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...
Abebooks Goes Live With Deceptive Bookseller Rating System
Leave it to Abebooks to come up with yet another way to alienate the core group of booksellers that their company was built on.I blogged about this rating system and it's utter disregard for the integrity of bookselling while it was in beta mode.Here is a snippet:AbeBooks is working on a rating system for booksellers based on the star rating systems that appear at other online marketplaces. Unfortunately, this bookseller rating system has nothing to do with bookselling and everything to do with order fulfillment. The amount of stars you earn is based exclusively on your order fulfillment percentage. Nothing...
The Library Sale as a Contact Sport
The public library sale, especially in major cities, has always been a competitive event. They are important inventory streams for most used booksellers who have an open book shop and for most book scouts. They get there early and when the doors open they turn off all appearances of civility and enter accumulation mode.Now these sales are also the feeding grounds for the new breed of booksellers who sell primarily online and deal almost exclusively in books with ISBN numbers, that is books printed after 1966 or in many cases after 1974 when it became the worldwide standard.Most of the...
The King of the Street
A couple of months back I posted a video about New York's street booksellers. Now I bring you a 3 1/2 minute video of the king of street booksellers.His "shop" is in Chennai, India. He has been there for 60 years and I am not sure if he's ever left. "This is my business for life I know no other" he says.He goes on:"The government doesn't want to help us. Government wants people to remain ignorant. If people started to read they might vote for others so the government gives no importance to education."Now that's street smarts.
Two Grande Dames of Bookselling Hit the Stage
Update: Stephen Wells has a review of the play in the New York Times ; Two Women, Rare Books: A Small, Literate Musical. He calls it a "promising new musical being given its first breath of life at the New Jersey Repertory Company."One of the unanswered questions in his mind with the play was the sexual orientation of Rostenberg and Stern. It was clear that they were soul mates but unclear if they were lovers."It is fine if they are not lovers, but that needs to be made clear, and then certain questions need to be answered. Are they asexual?...