving the balance sheet and making this property ripe for picking.

This rather seismic event might have raised greater fears and more resentment years ago when ABE was pure, but things have gone so far downhill with mega-lister clogged search result pages, the credit card processing grab, and a score of other professional and technical problems that many of us are hoping equally impure Amazon can save the day. Unless Amazon gets religion all of a sudden about the difference between unique used/out-of-print/antiquarian books and shiny identical new ones fresh from the publisher’s warehouse, however, there’s a good chance we are jumping from a sinking ship to a ship of fools.

I have given up debating enthusiastic Amazon supporters, who believe that the phenomenal branding and number of eyeballs Amazon delivers absolves the company of all sins against our noble profession. I shop there for cheap music and new books, but I usually don’t do my research or important buying there due to all the dumbing down and distractions, and I suspect it is the last choice for serious book buyers who know about the alternatives. Amazon’s customer base is not as sophisticated either. We just heard the following rationale for a refund from an IOBA bookseller: “I was ignorant of the fact that the product that I was buying was a book.” This is what makes the loss or diminution of ABE worrisome. Amazon makes it very easy to order books and it delivers them quickly on the back end, but it also makes it difficult to list books and to find books on the front end. And for “better” titles, Amazon’s dirty little secret is that these selfsame books can often be ordered directly, easily, and safely from independent booksellers, without the big Amazon markup added to cover the costs of doing business there, or added by those who realize that most buyers don’t know about this alternative. “Customer-centric” sounds great at first blush, but it often involves brutalizing your suppliers, undermining other businesses in the quest for monopoly, degrading traditional standards that are usually there for a good reason, and actually increasing prices in unseen ways.

I have two visions of Amazon. The first is of a galactic horn of plenty sluggishly moving through the universe devouring star systems with the same guiding principles that inform WalMart. The other is of the Pythonesque Ministry of Silly Walks that must be their used books department, deep down in the bowels of the rude cornucopia. I picture the office door at an angle, up off the floor a few feet with a whacky doorknob and painted some bright color, with people inside jumping through flaming hoops and putting out small fires all day, which is what they make us do with technical inefficiencies (uploading, etc.) and bibliographic atrocities (truncating descriptions, etc.) far too numerous to list here.

There is a third hopeful vision, long cherished, of our nice books smoothly interfacing with Amazon’s enormous potential. Will they start from scratch with used books and integrate AbeBooks into that, or will they make AbeBooks the premier arm of their bookselling empire? Will they squeeze us for profits, hide our identities, and coerce us into lowering standards, or will they respect the profession and treat us as business owners rather than shipping clerks? Will either company even listen to us? One thing for certain is that IOBA will try to make them listen, as when one of our Canadian members reported on challenging the head of AbeBooks heading for his sports car out on the street after a good but rather restrictive radio interview on hurtful new shipping commissions “like an Ent lecturing Saruman.”

In this issue, three online bookseller insiders weigh in on the ABE takeover; a New Hampshire bookman says farewell to a beloved children’s author; IOBA supports our South African colleagues; a cool letterpress Q & A; and Joe Perlman writes about Great Unexpectations. The Reference Desk performs a strip search; the book review comes with Goodspeed; and we open a new drawer for exciting interviews with up and coming authors. The Tool Box gets into a bind and fights corruption. IOBA Bookseller Profiles say Havre de Grace, MD; go leather in Devon, U.K.; yet bow to royalty in Palm Desert, CA. If that doesn’t stuff you, how about a large slice of Addenda for dessert?

I am late on this issue for the first time (July in October), and will try to catch up, though it’s always so tempting to save untold hours with two little words—“combined issue.” You can help. Send articles about your specialties, send brief pieces, send something. Please see “Solicitations” in the back pages for more information.

PS: Sorry to take care of internal business in a foreword, but it has come to our attention that a good portion of IOBA members are not receiving our Announce List messages, probably because they are being filtered into a trash or junk folder. You can opt out of other lists, like Discuss or TradeBooks, but we ask all of you to make sure you are receiving Announce List messages, as that is our official conduit for important announcements, the annual August renewal notice (for the membership year September through August), voting on board elections, etc. We try to use it sparingly but we need it to reach all of you. Please consider this PS as a ping test. If you received word of this new issue of the Standard through the Announce List, you are golden. If you found your way here through some other means, take action to make sure Announce List emails go into your In Box. We can help you with this if you need it. Thank you kindly. We now return you to more standard programming.

Foreword

As IOBAns on our internal Announce List know, I was recently elected president of the organization. The board of directors consists of a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer who are elected every year, and six members at large who serve staggered terms of three years each. We also have eight standing committees (Bylaws, Education, Ethics, Finance, Internet, Membership, Public Relations, and Standard), but some of these were dormant and even vacant. My first goal of dual service whereby board members also chair committees has already been realized. The advantage of this is that board members are more fully invested, and frankly it is easier to find ten motivated people than it is to find eighteen. If you want to give back to the organization, you start off by joining the committee of your choice, you may chair it some day, and after that the sky is the limit (or such sky as a small trade association has to offer at any rate).

