Charles Vilnis – BookRouter & Allusive Information Systems

URLS: http://www.allusys.com and http://www.bookrouter.com

When Shirley Bryant approached me with a request to do an interview for the IOBA’s The Standard newsletter, it forced me to reflect on what it is my colleagues and I do at Allusive Information Systems and how we got here to be doing it….

From personal experience, I can tell you that book dealers and computer people are very much alike – generally independent, a bit eccentric and definitely passionate about the ingredients of their respective vocations. Just as book dealers do much more than simply buy and sell books, computer folks do a whole lot more than simply sit and code, or create computer systems for clients. The world of books and the world of computers exist – both cultures of communication.

I began as a citizen of the world of books….

After a stint in New York working for a Japanese trading company where I could use my Japanese language skills acquired in college to a practical end, I moved to northern California in 1975. I was working as a finish carpenter in 1977 when an acquaintance asked me to become his partner in a small used bookshop in a small apple town where the freight trains still ran down the main street (called Main Street, by the way) on their way to the cannery. The day I came by to talk to him, he gave me a set of keys and put my name on the checking account. Suddenly I was a book person – a full partner in a business that had grossed almost $14,000 the year before!

Most instances of autobiography now turn to the enormous success that followed – fortune and the respect of colleagues accumulating through the years – the subject turning back in self-satisfaction to consider a life well led…

In my case, I would have to say that, while I hope I have gained at least some regard from my colleagues and learned a little bit about the craft of dealing in the books of East Asia, what I really found that day over 25 years ago was a passion, a love for books and for the world of books. I did become a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association in 1980 (at a time when the ABAA was full of young booksellers in their late 20’s to their early 40’s). A few years later, I moved to Boston and became involved in the life of Helen Kelly and her business, the Boston Book Co., founded in the 1970’s. It was Helen who gave me the chance to see what a large urban book business could be and who opened my eyes to the joys of domestic life – we married and had a son in the late 1980’s.

Helen had one of the first computers in the old book trade: In 1982, she bought an original IBM PC with specifications laughable by today’s standards – but it was top of the line (with a hard drive, no less) and cost her about $10,000! Not so laughable a sum then. Soon after I merged my book business into hers, I became involved in the care and feeding of that by then venerable PC and its successors – then creating a network…..I was hooked.

Helen had introduced me to my second passion – the world of computers.

Helen had equipped that original PC back in 1982 with Bookease – Marc Younger’s professional bookseller’s package, built on DOS, which he had created for his own bookseller wife Helen in the same year. By the early to mid-90’s I had become Boston Book Company’s information technology department – our computer network had grown – we had gone far beyond the first PC to the blistering speed of the 486! Marc had succeeded in creating a version of Bookease that networked well and stably, we had bought a commercial space specifically for our rare books. Our book business was prospering… we cranked out catalogues, published lists and I personally had also become our Asian book department of one and was doing a land-office business with Japan.

But off on the horizon, no bigger than a man’s hand, a dark cloud was churning. The Japanese market was in decline; that was clear. Techno-friends were starting to talk about the growth of a “network of networks” called the internet and I decided to take a look. By 1992 I had an email address and a shell account so I could start exploring the ‘net (not via the Web, though, it was too early for that –I didn’t even use Windows….). But even in my halting fashion, I found my way in cyberspace and what I found astonished me: the internet was full of librarians!

Viewed from the near side of the dot-com divide, the internet of those days seems quite quaint. Even folks with “com” domains were careful to give as little offense as possible to the dominant anti-commercial culture. The ‘net was for the exchange of information – if you wanted to share bibliographical information as a bookseller with your colleagues and with the library and academic worlds, that was fine, but booksellers should not flog their wares.

But soon there was an accelerating move to make more than pure information available over the ‘net – fueled largely by the splashy, graphics-heavy and user-friendly World Wide Web. By 1993, Boston Book Company was on the Web and by early 1994 we had established a searchable database of our wares there. Interloc was still a Bulletin Board Service not open to the public, ABE and Bibliofind were just stirring, Amazon had only burned through their first few millions – spring was in the air.

As the dot.com boom evolved in the mid to late 1990’s it became clear to me and many of our colleagues that the easy answers for marketing that the Web seemed to provide for small businesses like ours were not an unmixed blessing. Bibliofind, ABE, AntiQbook in Europe, Interloc (later Alibris) and soon many other sites were jostling each other for a piece of the pie – trying to lure dealers to post their listings and to draw eyes to view them as well. And just like that we all seemed to get bulldozed by big money – folks you would never expect it of were suddenly interested in books. Capital was being poured into the process – relatively big fish were being swallowed by bigger fish in the internet world – Bibliofind was grabbed by Amazon which had discovered a sudden interest in old books and ways to market them and Interloc became Alibris absorbing Bibliocity, hoping to create a whole new market for old books by raising their visibility through the pages of the New Yorker…. It was a strange time.

There seemed to be a two-fold attack on our way of life. On the one hand, it was clear that money was trying to take over the old book world – whether that was sensible or not, whether there could be any reasonable return for the outlay of cash required to get noticed on Wall Street. One could foresee a future in which old book dealers would become glorified scouts for the various huge marketing venues. Not the sort of future most of the book people I knew relished.

The second attack (or just plain change, to be more neutral about it) was a revolution in our day-to-day activities. Traditionally there had been a “food chain” in the old book biz – at least since the demise of the truly great generalist booksellers – dealers sold to other dealers up that chain, retailing to their own customers along the way and wholesaling to specialists or those with more savvy about marketing at the high end. The romance of the vagabond bookseller hunting for gold on the less-traveled roads of America was being written every day, even just a few years ago. Yet the growing access to information (and misinformation, alas) over the internet meant lots of people knew lots more about books and markets than ever before, and the out-of-the way bookshops got much less remote. In the meantime, the multiplication of electronic venues, and the growing need for sophistication in all things digital, meant that there was less time for actually handling the books we all love…. Our customers, who had relied on us for expertise, were going to the search sites or to Amazon, to find information certainly, but more often to find stuff cheaper.

Ironically, the computer, which was supposed to make everything easier, ended up on the verge of separating us from our wares, making us work harder and maybe even making it harder to make a living.

