Last week Which?, a Consumer Reports type organization in the United Kingdom, released the results of a survey focusing on customer satisfaction as it relates to online shopping for entertainment products.Abebooks UK lead the field with a rating of "89% for overall satisfaction and were praised for how easy it was to find products on their site." The sample size for AbeBooks was pretty slight at 89 respondents where Amazon UK had 2812 and, the other company that shared the top spot with AbeBooks, Play.com had 416 respondents. Categories included Price, Availability, Delivery and Returns.I would love to see someone...
AbeBooks Latest: Rare Books $10 and up
AbeBooks continues to amaze me. They act like a company with a borderline personality, courting the traditional bookselling community at every turn while doing all they can to push these same booksellers away.AbeBooks has recently announced that they are adding a new search feature to their Rare Book Room."We have added a feature to the Rare Book Room search that automatically pre-selects the price range to show only books priced at $10.00 and over."Now their same loose definition of 'bookseller' is being applied to 'rare'.Remember this is the company that still claims that "Rare and antiquarian booksellers make up the...
Thomas Jefferson’s Books Arrive at LibraryThing
The library of Thomas Jefferson, which is the library that made up the backbone of the early Library Congress, has arrived at LibraryThing.Using E. Milicent Sowerby's five-volume bibliography as their guide a group of sixteen catalogers took four months to enter nearly 4,900 titles and 187 of Jefferson's reviews.Now all the bells and whistles of LibraryThing are available for one of the greatest libraries ever assembled in this country; all those clouds and stats are now in play.Tim Spalding the founder and guiding light of LibraryThing frames the significance of this best when he says "On LibraryThing it's not just...
The Internet and the Traditional Bookseller: A Failing Relationship
Here is my piece that runs in the latest issue of Amphora, the magazine of the Alcuin Society. I have been waiting on posting this in hopes that they would be putting the new issue online but with things changing so fast in the online bookselling world I thought it was time to get it out there.I wrote the piece back in August and since then both AbeBooks and Alibris have lost their Chief Executives. A telling sign that things are 1) not what they used to be and 2) significant changes are on the horizon. One of the first...
A Megalister Exposed
If you look for books online with any regularity you know who they are.Their names show up on almost every search you do.Their prices, for the most part, are completely out of whack with the other listings for the book.Their descriptions are more often suited for the selling of commodities than books.Oh, and they don't own the books they are selling.A colleague of mine refers to them (and the online sellers who offer books for a penny) as the "termites eating away at the foundation of bookselling."Now it seems that one of these mega-listers, Anybook, has taken this insanity a...