"Gaining market share and widening the reach of its e-commerce technologies, AbeBooks Inc. has acquired Chrislands, a company that builds, hosts and maintains online bookstores for used booksellers around the world. Web-only retailer AbeBooks, which sells new, used and rare books from 13,500 registered booksellers, did not disclose terms of the acquisition."
"Internet book marketplace Biblio.com announced today that it is continuing its commitment to literacy and education through a $15,000 donation and a pledge to provide material support to BiblioWorks, a non-profit organization which provides opportunities in literacy and education to some of the world's poorest regions. "
"'This is the one website where customers will know that all their purchases will directly support Oxfam working with people in poverty across the world. They can reach out to others by choosing from a fantastic range of re-used, recycled and Fairtrade goods.'"
"Rare books are just one segment of the nation's intricate, multibillion-dollar collectibles industry. For a taste, try the 25th annual Great Sacramento Rare Book Show and Sale. Thirty dealers will offer thousands of books, including modern first editions, Western Americana, classics, sci-fi, cookbooks, World War II books and more..."
"Two major online marketplaces for new and used books, Alibris.com and Biblio.com, removed listings for the book Friday after it was offered at prices up to $5,499. And eBay, the online auction site, has removed at least eight listings, the latest Tuesday. At least one early eBay listing went undetected, and the book sold for $50."
"Alibris, the premier online destination for new and second-hand books in the United States, announced today the launch of its U.K. Web site and a drive to expand into international book markets."
"Some people will pay a lot of money for a rare Stephen King book. To celebrate the darker days of the year, here are the 10 most expensive Stephen King books ever sold through AbeBooks. "
"The genteel, slow-paced atmosphere of most second-hand bookshops seems to belong more to the 19th century than the 21st; few things are further from today's high-tech, high-speed connected world. The advent of the internet and the widespread take-up of broadband in recent years has intruded brutally on this cloistered world, changing the face of the second-hand book business forever."
"A forest of sites has sprung up selling second-hand books in vast quantities. These include the ubiquitous Amazon.com and others such as Alibris and Bookfinder.com, but the category killer is Abebooks."
"The book-scanning contract between Google and the University of California has made the Association of American Publishers (AAP) even more distressed over Google's project to digitize millions of volumes from libraries. "
"Last year, the AAP sued Google on behalf of five of its members -- The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons -- alleging massive copyright infringement in the Google Books Library Project. "
"A rare facsimile edition by Governor William Bradford of Plymouth Plantation fame, goes up for auction on the popular internet site eBay. The 1896 facsimile edition of the manuscript is one of approximately 100 surviving copies in the world; only 5 or so are thought to be in private hands, the rest are in museums and universities. The facsimile manuscript is expected to fetch $6,000 to $12,000...but don't be surprised if Pilgrim Nation outbids the predictions for this rare gem."
"'One of the most exciting features of the new Rare Book Room,” says Kevin Donaldson “is the monthly feature. In September we are promoting The Beat Generation. Sellers will nominate any book listed on Biblio.com and then vote for the best of these books. Winners will be featured in the Rare Book Room, and receive the book listing free in the Rare Book Room for as long as the title is listed on Biblio.com.'"
"In April of this year, Biblion Ltd., and Biblio.com, one of the world's largest marketplaces for used, rare, and out-of-print books, announced their mutual decision to work together to redevelop the Biblion.co.uk online strategy. After 3 months of production and beta-testing, the www.biblion.co.uk was taken live with the new platform in early July."
"Since it was founded in 1954, Ketterer Kunst has been firmly established in the front ranks of auction houses dealing in art and rare books. The Munich headquarters in the Prinz-Alfons Palais plays a leading role with two annual auctions of Modern Art. Two auctions a year are devoted at the Meßberghof in Hamburg to Old Masters and Art of the 19th Century /Marine Art as well as Modern Art. Hamburg is also the venue twice yearly for auctions of Rare Books - Autographs - Manuscripts - Decorative Prints. In addition, special auctions and benefit auctions for charity are regular events at Ketterer Kunst."