The old book world responded with a whole raft of marketing solutions – ideas like the IOBA, high-end venues like WorldBookDealers, the ABAA/ILAB website and search engine, the joint ownership represented by TomFolio, etc. Each was an effort to reclaim the old book world from the new giants. We had all seen too clearly the utter demise of the independent new book dealers. No one wanted to follow them.

I supported all those efforts as best I could, but there had to be an answer from the computer side of things, as well. In that atmosphere, I decided to try and create some tools that would make it easier to interact with the brave new world of bibliospace, to alleviate some of the new drudge work that our friend, the computer, had created for us. As a member of Boston Book Co., I felt I was a good position to understand the joys and pains of 1990’s bookselling – we operated a used bookshop near the BU campus, and had a rare book operation in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood. At the rare shop we handled general antiquarian items, but we also pursued a fairly serious specialization in the world of Japanese books. In short, because of our internal diversity, whatever we could create to help us at the Boston Book Co. would probably help many of our colleagues, as well.

If I turned to my book business for inspiration and experience, I turned to my next-door neighbor for digital muscle. My neighbor, Mark, is a very skilled database developer with over 20 years experience in creating database tools for hospitals and educational institutions. He and I started to discuss the idea of using the internet not merely as a marketing medium but also as a foundation for helping booksellers more easily control their businesses as well. Our talks, at first theoretical and purely speculative, soon became very practical and, by early 1999, we had formed an LLC: Allusive Information Systems. Mark quit his job and came on board as a full-time in-house developer.

Over the course of those conversations, we developed a set of principles that would be the underlying theory of Allusive. Allusive was set up to fill a niche in the old book world, to develop a set of answers to some problems that I had learned about too clearly as a bookseller.

First of all, as computer people, we had to learn to listen to the customer, to the bookseller. Technical people tend to see the world in terms of their own latest technical “fad” – they are excited by the new, want to explore the “bleeding edge” of technology. We were determined not to prejudge a solution by its technical “sexiness” alone. What works, works.

On the other hand, it is true that clients and especially booksellers who aren’t computer literate have a certain Luddite strain (which I don’t entirely disagree with) that has to be dealt with. Sometimes the old way of doing things has simply gotten too complicated. I often find that booksellers use a Rube Goldbergian mess of structures, techniques and equipment that has evolved in response to practical needs as they have changed over time, which “works”, kinda, but which is so inefficient that it isn’t making economic sense for the business.

The result of those two problems is that booksellers are sometimes stuck with systems that are either alien and unusable or antiquated and overly complicated. In both cases, the systems are further compromised by being unreliable. And where do you find somebody to help you fix a problem at a moments notice? If your technical “faddist” moves to Peru, who will understand what latest gizmo he or she has equipped you with? On the other hand, if your system is a crazy quilt of operating systems and older equipment, who can pull it all back together when it falls apart?

Mark and I came up with the notion of creating a “toolbox” of software, both for the dealer’s office and for use over the internet. We figured that the basic task of the bookseller was the creation, storage, conversion and transfer of information. The average bookseller has data that they need to store and have access to – book records, sales records, wants, etc., etc.

Most everybody has some sort of database that they use for helping them with that – a software replacement for the raw memory skills and the many, many index cards we all once used (and once had, in the case of memory skills). Those databases are sometimes brewed at home out of Access or a spreadsheet or Filemaker Pro. Alternatively, there have been dedicated bookseller programs around for many years: Bookease, Homebase, BookTrakker, BookHound, etc., etc. Some were built from scratch, some on a base of Access or Filemaker – all useful as far as they went. It was the integration of those existing tools with the internet, and the growing marketing opportunity the internet represented, that we wanted to aim at.

It was at that point in 1999 that an interesting practical circumstance arose that put a point on our need to come up with tools for integration. I had been friends with Marc Younger, the developer or Bookease, for many years. He had handed over the maintenance of Bookease to other people soon after developing some simple tools for exporting internet-ready files out of it in the mid-1990s. The handover was not a success and became a classic case of the two failings we were seeing: too much tech on one hand, too little service on the other. The first group that took over Bookease for DOS meant well but never seemed to be around when there were problems or questions from the Bookease booksellers. In despair, Marc made an arrangement with another developer on the west coast – this fellow decided to rebuild Bookease from scratch as a Windows program on an Access foundation. Bookease had been brilliantly conceived by Marc and was a very stable and expandable piece of software built on a Foxpro foundation. Access, on the other hand, is not a foundation for a mission-critical business environment – at least not as it was used in the new “Bookease Pro” for Windows.

The results were instability, loss of data, bookseller recriminations and the new developer’s disappearance from the scene. Bookease Pro was in shambles and Bookease Plus for DOS, while humming merrily along, was running into a limit we all saw in the late 1990’s – the Y2K dilemma. Bookease for DOS needed an update desperately and time was running out.

It was at that point that Marc Younger came to us, and asked if we at Allusive might take over the maintenance of Bookease for DOS. Though it seemed a bit far afield from our primary mission of building all new tools, I saw it as an opportunity to establish a relationship with a whole group of longtime computer users who still used the old Bookease program, and an acid test for our ability to integrate the old and the new with software “bridges.”

In late 1999 we set up a Y2K upgrade system, contacted those many Bookease DOS users who had been languishing a bit since the mid-90’s, created a service contract system and Y2K converted every dealer who wanted to sign up before the January 1 witching hour. It was a great experience, an early success, and it taught us a lot about where we should be going. It was also the genesis of the online data conversion system that would become BookRouter.

As I mentioned, Bookease had a rudimentary capability to export book records in UIEE format, which had originally been developed by Tom Sawyer of the then Interloc as a lingua franca for the transfer of book data. That was great as far as it went; one could log on to the various indexing sites and upload the export files, or one could use email to send an attachment to a few of the sites, or send by FTP, or…. There were many ways to keep up – too many it seemed and I–and many of my Bookease customers–was spending one heck of a lot of time creating formats and logging on and sending by email, and it didn’t seem to make much sense.

