Searching the Old Book Sites:
Something Old, Something New
- By Michael Stillman
The zShops home page follows Amazon's
By Michael Stillman
Last month I had the opportunity to write about some of the major internet bookselling sites, seven of them to be exact. That article generated its share of comments, which any writer appreciates, because good or bad, at least it means someone is reading. The other nice thing about comments is that they provide an excuse for writing more. Here goes.
For those of you who missed the last article (the link is: www.americanaexchange.com/NewAE/aemonthly/article.asp?f=1&page=1&id=181), Abebooks, Alibris, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, ABAA, ILAB, and Froogle came up for review. This month we'll go a little further. First, however, a look back based on some comments.
My methodology was very unscientific. I simply went to the sites and searched for a list of old books to see what I could find. Some sites brought back more results than others, though all provided matches, at least for some titles. However, some sites were easier to use than others. Amazon came in for its share of gentle criticism as I found it frequently to be confusing, and sometimes offered many fewer matches than I anticipated. Based on the comments I've seen, I'm not alone in holding these sentiments. However, it was pointed out that what I needed to do was also search Amazon's zShops to find more matches.
Again, remember I am approaching this as an amateur, or to put it another way, like an ordinary customer. Most customers are not experts in using websites, but their feelings should not be ignored because of that. After all, consumers are the ones who buy the books that you, presuming you're a bookseller, sell. They may not be tech savvy, but they are always right.
I went to the Amazon website to look for zShops. It wasn't easy. There were 15 tabs and buttons on the top of the page, and more links and items for sale than the eye can rationally deal with all over the page. So I took the easy way out. I went to Google, searched for "zShops," and allowed it to find the zShops page on the Amazon site for me. I can now report, it is there. In fact, I then went back to the Amazon home page and found at least three ways you can get to zShops: (1) Near the top of the page is a link labeled "see more stores." Click this link and then scroll down the page it links to. It's right there, the 24th link on that page. (2) There is a list of subjects to browse on the left side of the Amazon home page. Scroll down that list and there it is again, link number 49. (3). There's a search box near the top of the page which says "All Products." However, if you click on the arrow next to it, it gives you a list of places to search, and right there at number 33 is zShops. So why then did I have so much trouble finding it?
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Searching the Old Book Sites:
Something Old, Something New
- By Michael Stillman
Choosebooks provides a convenient search.
Of course this doesn't answer the even bigger question: why would I know to look for old books in something called "zShops" What does the "z" in "zShops" stand for, anyway? Bookz, shortened to ''''z' You would almost think Amazon is trying to hide it. Sure, they only charge 5% or less for sales in zShops versus 15% for books listed through their regular search, but that wouldn't lead them to sort of hide zShops, would it? Certainly I can understand why Amazon would want to emphasize the listings which pay them the most. I could see them placing those books on the top of their list, in bold, in red, flashing lights, whatever. But, it seems to me that if you are going to offer something called "zShops" as a means to sell old books, people looking for old books should be able to figure it out. If they don't want people to buy this way, then Amazon shouldn't offer the service. Don't offer something but then make it hard to find and difficult to understand.
I also had several sites recommended to me that I had not reviewed before. These were not nearly as large as the major booksellers, but were worth a look. First off there was A1 Books. A1 is a bookseller that has been around the web for many years (since 1995 according to their site) but is now beginning to sell books on behalf of others. I've heard they have been doing some fairly aggressive promotion to online booksellers to encourage them to place their books on the A1 site. They offer dealers the option to list their books at no charge, and their 12% commission on books that are sold is 3% less than Amazon (4% more than Abebooks, but Abe also has a monthly listing fee).
Strictly from a consumer's point of view, the major problem I had with A1 is that I couldn't see any compelling reason to move from the more familiar sites. They say they have one million books in stock, which sounds like a lot, but not when compared with an Abebooks with a claimed 50 million titles. While they seem to have a reasonable site for specific, more recent books (or reprints), it is not yet a place to find older or rare books. I checked a couple of old titles. First, Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, not his most popular title (though it once was). I found a dozen copies, all recent reprints. I then tried Rudyard Kipling's With the Night Mail, a century old book with virtually no recent reprints. A1 had no copies to offer, though many first editions are available on the larger sites.
I was not fond of A1's "Advanced Search," as it allowed only searching by author, title, ISBN, and price. No searches were available of the description, by date, or by publisher. Those are search fields I regularly find helpful.
My conclusion was that A1 has to come up with a reason for people to use their site. "Me too" is not likely to cut it in a world of major powerhouses like Amazon, Abe, Barnes and Noble, and Alibris. A1 needs to come up with something different.