Small can be good, but so can big. I am firmly in the camp that believes IOBA should have 500 professional members by now, rather than 250 to 300. Part of the reason for slow growth has been inertia on the part of the leadership fed in part by apathy on the part of the membership, and we had a couple of withering internal debates some years ago, but it is mostly related to the stormy seas of online bookselling in general. We have also fumbled the annual renewal process on occasion, in terms of effective and timely announcements and reminders. 300 seems to be a magic number for independently minded bookselling organizations such as ours. The only one that has cracked it lately has been the search service Biblio. If ABEbooks can attract 13,500 booksellers, many of whom are of professional caliber, IOBA should be able to reach 500.

Membership will be my first priority. The Membership Committee does the most everyday work in IOBA. They vet and they vote. In the very beginning vetting was unnecessary, as most of us were the same professionals that helped companies like Interloc, Bibliofind, and ABE pioneer online bookselling to begin with. When the floodgates opened, however, standards suffered as we took pretty much anybody without review. Many of those were “instant booksellers” and they have long since departed. We now go about this differently. The Membership Committee basically requires the following. Primary online business is selling books, a minimum of 200 books listed, no more than 10% of total stock should be priced under $5, should own at least 90% of books listed (this bars “megalisters” while recognizing that some specialty stock is ordered directly from the publisher), a standard satisfaction guaranteed returns policy, and full and accurate descriptions (no boilerplate) of the actual book in hand. Automated pricing and similarly lazy or eyebrow-raising practices are frowned upon. Specialization and having your own website are considered a plus. Most successful applicants spend one year at the Associate Member level ($30/year) and then move up to the Professional Member level ($60/year). The first step may be waived at the discretion of the committee co-chair, and needless to say we are very desirous of adding top shelf booksellers to our ranks.

For borderline entry-level booksellers, we want to formalize a mentor program, to be administered through the Education Committee. The Membership Committee will recommend mentoring in those cases where the applicant may be able to meet the standards within a reasonable amount of time. There is also an expectation that they will maintain these standards, adhere to the IOBA Code of Ethics, and grow as professional booksellers. We don’t mean to be elitist with all of this, but IOBA was formed over a concern for slipping standards, and it is natural that we would institute our own. For a refresher on what IOBA is all about, it’s right on our home page in five short paragraphs.

I mentioned apathy on the part of the membership, and I would like to clarify. Most IOBAns are not at the very top of the food chain, with decades of experience, a bricks and mortar presence, and tens of thousands of stellar books in stock. We have some ABAA and ILAB members and many highly accomplished and specialized bricks and clicks and internet-only dealers, but as a trade association of independent online booksellers, many of whom are relatively new to the profession and want to better themselves in the modern absence of traditional apprenticeships, we take more of a big tent approach. There has been board discussion in the past about requiring all members to participate at some level, kind of like some food co-ops do. I don’t favor this, as it would require a lot of administration and would engender headaches and departures. Board members and committee chairs have consistently noted signs of apathy over the years, and such discouragement often leads to inertia. From my perspective as editor of the Standard, for example, I spend over 150 hours per issue and get perhaps one response (this is not a plea for feel good feedback…just an observation); or I email IOBA members several times asking for a profile or other contribution and don’t even hear back (I am tempted to order a book from them just to get their attention). Others joined only because of the ability to sell through IOBAbooks, and when that did not produce enough profit they packed up and left. Varying levels of participation is a common occurrence in most organizations, and indeed throughout history. The 300 Spartans were awesome, but they got a little help from a pan-Greek army and untold numbers of everyday citizens you don’t hear too much about.

Speaking for myself, this general malaise isn’t ideal, but it does not bother me greatly. We are all busy, and the more time you save for selling books the better chance you have of staying in business. To me it is all about the IOBA logo that can be displayed on your website and elsewhere. That logo stands for something. It is reassuring to colleagues and to book buyers. The logo alone is worth $60/year, even if the organization is not always incredibly vibrant or active. Luckily the founders erected a pretty good framework, and there are always some dedicated members who step up and give of their time and talents. I am not especially well suited to be president of my own sock drawer, let alone a disparate group of booksellers, but one reason I took it on is that I feel we are at a sink or swim stage. We can slide into murky depths at under 200 members or barely tread water at under 300 members, but please consider joining and/or giving back to the association if you are in a position to do so as we gear up for the goals and challenges ahead. Let’s reach a nice island (with modern amenities, and not Fantasy Island either) and IOBA can be our port in the storm now and our naval station later.

This year I will mainly be concentrating on infrastructure. The website, internet applications, membership issues, defining the roles of the committees and populating them with volunteers and, either this year or next, revising many of the bylaws. IOBA does seem to have a short institutional memory due to high turnover at the top, and I would like to get some pages up in the Members Section that will explain how certain things are done, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel so often. I’m also interested in improved internal and external communications; advertising and promoting and internationalizing IOBA; and improving IOBAbooks.

Now that I’ve aired our organizational laundry in public, let’s get back to finding and selling and reading and loving books.

In this issue, U.S. overseas internet book buying; a shape shifting eBay experience; an interview with book fair promoter Bruce Gventer; a wall-mounted hard drive; and Joe Perlman scales New Hampshire. Quirky QSLs qualify for the ephemera column; and the book review is murderous this time around. Tool Box content includes book hunting, insurance, and contact info. IOBA Bookseller Profiles hail from Lehigh Acres, FL; Spring Hill, KS; and North Yorkshire, England. And Addenda.