It was in that environment that my database-savvy neighbor and I put aside the development of yet another online search site, and decided to create a universal online data converter which could take pretty much whatever text-based data that was thrown at it, convert it to an appropriate format for the various indexing sites and send it on. We also thought it would be good if we could do things to the book records on the fly…. Perhaps the dealer would only want to send books over $100 to one of their sites – or perhaps they wanted to have an instant “sale” by lowering prices, or they wanted to add an html link to their homesite to each and every record. We (or should I say Mark) created a “swiss army knife” data converter online at http://www.bookrouter.com and our first “bridge tool,” the prototype for the whole concept, was born. BookRouter went public in mid-2000. It has gone through many changes and improvements since, but the original simple idea remains the same: Upload once to us and we will take care of the rest – including all the toing and froing and talking to the sites when a mistake occurs. We wanted BookRouter to become the ultimate time-saver. At first customers were skeptical – it was really quite easy to upload files after all, and it didn’t seem to take much time – skeptical until they realized just how much time they really had been spending now that they weren’t spending it anymore.

The Bookease experience also showed that there really was a need for a multi-tiered approach to the in-house bookseller software dilemma. Bookease DOS had been built on a state-of -the art foundation that was very robust, but the platform was creaky now and it was clear that a lot of functions (direct export of data to emails, for one, “assisted cataloguing” like Homebase’s ISBN lookup, for another) that were so necessary for modern commerce could not be added via DOS. But the Bookease Pro disaster showed that simple conversion of Bookease functionality into a Windows-based environment was not the answer by itself. A “one-size-fits-all” mentality wouldn’t work where some folks were dealing with thousands and others potentially millions of book records. New thinking was needed. We had to look around for new systems, new approaches.

We had been using a Linux data server at Boston Company for many years. Linux was free, or close to it, and it was incredibly stable and bulletproof, as well. It networked well with Windows and made it possible to set up data server boxes separate from the rest of the Windows network and thus protect against the data corruption that came from inevitable Windows crashes. In addition, hardware had gotten so cheap that there wasn’t too much economic pain involved in setting up those Linux servers, as well. Any “entry-level” machine off the shelf was more than capable of doing the job. Over the course of time, I have set up a number of Bookease users with whole new systems – integrating their old hardware with a new box that hummed along – delivering data. It was almost comical – I would stop by a client’s shop to deal with some problem or another or just to check in – and the server would be running perfectly. I would reboot it just since I was there anyway. There are data servers at some of my clients’ places that are only rebooted once or twice a year.

So we had grown busier – besides the toolbox business, as exemplified by BookRouter, we were also doing systems consulting, taking care of all the Bookease DOS users, setting up hardware/software networks, consulting on equipment acquisitions (we have found that most folks overspend on hardware because they are insecure about what they really need), etc. Help was necessary. Especially since early in 2001, Mark, having built BookRouter and the online search engine, got an offer from MIT he could not refuse.

We brought in a part-time developer, Steve Clay, to take care of further work with BookRouter and the search engine on a consult basis. In addition, we hired an office manager, first Cathy, then BJ – who sends out bills to our customers and makes sure at least some of us get paid. We added Scott Pezza to take care of customer service. He is the one who fields questions, sets up new clients, writes conversion scripts for the occasional exotic data format beyond the reach of even BookRouter’s built-in tools – in short, he is the glue that holds the day-to-day operation of BookRouter together. And he is a gifted developer as well. Over the last many months, he has been hard at work creating a new tool for the toolbox: He has written an order management system which integrates and organizes all the email orders from the various online listing services – puts them into a coherent form, generates reports, creates packing lists and invoices, keeps track of clients, etc., etc. All this can be done either locally over an intranet or over the internet when the user is away from home. We haven’t come up with a name for this analogue to BookRouter, a Swiss army knife for orders, the results of our labors, but we are thinking about one – for now it is just “OMW” – Order Management Web.

We are refining the online search mechanism, which now exists in-house as a database of our BookRouter users. Soon we will be offering that database “backend” as a feature to our BookRouter clients: they will be able to search their own inventories from their own websites without potential customers being diverted into the ordering systems of the indexing services. The search results, logo, colors and all, will appear to come straight from the dealer’s own search engine.

We have outsourced development work on the successor to Bookease DOS to a group of programmers in Europe and further east and are working closely with them to dot the “i”‘s and cross the “t”‘s. The program is called Biblioware and it is a total departure from the standard in-house bookseller’s database program. It has a front-end with all the bells and whistles derived from the best of the bookseller programs, a user interface that can potentially plug into any modern database you please – whether it be our home grown Java data backend that will allow the Java version of Biblioware to be totally self-contained and totally compatible with any operating system, or a heavy-duty Linux/Unix/NT database for heavy lifting client/server operation, for people with thoughts of putting a million book records online.

Carrying the “toolbox” idea even further, we are also working with a fellow who has created a wonderful assisted cataloguing system that is at least as accurate as Homebase’s ISBN lookup feature, but which will also allow the lookup of older, pre-ISBN material, as well. Its functionality will be integrated into Biblioware, the successor to Bookease DOS, but it will also be “modular” so that it can integrate with any bookseller’s program out there. One needn’t have to convert to a whole new system like our Biblioware or stick to an essentially “light-duty” database like Homebase in order to derive the benefits of assisted cataloguing technology.

Obviously, even with outsourcing some development, we are going to need more hands to make all this work. Scott needs an assistant, I need an assistant, we need an extra full-time developer on staff – the wish list is long. We “come in” in the morning (sometimes we log in from far away, actually), clear up any problems re Bookease or BookRouter first thing, then start to work on toolbox projects or in setting up connections with new customers or new indexing sites. We have, in the past, had to create entire new programs to allow bulk uploads to Amazon or Half – there is never a dull moment at Allusive Information.

Finally, we are always looking for new ideas from our book-selling colleagues. We are committed to making this “computer thing” work for all of us, not just for the ones with the money or technical savvy to bulldoze their way to a solution. So far we have created BookRouter, which we are very proud of as a tool for reducing the day-to-day drudgery of the online bookseller. We have set up a stable maintenance contract environment for all the Bookease DOS users still out there. And we are hard at work on a whole group of new capabilities or tools – centered around the new bookseller’s program called Biblioware, but consisting of a group of universally adaptable modules: the order management system, the assisted cataloguing system, the online search engine. All of these will follow the BookRouter model of being universal and adaptable to as many legacy systems as possible. It all sounds very complicated, but, hopefully, the complication is under the surface where the user never sees it. Take one, or take them all, the tools are created to make things just a little bit easier and more simple for the bookseller client.