Anirvan Chatterjee: "We've noticed significant changes in the pricing landscape in the used and rare book markets. On one hand, we're seeing a flood of very cheap titles, often less than $0.25, where the seller makes the profit from the shipping charges," says Chatterjee.
"On the other hand, we're also seeing increasingly price-competitive international bookselling, where it can be cheaper to buy a book from another country, in spite of the relatively larger shipping cost. Bundling shipping prices can make clear the real cost of a $0.01 book, while making it a little less scary for a Californian considering buying a title from London."
"Springer (http://www.springer.com; part of Springer Science+Business Media), which claims to be the world’s largest STM (scientific, technical, medical) book publisher, has announced it will offer its complete publishing program online and on one integrated platform. Springer unveiled its new e-book initiative at the American Library Association annual conference. To accommodate the e-books, the company also launched the Beta of its redesigned SpringerLink service, which allows users to access e-books, electronic reference works, and e-journals on a single integrated platform. At launch, the new eBook Collection provides 3,000 imprints from 2005, with a target of 10,000 total titles in 2006. The company plans to add 3,000 new e-books every year. The new SpringerLink offers simplified and improved browsing and search functionalities, including a new guided navigation search engine and seamless integration and linking of e-books with the other content."
"While others were abandoning brick-and-mortar for a cyber presence, she decided to return to the romantic roots of her trade. Two years ago, she sold her shares and bought a bookstore."
"Located in a pseudo-Tudor commercial block including a pub (the Pennyfarthing) and a restaurant (the Blethering Place), the Grafton Bookshop in Oak Bay has a pith helmet on one wall and a cricket bat in the umbrella stand. The shop boasts floor-to-ceiling oak bookshelves, the upper levels reached by climbing a rolling ladder."
"After 34 years, the Good Times Bookshop, Suffolk County's oldest antiquarian bookstore, plans to close its doors on East Main Street in Port Jefferson Village at the end of the month if no buyer is found for the business."
'"It's a tragic day," Mason said. "This wonderful bookstore has been a delightful place to meet, talk to friends, see what interesting books Michael and Mary have brought out, and find out what's going on. This is heartbreaking for a lot of us. '"
"Eliminating the need for its patrons to lug boxes of old books shop-to-shop, Pacific Book Exchange LLC has brought the experience of selling to a used bookstore online."
"Michael Johnson, who founded the online bookseller in San Leandro with his wife, Joy, in 1997, co-developed the site - www.bluerectangle.com - as a way to expand his inventory, after his advertising for books on sites such as Google and Yahoo worked a little too well. "
Read this article.
"MENLO PARK, CA: Oak Hill Capital Partners announced today that it has acquired Alibris, a leading online exchange for used, hard-to-find and specialty books, music and videos. Terms were not disclosed."
"According to Bill Pade, a Partner with Oak Hill Capital Partners, 'We have conducted extensive research on the used/hard to find/rare book market and related 'long tail' businesses. We are impressed with the position that Alibris has built in this market and with the quality of its management, technology, and business partnerships. We are excited about helping this company grow and prosper.'"
"A UNIVERSITY has shelved controversial plans to throw away 22,000 library books after objections from students and academics."
"Dundee University had planned to bin thousands of books because of demands on space, even though a £7.5 million library extension is due to open."
"The about-turn comes after a Dundee economist, Neil Robertson, claimed that he bought a four-volume set from the library for 80p and subsequently found the same books being offered for sale at £1,500 on eBay. "
"A spellbound Harry Potter fan snapped up a rare book signed by the cast of the hit movies - for more than £2000.
The special edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sparked a bidding frenzy when it went under the hammer on an internet auction site. "
"Harness Tracks of America has launched a new service to the sport."
"The association of 42 harness tracks has added a Rare Books division to its Web site, offering “the rarest of the rare” in literature of the trotting and pacing horse."
"The listing of rare, old and out-of-print books includes treasures of harness racing literature of the past 150 years, and all of the works are being sold for the benefit of the Harness Tracks of America College Scholarship Fund for children of participants in the sport, or participants themselves."
