The Book Bandit

Today I shipped a book from my shop in the United States by a women named Ali, who was born in Bangladesh and grew up in England, to a woman named Proudfoot, who lives in Australia. Just another day bookdealing in a truly a global community.

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.