Mark's Brain

Two recent events have had a tremendous impact on my internet bookselling. The first is Amazon giving Alibris and Abebooks the boot, along with Abe's self-imposed exit from half.com. I will lose a lot of sales from these changes. The second is my new computer at the shop, a Mac Mini.

For my first 4 years in business I was a strict ms windows guys, then I began playing around with linux and eventually decided to switch to Mac OSX. I had been running Virtual PC on my other Macs and using Abe's Homebase inventory management tool on the Mac through the windows emulator. I have decided with this new Mac that I am not going to use Virtual PC, hence I will not be able to us Homebase for inventory management.

The result is that I will now have to triage my listings of inventory. My thinking at present is to just drop Abebooks and not use them or their software at all. The triage would go something like Amazon, Half.com, Biblio, then Alibris. This will help me locate the best locate for my wide variety of inventory. One primary reason for this order is that the order of annual revenue for used books is, from largest down, Amazon, Half.com, Alibris, Abebooks. So then why drop Abebooks and include Biblio. Fees! Services! Reputation among dealers! Abebooks has been going downhill in service and reputation. And if my sale are going to drop then it becomes harder to justify the fees of listing on their site. Biblio's fees are more reasonable. Their image and service is 100% more professional.

So we will see how it goes.

I have set as a goal for myself to learn one new computer trick a day and to try and record what I have learned. Of course, I can always learn more than one a day, but this is my minimum goal.

Yesterday I was busy setting up and tooling my new Mac Mini that I purchased on eBay. A sweet little gem that is perfect for the tasks I have at the shop. Just enough power and pizzaz. I love living in the Mac world, now both at home and at work.

Today I figured out how to photograph a book, download the image into iPhoto, resize it and save it for uploading to a listing for inventory I put on Biblio.com. I have done similar things before for listings on eBay, but not for Biblio.com. The most difficult part was getting the file size to just under 97kb, the max for Biblio images.