"When Jack Hamilton posted the inventory of his closed rare-book store on eBay, he didn’t really expect to get any bids."
"The listing, asking for $495,000 for the collection of more than 75,000 items, is more of a classified ad than a real item up for auction."
"Every year at the Booker Prize, there's an odd little ritual in which six 21st century writers come face to face with the art and craft of the book as Chaucer knew it. Before the winner is announced, each writer is presented with a sumptuous, hand-tooled, hardback edition of their novel. Once a reaffirmation of a venerable, but vital, tradition, in years to come this ceremony may seem absurdly quaint. All the signs are that the book as we know it may be going the way of the codex and the illuminated manuscript."
"Internet giants like Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. are making headlines with their rival plans to create online libraries of books. Long before those companies even existed, though, there was Project Gutenberg: an ambitious, offbeat effort to digitize classic books by typing them out by hand."
"The approach made a lot of sense back in 1971, when Project Gutenberg's founder Michael Hart was a student at the University of Illinois. He enlisted an army of volunteers to help in the effort, by pulling their own dusty volumes from attic shelves and transcribing them..."
Read this article.
"Mondazzi and his wife, Sonja, are among the growing ranks of independent booksellers who are shifting all or much of their business to the Internet even as their beloved, cramped storefronts continue to disappear."
"Book dealers say the lower overhead of warehouse operations - mainly cheaper rents and lower utility costs - makes it possible to survive against the dominance of national retailers such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, not to mention the major online retailers, such as Amazon.com."
Read this article.
"Just a decade ago, Britain was littered with alluring, dusty, pleasantly smelly little shops packed with mile upon mile of shelves of books. Some survive, but many more have closed their pages for the last time."
"Driving through market towns and turning up on the doorstep of what a few years ago was an exciting shop, one now finds boutiques, organic greengrocers, mobile telephone hawkers or private houses. The second-hand bookshop in the provinces is on its last legs."
"A stack of "The Apprentice" by Lewis "Scooter" Libby sat on the shelves of the Lorem Ipsum bookstore for more than two years, with only one selling for $2.88 during the period. Then, Libby's indictment came, and now the same books are in high demand with a relatively low supply, causing their prices to skyrocket to over $900 on online book distributors like Amazon.com."
Read this article.
"Jinbo-cho, Japan's mecca for book lovers, is undergoing a quiet transformation that will change the way people browse for books."
"The district in Tokyo's Chiyoda Ward hosts 45 bookstores for new books and 120 offering rare and secondhand books, with estimated combined holdings of 3 million titles and 10 million books."
"An electronic database is now being constructed to catalog these inventories on a Web site for the public."
Read this article.
"Amazon.com on Thursday said it would let readers buy digital pages, chapters and entire books through two plans that present a broad challenge to a controversial strategy of Google Inc."
Read this article.
"AUCTIONEXPLORER's latest on-line rare book auction ended last night, with participation by a number of countries around the world. "These auctions are continuing to attract increasing international interest, and overseas book dealers and collectors are now making up (a considerable) percentage of our clients," says Paul Mills, a director of AuctionExplorer."
"Alibris has created an online Gulf Coast book wishlist at http://www.alibris.com,
where customers can donate new or used books to libraries in Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi that were destroyed or damaged by Hurricane Katrina. For each book donated by a customer, Alibris will donate a book to the drive."
"Thanks to the Internet, used books have become today's powerhouse, driven by price and the convenience of finding just about any title without leaving home. However, used books have become a threat to be reckoned with for booksellers across the country.
"We are becoming an endangered species," says John K. King, Metro Detroit's leading dealer in used and rare books and owner of John K. King Used & Rare Books. He was reacting to a study just released by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a national nonprofit research organization."
"Tom Baldwin of Baldwin's Book Barn near West Chester, Pa., was anticipating fierce bidding that could have netted up to $100,000 for a first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel "The Great Gatsby."