With that, I think I have to say goodbye to you all. This essay ended up being a lot longer and a bit more technical than I thought it would be when I started. I am always ready to field any questions that anyone might have about what we are about, but for now, from Scott, BJ, Steve, our European friends and myself, I would like to wish all of you in the world of books heartfelt best wishes from the world of computers.

#databases #Software

Milo Parmoor – Bibliopoly.com

URL: http://www.Bibliopoly.com (and others)

What was your purpose in starting an online book database?

Bibliopoly belongs to Bernard Quaritch Ltd., an antiquarian bookshop in London, established over 150 years ago. Quaritch had set up an internal database in the early 1980s to administer and hold catalogue descriptions of its own stock. This database proved useful in catalogue production and in answering customers’ questions. Quaritch, with a staff of about 30, is divided into nine departments, each of which specialises in a topic or range of topics. Books, however, do not restrict themselves to a single topic. The book of an explorer to Australia might have botanical content and be of navigational interest. The custom-built Quaritch database catered for this through a coding system that allowed several different subject codes to accompany a stock item. We could also enter onto our database that the binding or printing or illustration of a book was particularly fine, and always entered (unless this information was unavailable) the name of its publisher, the date of publication and the town it was printed in. We also entered the language of the book and thus could search for books written in a particular language.

When we first came across communal book databases on the internet, we found they lacked many features of our internal system. This was to be expected; they had been developed for a different market, that of in-print books or out-of-print second-hand books. In that market, customers do not require the wealth of information demanded by collectors of rare books. Nor, looked at from the dealer’s viewpoint, is the profit to be made on the sale of a relatively inexpensive book adequate to defray the cost of extracting, which may require research, storing and displaying such information. The traditional sales tool of the antiquarian dealer has been a printed catalogue in which each item is professionally described; the technical part of the description includes some of the information mentioned above and is usually accompanied by a text explaining the merits of the book in terms of edition, condition, content and other circumstance. A communal database brings together the inventory of a number of dealers who thus benefit from the public interest a single dealer’s site is unlikely to generate. If people want a cauldron they go to the street of the copper-beaters. As Quaritch itself was effectively a small community of specialist antiquarian booksellers, our experience seemed relevant to the specification for a larger community of a website which followed the cataloguing traditions of our trade. Bibliopoly is that specification.

But it also includes facilities – the digital holding and transmission of images in colour, for example – that have not long been widely available.

One of the features left out of account on the sites we looked at was language. London is a very international city; English-speaking, it is also European and its booksellers welcome the frequent visits they receive from Continental colleagues and collectors, whose interest may concentrate on books written in their own languages. Our idea was to provide a website on which dealers from the Anglo-Saxon world and from the main countries of Continental Europe might all list books, catalogued in their own languages but so entered onto the data-base that they could be found by a searcher using any one of five. Bibliopoly was designed to provide the search facilities we had found valuable for our catalogue production and sales, facilities which matched the traditional information requirements of the rare and antiquarian book market, and to be of use to people working in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish.

Is this a long-term commitment on your part? Where do you see yourself and your database in 3 or 5 years?

Yes it is a long-term commitment. Further facilities seem likely to be added within five years.

What book database inventory programs do you support?

In theory we can accommodate any database formats. However, for our search machinery to function effectively we do require an appropriate level of delimitation in the data uploaded. For example, book data that does not have a separate imprint field (or separate fields for place and date of publication, publisher or printer) excludes itself from any Bibliopoly search, such as the important date-range search, which uses imprint-related criteria.

What are your upload procedures? Deletion procedures? Are “wants” listings available? For sale matches? Are any additions/changes planned?

Our on-line inventory management includes an upload facility which transfers data from the bookseller’s computer to ours by way of an ‘add’ file, ‘delete’ file, or ‘ purge’ file, as the bookseller wishes. Booksellers can also edit and delete individual records from their Bibliopoly inventory on-line. At present we do not have ” wants” listings.

What customer service (for both buyers and sellers) do you have?

No service for buyers, as we have no e-commerce function. We do our best to be helpful to dealers who list their books on Bibliopoly; this involves, inter alia, the provision of multilingual technical support, advice on data-formatting – a service for which there is considerable demand — and help with hosting images etc.

Do you have any quality standards for your listers? If so, what will be the consequences of violating those standards?

We accept all members of any ILAB-LILA affiliated bookseller association and booksellers recommended to us as professionally reliable by at least two existing Bibliopoly dealers. These conditions should ensure a proper standard of accurate cataloguing. We retain full discretionary power to remove a dealer from the site and would not hesitate to use this power if we thought the dealer guilty of improper or unprofessional conduct.

What are your technical arrangements (in non-technical language, please) to ensure reliability of service? Future growth? Additional services?

Bibliopoly runs on a server pair, each with multiple RAID-configured hard-drives. RAID configuration means that failure of a single hard-drive will not cause the system to fail. Server connections to the major internet backbones are via multiple DS-3 lines so that if one backbone goes down, we still maintain excellent connectivity through the others.

The main server delivers data to the public while the secondary server indexes – in this way there is no degradation of performance during a long indexing procedure (as we allow ‘ any word’ searches our indexes are large). Our daily back-ups are on the secondary server, so that in the case of catastrophic failure of the main server, we can switch immediately to the secondary.

The latest addition to our technical services was the recently introduced inventory export facility. Using this our dealers can export their inventory, in a variety of formats, to any FTP server they choose, e.g. ftp.abebooks.com. Another important service is provided by http://www.polyBiblio.com which gives an individual website to each Bibliopoly book in html format so that a dealer may send his description of one or more books to a customer, or prepare on-line catalogues, etc. There is an ancillary benefit in that these individual book websites are sometimes found by the big search-engines.

Do you have the capability of taking credit card info for orders? No. We have no e-commerce facility of any sort. Buyers must themselves make contact, and agree paying arrangements, with dealers.