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Searching the Old Book Sites:
Something Old, Something New
- By Michael Stillman
ZVAB has been selling a few books for American booksellers.
Another site that was mentioned is Choosebooks. This is not a bad option. I don't recall ever hearing a bad word about them from booksellers, and booksellers generally tend to be rather free with their comments. I've heard many, many unpleasantries said about the major sites.
Choosebooks offers a most reasonable pricing structure for the seller. It's 10% up to a certain monthly cap (not that high) based on number of items listed. For example, the cap is $25 for up to 10,000 books online. You will pay 10% until the commission reaches $25. To put it another way, you pay 10% of your first $250 of monthly sales. After that, the commission drops to 5%. And, that is a cap, not a minimum. If you sell nothing during the month, you pay nothing.
For buyers, Choosebooks offers a very good search. It provides not only standard search fields like author and title, but keyword searches, including a negative (exclusion) keyword search. You can also choose several options on how to have results displayed. They don't have a publication date field to search, which is about the only drawback I can find. Results are displayed in an easy to follow form.
What is the drawback to Choosebooks? For buyers, there aren't as many items offered. They say they have 8 million for sale, and while this is a decent number, it's still only 15%-20% of what the largest sites have. A buyer will get a reasonable enough number of responses on a more common title, but they get thin as books become rarer. For sellers, the drawback, from what I hear, is they don't generate a lot of sales. There are sellers who wish more of their volume came through the lower priced ChooseBooks, but so far, it appears that this site provides only a small drop in the bucket for the typical online bookseller.
ZVAB is generating a surprising amount of interest, particularly from American dealers, since it is a European site. For those wondering what ZVAB stands for, the answer is "Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher." You're probably still wondering what it stands for.
ZVAB was something of a surprise, at least for me. As someone with a distinctly American orientation, I was surprised by the number of English-language titles I found on this German site. They claim to have "over 10 million antiquarian books" from "over 1,600 antiquarian book dealers all over the world." Perhaps it's the word "antiquarian" that made this site more productive than I expected. Abebooks may have over 50 million books, but most are "used" books, not "antiquarian." If ZVAB has a greater concentration of true "antiquarian" books, then ZVAB may have more to offer those who seek such books than a 10 to 50 ratio might imply.
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Searching the Old Book Sites:
Something Old, Something New
- By Michael Stillman
none
From a consumer's standpoint, the ZVAB "Detailed Search" is very good. It lets you search in just about any way imaginable. Results are presented in an easy to follow format. Naturally, this is going to be a particularly good site for those seeking continental European books, but might yield a surprise in terms of American books offered by European sellers. For American sellers, it may yield some new customers, particularly for your European books. How many is not clear, since sites like Abebooks have really become international, but from what I understand, American dealers are picking up a few new sales from ZVAB. No, it is not a major part of their business, but it does appear to be adding a few extra sales.
Finally, some readers recommended use of the multi-search engines. These are the sites which search other listing sites, rather than list books themselves. While these can be very useful for the consumer, I skipped them simply because, though writing as a consumer, I expected my audience would be primarily dealers. As a bookseller, you cannot put your books for sale on a site such as AddAll, you can only offer them for sale on one of the sites AddAll searches. Actually, I did include one such multi-search site: Froogle. They don't sell books either, but only search sites that do. However, I included Froogle because they are willing to search your own personal website, whereas the others will only search other sites that carry listings from many booksellers, such as an Abebooks or Alibris.
Technically, you would think this type of search would equalize the bookselling sites. You get equal access to an AddAll search if your books are listed on an obscure (and perhaps cheaper) site as you get from having your books listed on Abe or Alibris. Certainly AddAll receives many visitors, but for whatever reason, the existence of such multi-search sites has not gone very far towards equalizing the big and small bookselling sites. Otherwise you would expect to find as many dealers selling on Maremagnum as on Abebooks. The reality is, if you want to sell in volume, you still need to list with the high volume sites.
Here are a few links with more information:
For those who missed last month's article, go to www.americanaexchange.com/NewAE/aemonthly/article.asp?f=1&page=1&id=181
For an earlier review of the multi-search sites, see www.americanaexchange.com/NewAE/aemonthly/article_1.asp?id=132&q=addall&page=1
Joel Kovarsky of The Prime Meridian has notified us of an article he wrote about the online sites. His primary focus is old maps, and some things have changed since the article was first written, but it provides another interesting comparison of bookselling sites on the web from the perspective of a seller. See www.theprimemeridian.com/webbooks.html
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