But more people gathered to watch than to bid. Just one person, a California book collector, offered Baldwin the minimum $25,000 bid for the book, in the last minute of bidding. But Baldwin had set a "reserve bid" of more than double that amount, allowing him to reject anything lower."
"Today, The Folio Society, Britain's leading publisher of fine books, launches foliobooks (www.foliobooks.net). For the first time, you can buy beautiful, illustrated, hardback books which, until now, have only been available to members.
The site launches with a wide range of titles, embracing humour, poetry, travel, art, music, myths and fairy tales, biography and autobiography, children's books and fiction. It will generate a passion, not only for good books, but for the best in illustration and production. 'Books do furnish a room,' declared Revd Sydney Smith, and they should. Foliobooks aims to make Britons proud of what their book collections look like, as well as what is inside them."
"A West Chester book dealer has begun an online auction of what he said is a rare first edition of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
Single copies, depending on a book's condition, can sell for $1,250 to $4,950. But book dealer Thomas Baldwin thinks his edition could fetch far more. He has started the bidding at $25,000.
Baldwin's 210-page copy is far from mint condition, but it has what he said is the original dust jacket, which to some collectors can be more valuable than the book. Baldwin started an online auction on eBay late Wednesday and is asking for an opening bid of $25,000."
"Many publishers say Amazon's benefits outweigh its pitfalls, but one gripe is widespread: Amazon has driven up sales of used books — great for thrifty readers, but bad, they say, for authors who depend on royalties.
"That's done more to hurt publishing, big and small, than anything, and readers don't think about it," says Fran Baker, a romance writer who runs her own publishing company, Delphi Books, in Lee's Summit, Mo., outside Kansas City.
Amazon, though, has seen used books spur sales of new books. "We've found customers that do buy used books are more likely to come back and buy (new books) from that publisher or that author," Greely says. "It's a way of introducing customers to new genres, new areas of interest."
"German online bookstore Buch.de has announced it saw a sharp jump in sales and earnings in the first half of 2005.
Book sales rose 19 per cent on the same period last year to €20.4m, the company reported.
The company's earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) had risen to €351,000, up from €19,000 last year."
"Searching for rare titles is a "treasure hunt" for book collectors. For years, they peered deep into the shelves and bargain bins of used book stores. They ran their fingers along old bindings, relishing the possibility of hidden "gems." The search often proved more exciting than the actual book.
However, those days are largely gone. Today, rare finds often don't go on the shelves but are sold online. Some dealers have shut their stores and switched to Internet sales only. The entire used book world has changed."
"Last year, the firm decided to base its second UK distribution centre in Scotland with the creation of 300 jobs, at a distribution facility on the outskirts of Gourock in Inverclyde. The plant is based in a building owned by economic development agency Scottish Enterprise and extends to some 300,000 square feet.
The online veteran can also boast a software development centre in South Queensferry. The local operation works on new features for Amazon's six websites. It is the first to be set up by Amazon outside the United States, and will employ 40 computer scientists and software engineers by 2006."
"ASHEVILLE — Still searching for that book you remember reading in childhood? What about that signed first U.K. edition of “Harry Potter,” worth $10,000? Or, do you simply want to pick up a 50-cent paperback by John Grisham to pack for your next beach trip?
Brendan Sherar makes book browsing a breeze at Biblio.com.
Since he launched his Internet business, Sherar has seen his site mushroom into the world’s third largest Web site for used, rare and out-of-print books. Biblio lets online shoppers browse through 22 million titles online from 3,000 independent booksellers in 24 countries."
"I think there'll be more change and opportunity in the next 10 years than over the last 10 years. Look at all the raw materials we use: computers, disk space and bandwidth. Every year, they get cheaper and more powerful. I love it that our raw materials keep getting cheaper and more plentiful. We have to say, "What kind of innovation can we layer on top of that, that will be meaningful for our customers?"
"Google has agreed to meet with representatives of the publishing industry to hear their concerns, but is apparently moving forward with the Google Print project in the meantime. The entirety of Google Library, as the project is known, was expected to take as long as 10 years to complete."
"A new kind of book buyer is roving the aisles at local library sales, looking to turn a profit by snapping up used books at cheap prices and selling them online."