Do you ever plan to process credit cards?

No. Well at least not at present. Of course Quaritch processes listing fees from dealers who wish to pay by credit card.

Do you have any plans for programs associated with your database that would involve anything other than direct contact between buyer and seller?

No.

Do you have or plan to have an ” all word search” capability?

Yes. We have an ‘any word’ search as part of our main search mechanism. This searches every word in the database, including all keywords.

What search capabilities does your database have now? What is planned for the future?

Our answers to the questions above apart from the first question have been fairly short. This answer will be long. For convenience it is divided into two parts. The first on Search Criteria. The second Linguistic.

Search Criteria

People who buy in-print or out-of-print books usually know the name of the book or of the author they want; this is less frequently the case with antiquarian books. Here the customer may ask a dealer to show him ‘something nice’; the dealer, knowing the customer’s interest, will produce books that respond to it. Can something like that happen at long distance, and without prior personal acquaintance? Bibliopoly is dedicated to proving that it can.

There is a trade-off. Both the customer, in exchange for being able to see ‘something nice’ at any hour of the day or night, from any location in the world, and the antiquarian bookseller, in exchange for being able to offer his inventory to someone nine thousand miles away on a Sunday, need to be specific. The customer must specify on a search page what he intends by ‘nice book.’ The bookseller must so mark his books for upload, either by using a code, or through key-words, that a customer can find them.

Clearly any antiquarian database must recognize date of publication as a search criterion. Bibliopoly allows search by specific date, by date-range and by cut-off date; you may, that is, look for books printed in 1670, for books printed between 1660 and 1680, or for books printed before or, for that matter, after 1670. But collectors may be interested in particular printers or in particular towns where publishing took place; a ‘nice book’ may mean one printed by Aldus, or in Bruges. Other collectors do not so much mind who printed the book or where, or even what it is about; they seek fine bindings, or illustrations, or paper of unusual type, or rare type-faces, or they are looking for library sets, or miniature books, characteristics which describe the book as artefact rather than detailing the utilities a non-antiquarian buyer first associates with books – the information or entertainment they provide. Or they may want books enhanced in interest by a previous ownership: the copy may have belonged to the book’s author, or have been inscribed by that author to a friend, or have belonged to someone else of particular interest.

Bibliopoly allows the visitor to search for all the above characteristics: for publishers, for cities in which books were printed, for fine bindings, for books on paper of especially high quality, for association and presentation copies, for miniature books.

The essential, distinguishing aspect of Bibliopoly is a category system designed for these searches. A few words on its two- and three-tier hierarchy will explain the approach we took.

We have at present 323 categories in all, namely: 13 Main Categories, 236 Subcategories and 74 Sub-subcategories. Each main category (and subcategory in the case of Regions and Countries, the only group to have a third tier) is composed of its own subdivisions. Regions and Countries aims to give the geographical/topographical area to which a book is relevant. Many customers of bookshops are interested in their own place of birth or residence or in a region that attracts them for some other reason; here the definition required may be closer than merely the continent or large country in question, which is why three tiers were needed.

Nothing in this world is without some cost. Antiquarian booksellers are an idiosyncratic bunch. They have their own key-word systems which may not coincide with ours but we have always done our best to accept as keywords those booksellers use in their uploads.

As well as keywords, Bibliopoly uses alphanumeric codes in its category system. For the Country and Region category mostly, and for the Specialist Collecting category entirely only these codes can be used, and they may be used, at the dealer’s option, for all other categories. The codes are of particular benefit to the specialist dealer who deals in relatively few different types of book, for he can easily memorise the few codes he regularly uses. Again, where we have not accepted as keyword a phrase such as Musical Instruments –(both words making up the phrase have too many other references)– although we do have a subcategory which includes musical instruments, it is advisable to code a book with the correct alphanumeric code, in this case F3.

Linguistic

Bibliopoly works in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. On a superficial level, this means that the site has five home pages, five search forms, five texts for its other pages. You can go straight to the German version on http://www.Bibliopoly.ch and straight to the Italian version on http://www.Bibliopoly.it. The French and Spanish versions are respectively available on http://www.bibliopoly.com/frand http://www.bibliopoly.com/es. Or, on the site itself, you can easily move from one version to another.

We were fairly disappointed by the automatic translation systems that came to our attention, so we arranged the necessary language work ourselves and are grateful to booksellers in various countries who helped us with correct phrases. A more taxing problem was to get the search machinery to obey an instruction of the following type: ” When someone asks for horses you must display all books which carry the code J3 together with those for which English-speaking dealers have included the keyword HORSE or the other English keywords we accept for this hippic and equestrian category and you must also show them the books for which foreign dealers have keyworded CHEVAUX, PFERDE, CAVALLI or CABALLOS etc.” This involves creating “dictionaries” of equivalences, not for every word, which is clearly impossible, but for the keywords accepted by the category system. Again, in answer to a request for books by Pushkin, the search engine must understand that material uploaded with POUCHKINE, or PUSCHKIN, or PUSCKIN in the author field must be displayed together with books with, as author, PUSHKIN; and, if the searcher wanted books printed in Bruges, then any catalogued with BRUJAS, or BRÜGGE in the imprint field should likewise be shown; if books printed by Aldus, then books by Aldo, Manuzio and Alde must appear. A further complexity is superadded by Latin. Most academic books up to 1750 or so were published in Latin (the international academic language of the time) as well, often, as in a vernacular. Scholars used both vernacular and Latin names; their books were printed in towns often given in Latin locative forms. While the use of an asterisk, which Bibliopoly allows, to search for a name or word where the user is unsure of the word’s ending or where the ending has various forms, may work in some cases, there are many where the Latin form differs widely from the vernacular. Lond* will get you Londinii as well as London, but if you wanted Paris, while par* would find you Parigi, Parisii, etc., it would not find you Lutetiae or Lutetie (Parisiorum), the standard Latin forms. Perhaps the worst linguistic challenge Bibliopoly faces is to avoid a proliferation of false positives where keywords in one language mean something completely different in another. In English the word ROMAN is an adjective denoting a thing or person(s) associated in some way with the capital of Italy. You might have the Roman Empire or Roman Catholicism or Roman baroque architecture. In French the word, as a noun, means the prose work called a NOVEL in English and, as an adjective, denotes the architectural or decorative style Romanesque. This problem meant that the category system needed editing lest ‘key-words’ were accepted which, although unambiguous in one language, would, unlike Horses, Chevaux, Pferde, Cavalli and Caballos, become ambiguous in a multilingual field.

