UPDATE : Luke Lozier, co-founder of Bibliopolis, has alerted me that Bookhound is now available for free to ALL booksellers not just Biblio.com members.
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AbeBooks.com has Home Base, Alibris has its reincarnation of Bookmate and now Biblio.com has Bookhound.
Biblio.com will begin offering the Bookhound inventory management tool for free to its sellers. The Mac version will be released first with the PC version to follow in July. Bookhound, a product of Bibliopolis, has been around for over 10 years and is currently used by many leading bookshops and booksellers both here in the U.S. and around the world.
From the press release:
“BookHound boasts many features, such as an integrated BISAC subject library, integrated spell checking, advanced searches and global editing of data, and easy-to-use options for managing inventory across multiple online sales venues. BookHound also includes tools specifically designed for brick-and-mortar shops.”
Brendan Sherer, the CEO of Biblio says “We believe that delivering a high quality, mature product for inventory management will materially contribute to the growth of their businesses, and therefore, to ours as well.”
Let’s hope so. For out of the big 3 non-new book aggregators (Amazon is a different animal entirely) Biblio’s focus is on the more traditional and professional independent bookseller, there are no mega-listers and no penny sellers allowed and their model is guided by the triple bottom line approach using the “three goals of achieving profit, serving people, and preserving the environment as the benchmark measurements for a company’s success.”
“In a world increasingly globalized and seemingly spinning faster, we are working to position ourselves somewhere between the old and the new, somewhere between our local community and the world around us, between dreams and practicality, between profit and social responsibility.”
Hard to argue with that but a business with a conscience faces tremendous obstacles in the current marketplace. The addition of Bookhound is a big plus now they have to work on increasing their exposure as a sane alternative to the increasingly confusing and saturated online bookselling world. A tremendous need exists for an alternative marketplace and Biblio is in a position to take the lead.
Biblio.com Press Release