"Amazon announced it has acquired BookSurge LLC, a global leader in inventory-free book printing and fulfillment based in Charleston, South Carolina. BookSurge maintains a catalog of thousands of titles that can be printed on-demand and are available for sale on Amazon.com. BookSurge offers its inventory-free book fulfillment network to publishers through BookSurge Publisher Services and to authors through BookSurge Publishing. In addition, retailers, wholesalers and distributors can leverage the BookSurge Direct wholesale platform."
"Within four years, says Verdict analyst Nick Gladding, one in 10 books will be bought in a supermarket."
"The supermarkets are selling on price alone and because of their enormous buying power they can undercut everyone. But they are only interested in the best-selling titles where high volumes can make up for wafer-thin margins. Gladding adds: 'Every sale to a grocer denies footfall and additional revenues to a bookshop.'"
"The EU Publications Office (OPOCE) has launched an online bookshop, providing a single access point to the various publications of the EU institutions, agencies and other bodies."
"With Taiwan's e-commerce continuing to boom, we believe there is still huge room for online book retailing to grow," Su Yun (Ĭªå), vice president of PC Home's e-commerce business division, said at an inauguration ceremony yesterday."
"Google's browser toolbar for Internet Explorer is raising eyebrows over a feature that inserts new hyperlinks in web pages, giving the internet search provider a powerful tool to funnel traffic to destinations of its choice."
"Guest books signed by Johnny Carson's famous visitors to The Tonight Show and rescued from the trash in the 1960s may turn into treasure for their owner."
"The three books, containing signatures of Groucho Marx, Paul Newman, William Saroyan, Arnold Palmer and other celebrities, are being auctioned online by Steve North, whose father, Jules, worked for NBC's Tonight show."
(I found this news story on Mike Goodenough's site.)
"Today, Abebooks has an interactive marketing presence in several key overseas book markets, including North America, France, Germany and the United Kingdom."
"Oxfam has become the largest retailer of second-hand books in Europe, with sales estimated at £15 million in the current financial year. It is expanding its network of specialist bookshops from 70 to an estimated 100 by the end of the next financial year."
"Michael van Rooyen, founder of Loot.co.za, says his company's sales were double the normal level in October and November, outstripping the industry growth of around 30% during the festive season."
"The Upper West Side used to be chockablock with independent bookshops," Cushman says from atop the ladder he is using to shelve books. "They're all gone."
"With the opening of the book market in China, Amazon.com recently bid for two small Chinese online book retailers. Dangdang.com, an online book distributor with annual revenues of $9.6 million, reportedly rejected a buyout from Amazon for $150 million. Joyo.com, the second largest online book distributor in China, was acquired by Amazon for $75 million."
"Whether your tastes run to cracked leather sofas and piles of first editions or wall-to-wall Peruvian poetry, nothing beats a browse in a truly fine emporium."
"According to him, there are volumes of as-yet unexplored, non-professional literary criticism at this popular website, in the form of customer reviews, which are ripe for academic scrutiny."
"[Google's] impact is even more critical for the already financially strapped academic publishers, who rely on research institutions and scholars for monograph revenues."
"Another colleague suggests it may be time to buy stock in used book seller Alibris."
"Items from Jack Kerouac's original book collection and personal wardrobe are currently up for bid online."
"The cool head of Amazon.com talks about the rise of the obscure..."
“You can get better deals online compared to the Bookstore, sometimes even at less than half the price for used books.”
"Amazon has placed the donation feature on all of its international websites as well, including in Britain, Canada, France, Germany and Japan."
German Book Company buys American Book Company
ZVAB buys Choosebooks.com
NBA Basketball Players and Books
"Amazon runs e-commerce sites for Target, Toys 'R' Us, Bombay Company and the National Basketball Association, among others."
Searching for Books with Search Engines
"Ninety-five percent of searchers will likely click on the first two (Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com)"
Amazon is Selling More Electronics
"Amazon.com Inc. is making progress in becoming more than primarily a book seller."
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