The Any Word search facility (see the other question above re search capability) is monoglot and rigidly pedantic in matters of spelling. If you ask for horses, you get horses but not a single Pferd or Cheval.

On what do you base your listing fees? What fees do you now have?

Dealers pay an invariable fixed fee of £30 per month plus a variable monthly fee based on the value of their online inventory. This second element is calculated as follows: first £100,000 free, thereafter from £100,000 to £1,000,000 at 1/120% per month, which, assuming no change in value, works out on an annual basis at 0.1 %. There is no additional fee for amounts in excess of £1,000,000. The minimum annual fee is therefore £360 and the maximum is £1260 (i.e. £360 plus 0.1% of £900,000).

For the purposes of calculating fees, online inventories are valued in their listing currencies (any dealer may price his books in any major currency he wishes) on every day of the month; these daily amounts are then added together and divided by the number of days in the month to provide an average monthly value. This value, still in the dealer’s listing currency, is then converted into English pounds at the prevailing exchange rate. Fees may be paid either by credit card or by subtraction from an agreed prepayment.

We thought the fairest way of charging something over a minimum listing fee was to get the bigger dealer to pay more. We assumed that margins in the antiquarian book trade work out at roughly the same irrespective of the unit price of books sold. Given an equal margin over an entire price range, total value seems more likely to determine the benefit an individual dealer should receive from a site than does any other figure except, that is, a percentage on sales made. But Bibliopoly has no e-commerce facility and simply does not know what sales are made. As we ourselves are rare-book dealers, we thought other dealers might not want us to have information on their transactions and customers. At the level in the trade where Bibliopoly operates, commercial success is less likely to mean making a series of one-off sales than meeting a single good customer; as each separate item means an additional chance of so doing there is a strong case for listing the maximum number of books. The fee scale represents an incentive to this end; while the first £100,000 is charged at 0.36% p.a. (or more where the value is less than £100,000), and the subsequent £900,000 at 0.1% p.a., amounts over that carry no charge at all. The more you list the cheaper, in relative but not absolute terms, it gets.

Is your database searched by AddAll or Bookfinder?

Yes, by both.

Other than meta-search sites what are the ways you advertise to attract customers?

We have advertised in trade and literary magazines in a total of six countries, and on Google. Some of our booksellers have kindly distributed fliers in their catalogues.

Are there advantages to being a UK-based database?

As Bibliopoly itself makes no sales or deliveries, we do not believe the location of its management makes any difference. Clearly transport costs, etc., give dealers a competitive edge in their own domestic markets. But the question has less relevance to an antiquarian book site than to a site listing multiple copies of the same second-hand or recently printed book where transport or customs delays and costs can have significant impact on the relative attraction of copies. It is fairly rare for Bibliopoly to list two copies of the same book.

What background or experience do you have of the online book business?

We had no experience of the online book business but were able to specify a database as an able young man then working in our English Literature department was knowledgeable in IT generally. We have benefited greatly from the services and consultancy of Ammonet in Zurich. Dr. Jack Benson of that firm has his own book website Bibliophile.net. Ammonet provides our multilingual technical support.

Do you have professional bookseller management?

We hope we answered this above.

What geographical and demographic markets are you aiming at?

International; upper end of the market.

What problems or advantages do you see as unique to a UK book database?

We see neither advantage nor disadvantage in the location of our office in London, of our technical consultants in Zurich, of our website and database on computers in the United States.

Are there VAT problems for your UK dealers?

No. Book sales in the United Kingdom are within the VAT legislation but the rate is zero. Unbound manuscript material is VATable at 17-½ %. However assessability to VAT of sales made by UK dealers varies with location of the buyer. Export permits are required for some books and manuscripts. As Bibliopoly itself makes no sales, it is not subject to any of these regulations. It must, however, levy VAT on invoices issued to UK dealers for listing fees payable to itself. If they are VAT-registered they recover this VAT.

Do you use UK-based internet connection services? If so, how does your up-time compare to databases in the US?

Our servers are located in Washington D.C., through which as much as 40 % of the world’s internet traffic passes. This gives us access to six DS-3s: UUNet, Sprint, AT&T, Global Crossing/Global Center, Level 3 and Teleglobe, and hence excellent connectivity. This combined with our dual server configuration means we suffer hardly any down-time.

What services/features does your database have that you feel set you apart and/or will ensure its success?

We hope our replies above answer this question.

Please tell us anything you’d like to about yourself and/or your database, and thank you for participating.

Thank you for asking us. We can’t think of much else except that we are happy with our name. As we wrote on the website, it is an English word, though not on everyone’s lips, and comes from Ancient Greece. It is meant to stress the continuity of a trade which has existed since technology, in the shape of money and dyes and the processing of animal skins, first allowed the written word to be bought and sold – a trade that will continue even if a future technology renders books obsolete. The antiquarian trade deals in the obsolete. If you want to read Aristotle you do not need an outdated recension of the text in a language you may not know, which is what Aldus Manutius provides. But customers and dealers who admire and covet the Aldine Aristotle prefer, for their purposes, the obsolete to the most recent and correct recension. This will remain true when an even better recension is available on some as yet undreamt-of medium.

#databases

The Aniquarian Booksellers’ Association of America (ABAA) Database

URL: http://www.abaa.org

(EDITOR’S NOTE: PLEASE NOTE THAT ABAA IS A MEMBERS’ ONLY DATABASE, BUT INFORMATION WILL GIVEN AT THE END OF THIS INTERVIEW ABOUT HOW TO JOIN, WHAT THE REQUIREMENTS ARE, AND SOME OF THE BENEFITS OF JOINING.)

What is your purpose in starting a online book database (i.e., to help online booksellers, to get a database that does what you think a book database should do, because it’s a good business to be in, all of the above, none of the above, or ????).

The Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America has been in existence for more than 50 years. Its purpose is to promote interest in antiquarian books for the general public, and to provide a code of ethics and standards for the antiquarian book trade. For more detail, see the Section on the ABAA at the end of this interview.

The ABAA has been active in using the internet to support the interests of its members and to provide information of use to the general public, book collectors, librarians, and all members of the bookselling trade. The ABAA website provides information in a variety of areas, including links to other sites of interest to visitors, book fair information, glossary of terms, short essays on literary topics, articles by members of the ABAA, a listing of members with links to their sites, our book search database (more to follow!), member catalog announcements, and more. In addition, there is information about the ABAA itself, including our ethics guidelines, membership requirements, and information about contacting the ABAA. We also provide functions to our members only, such as listserves, which enable our members to communicate rapidly and efficiently with each other about matters of general interest to the membership, as well as specific items. Our committees also make use of these to accomplish their goals.

The ABAA online database is a natural extension of the goals and purposes of the ABAA. It provides our members and our site visitors still another way to buy and sell books, and survey the books offered for sale by our members.

Is this a long-term commitment on your part? Where do you see yourself and your database in 3 years? 5 years?

The ABAA is firmly committed to the internet and our online book search database. We feel that the internet is a major force in the antiquarian book trade, and one that we need to continue to work with as it evolves. We see the ABAA database and website continuing to take advantage of new technology for websites. While it is not always easy to predict where technology will lead us, I think it is safe to say that the ABAA website will offer more capabilities for booksellers to present their books in interesting and innovative ways which will make shopping for books easier and more satisfying. We will also continue to enhance the website to provide more functions for visitors, enabling them to look for book related information as well as books!

In addition, the ABAA is affiliated with the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB). This organization promotes the same goals and interests as the ABAA, only on an international scale. Its member organizations cover the globe—Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia. Earlier this year, the IOBA newsletter featured a review of the ILAB search engine. ILAB and the ABAA share the same webmaster and database. So, when a bookseller lists with the ABAA search engine, his books are also listed on the ILAB data base.

We see the international flavor and cooperation represented by our affiliation with ILAB continuing and expanding with time.

What inventory programs do you/will you support?

The ABAA data base supports all of the commonly used inventory programs, and can accept comma or tab delimited files as well. Inventory programs supported include BookEase Pro, BookMinder, RS BookStore, HomeBase, BookTrakker Pro, and BookMate. In addition, database programs such as Record Manager, MS Access, and File-Maker are supported. Both Windows and Mac files are supported. Members having special requirements for uploading files can often be accommodated.

What are your upload procedures? Deletion procedures? Are “wants” listings available? For sale matches? Are any additions/changes planned?

The ABAA database accepts six import file types: tilde-delimited, tab-delimited, “Comma Separated Value” (CSV), UIEE, ABE and Alibris PRV files.

When a bookseller first uploads, an example file is sent to the Support Desk so they can create the settings for that bookseller. Then the bookseller can upload their files to the website using the “total update”, “additions and changes”, or “deletions” functions provided in the members section of the website. An FTP account is also possible. These uploads are added to the database within 24 hours (usually much faster). Individual listings can also be altered on line. There is a wants service in place and we will soon be implementing the possibility of uploading wants files.

Other enhancements are under review, and will be included whenever it is appropriate. We invite suggestions from member booksellers as well as our site visitors.

What customer service (for both sellers and buyers) do you/will you have?

There is ready access to assistance via the website. Buyers may review information about our members, email questions, and even send messages to our webmaster or to the ABAA headquarters itself. Visitors may send inquiries to a bookseller regarding a book of interest. A shopping cart facility is provided. When a book is not found in our database, the visitor has the option of linking to OCLC to find a copy for reference at a local or nearby library. Our members have access to a members-only section of the site where there is online help information as well as an easy way to send queries to our webmaster. In addition, members may use our listserves to ask the membership for advice on any difficulties. We are working on enhancements to the site, and will be providing FAQs for members. Members may include images with their listings. Members also have the option of incorporating code on their website that will invoke the ABAA search engine and present the results on the members website.

Very soon we will be offering members the possibility of having their own homepage which will include the Personal Search Page feature. This will ensure that members will have their own URL, http://www.ilab-lila.com/membersname.htm and their own email address, membersname@ilab-lila.com.

Another service is our “highlights” feature. For a small fee dealers will be able to add their books to a “highlights” gallery putting them, as it were, in the shop window.

Will you/do you have any quality (i.e., descriptions, shipping, and/or customer service) standards for your listers? If so, what will be/are the consequences of violating those standards?

All of our members pledge to adhere to the ethics guidelines of the ABAA and are expected to describe their books and procedures in a professional, consistent manner. Complaints about members are reviewed by the ABAA Ethics Committee, which works with the involved parties to arrive at a solution. Noncompliance with the guidelines may be cause for removal from membership in the ABAA.

What are your technical arrangements (in non-technical language, please) to ensure reliability of service? Future growth? Additional services?

Our webmaster has a professional staff of over a dozen programmers, all of whom are highly trained in the software packages used to support the site. In addition, he specializes in website design and support for bookshops and booksellers’ organizations such as the ABAA and ILAB. The owner of the company was himself a bookseller for many years. As a result, they are highly responsive to the needs of the bookselling community. From a hardware standpoint, the functions are split across a number of systems, with considerable redundancy built in to provide the best possible availability and security. Industrial-strength software for security is in place. Further, one individual is assigned to the ABAA site to monitor performance, availability, and security, and make the appropriate changes.

Will you/do you have the capability of taking credit card info for orders? If so, what can you tell us about the safety procedures you have or will have in place to ensure the security of such info?

We offer a secure order form that uses the Verisign technology. The credit card details are sent to the bookseller in two separate emails. Credit card details are not saved on the server. And, of course, customers are always free to contact the bookseller directly.

Do you ever plan to process credit card orders through your database (rather than simply passing on the info to the lister) and, if so, will the lister or buyer bear the processing cost, and how long will it take to get payment to the lister?

We are considering this.

Do you have any plans for programs associated with your database which would involve anything other than direct contact between seller and buyer?

No. The ABAA believes that direct contact between the customer and the seller is one of our strengths.

Do you have or do you plan to have an “all word search” capability?

We have it.

What search capabilities does your database have now? What is planned for the future?

One can browse a bookseller’s books or catalogues. One may search by: author, title, description, any word/keyword, minimum price, maximum price, when added, publishing date, books of all ILAB members or of a national association (when on the ILAB site), first editions, signed, dust wrappers, hardcover, paperback, type (books, maps and prints, autographs) and we have a special character keyboard in place, which allows for accurate searching using characters unique to a given language.

On what will you base your listing fees? What fees do you have now or plan to have?

All members have directory listings on the web site. In addition, they may have links to their own sites. They can have new catalogues announced on the website. The directory listings are searchable by name, specialty, and location.

Use of the database is optional. The one time fee for setting up the database is $95. The monthly charges for listing books are determined by the number of books listed:

Up to 10,000 books $35.00 For each 5,000 books above this (or fraction of 5,000) $5.00

The monthly fee for having the search engine invoked on a bookseller’s own website is $10.00

Do you plan to have or now have your database searched by Addall or Bookfinder or any other mega-search site?

Our database is searched by both Addall and Bookfinder. As we learn of new mega-search sites, we evaluate them. Because we are listed as part of the ILAB data base as well as the ABAA data base, we will also be searched by any mega-search site based in Europe or any other part of the globe which searches the ILAB database.

How do you plan to advertise your database (both to draw listers and buyers)?

Listing books in the ABAA database is a privilege of membership in the ABAA.

For buyers, we regularly run adds in major book-related publications, such as Firsts, the New York Times, the FABS (Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies) bulletin, the Antiquarian Book Review. In addition, the promotional materials for our annual book fairs (held in New York, Boston, and San Francisco/Los Angeles) also display information about our web site. We publish an annual Members Directory that describes the site, and several of our regional chapters do so as well.

What background or experience do you or other people involved with your database have that relates to the online book or online book database business?

This can be evaluated on at least two different levels. First, the Internet Committee of the ABAA oversees all internet related activities. Members of this committee all have extensive experience with the internet and using the internet in bookselling. Many have sophisticated websites themselves. Further, many of the officers and directors of the ABAA have extensive internet experience, a number of them being pioneers in using the internet for bookselling. Secondly, our technical staff at our website has previously been described. These are web development professionals in all aspects of web design and maintenance who also deal exclusively with booksellers and booksellers’ organizations.

Do you or are you planning to have professional management, bookseller management, or????

We do. See above.

What markets (geographical and/or demographic) are you aiming at?

The ABAA is based in the United States, and all of its members are booksellers doing business in the U.S. However, our books are also listed on the ILAB database, which draws an international customer base.

What services/features does your database have that you feel sets you apart and/or will ensure the success of your database?

The ABAA database is managed by the oldest nation-wide American booksellers’ organization, which has a national reputation and stringent ethics standards. The ABAA has about 500 members, including many of the best known and established booksellers in the United States. The ABAA website is an integral part of the ABAA, and will continue to be supported and enhanced. We have a continuing international presence through our relationship with ILAB.

Please tell us anything you’d like about yourself and/or your database, or about ABAA, and thank you for participating.

I am presently a member of the Board of Governors of the ABAA, chairman of the Internet Committee of the ABAA, and the owner of Four Rivers Books, Ltd., which specializes in fine press books, Limited Editions Club, artists’ books, and books on books. I also write articles on my specialties, and am writing a history of the Limited Editions Club.

About the ABAA:

This information is extracted from the ABAA website at http://www.abaa.org. Please visit the site for more information.

Membership in the ABAA cannot be obtained simply by paying a fee or signing an agreement. Before being considered for membership, booksellers must prove that they are established, knowledgeable, and of excellent reputation. Prospective members must be sponsored by current members, and undergo a rigorous screening process. The average ABAA member has been in the antiquarian book business more than twenty years. Many of our members helped build some of the greatest public and private libraries in the world, and many are recognized experts in their fields, with numerous publications to their credit.

ABAA members have always been known for their active roles in the book world, and for setting high standards in bibliography and business practices. For more than fifty years, countless librarians, researchers, and novice and seasoned collectors alike, have found that they can do business in confidence with members of the ABAA.

Code of Ethics

As the oldest association of professional antiquarian booksellers in America, our members take their Code of Ethics seriously. It is the cornerstone document that makes us who we are: dedicated professionals with established reputations based upon integrity and reliability.

It is essential for the reputation of the Association that complaints or disputes involving Association members be resolved in a manner befitting the objectives of the Association. Claims against Association members, or disputes among members, should be made in writing to the Chairperson of the Ethics Committee, at:

Chairperson, Ethics Committee c/o ABAA 20 West 44th Street New York, NY 10036-6604

Mission Statement

The mission of the ABAA is to promote ethical standards and professionalism in the antiquarian book trade, to encourage the collecting and preservation of antiquarian books and related materials, to support educational programs and research into the study of antiquarian books, and to facilitate collegial relations between booksellers, librarians, scholars, and collectors.

More specifically, the objectives of the ABAA are:

1.To encourage and promote interest in and appreciation of fine and antiquarian books and other printed materials, and manuscripts;

2.To establish, maintain and promote professional and ethical standards in the trade;

3.To foster friendly relations among both the membership, and the bookselling community at large;

4.To encourage the advancement of the technical and general knowledge specific to the trade;

5.To sponsor book fairs and otherwise promote bookselling and book collecting for the benefit of the trade;

6.To collect funds to be used for the general purposes of the Association;

7.To act as an association in matters where individual action would be less likely to succeed;

8.To cooperate with similar organizations for the above purposes, in this country and abroad.

One very special activity of the ABAA is the maintenance of the Benevolent Fund and distribution of funds to booksellers in need. This fund is intended to assist booksellers, not necessarily members, who are experiencing extreme difficulties, such as illness or accident, financial loss due to fire or other disaster, etc.

Applying for membership

If you would like to apply for membership in the ABAA, please write the ABAA at:

ABAA 20 West 44th Street New York, NY 10036-6604

You may also email abaa@panix.com.

#abaa #databases #organization #tradegroup