BookScanned
Archive: Richard Evans Lee
A funny and interesting articles on the use and abuse of BookScan data:
There's an etiquette to BookScanning. You BookScan your enemies to take joy in their failure or to aggravate the agony you feel at their success. You don't BookScan your buddies, your colleagues, or your editors. That's partly to protect the BookScanned from the embarrassment of having others know that the project on which they labored for five years racked up sales in the middle three digits. And partly to protect the BookScanner from the embarrassment of knowing just how successful the guy who sits in the next cubicle has been. After all, the only thing worse than seeing friends fail in the literary marketplace is seeing them succeed in the literary marketplace.
Why writers never reveal how many books their buddies have sold.
Homebase and Atypical Descriptions
Archive: Used Bookdealer
During our Homebase database crisis I did download our listings from ABE. It was a revelation.
Have you ever wondered how book descriptions come to be Unknown/Unknown?
Not long after starting to sell used books online I stopped using standard terms like Fine, VG, etc.
I got tired of having to explain what fine meant. And was nervous about people who couldn't know that good means not very good at all.
I started using clearly descriptive phrases in Homebase's condition fields.
At some point ABE stopped accepting anything that doesn't match the old catalog conventions.
At least I know why our book descriptions stopped appearing on ABE. And when I downloaded our listings I saw that the bulk of our cataloged inventory was Unknown/Unknown.
You may be thinking that I should've kept the old bookseller terminology and added descriptions for the uninformed in the big description area. I have severe carpal tunnel - some days I just want to chop my fingers off - so that seemed to painful.
Oddly I'd just started doing both because of the way Amazon uses Fine and Near Fine. But I'm not going to go back and edit 15,000 listings for ABE.
Missing Emails from Amazon
Archive: Online bookselling
For a time recently we discovered that a fair number of orders from Amazon's Marketplace weren't arriving in our inbox.
Our annoyance with that was more than offset by discovering we'd made more money than we thought.
Checking the spam folder on Verizon showed nothing from Amazon. Actually it showed no spam at all. Used to show many megs of unwanted junk emails.
I tend to assume it was aggressive spam filtering, though Amazon's mail server may have been overloaded and eating them.
Seems to be OK again.
For now.
Damaged Homebase Database
Archive: Used Bookdealer
The power went out one night. We leave Homebase open and the computer crash - I guess it took the UPS past the battery's limit - put some microscope dent in the Homebase data file.
I don't have a copy of Access or know a thing about repairing an Access database.
Searching Google for the error message I found an ABE help page that said they'd try to repair damaged database files.
So I uploaded ours and sent ABE a message.
The next day I got a canned message saying I could download our listings from ABE. No mention of the uploaded file. I sent a note but got no reply. (ABE stripped out the location field - understandably leaving their file not as useful as it might be … to put it mildly.)
I followed up in the Homebase forum on ABE. A lady replied that they still repair damaged Homebase files. Still didn't hear from tech support.
I did get a short survey from ABE asking how satisfied the response to my support ticked. And a couple of days after that I got an apologetic note from ABE saying they'd work on it.
About twelve days later and ABE hasn't been heard from again.
You be saying to yourself Richard sure is a fool to not have a backup of such important data.
No kidding.
I'd been planning to mention the issue to Gordon just before the file was munged.
But …
I had setup an automatic backup using some old software by the folks who originally produced Partition magic. But it had been so long that I forgot about it.
So we were able to restore out data.
Goodbye to the Small Bookshop
Archive: Online bookselling
From an article in slate on the vanishing of small bookshops:
Unfortunately, many virtues of the new order are relatively invisible. Consider the used-book market. It was much easier to find a good used bookstore 20 years ago. Yet it has never been easier to buy a good used book, with the aid of, among others, Abebooks, a superb central depot for used booksellers.
What Are Independent Bookstores Really Good For?
Homebase / Amazon Marketplace Glitch?
Archive: Online bookselling
Today we got an order for a book via Amazon's marketplace. The Homebase book number which Amazon converts into the SKU was wrong. It was off by one digit.
Never had this before and hope to never see it again. The headaches this sort of thing could create are as painful as anything I can think of in online bookselling.
Dematerialization of the Book
Archive: Used Bookdealer
I remember back when I was a Wired reader (a very long time ago) waiting for the dematerialization of the book. It hasn't happened yet. (And who would trade scholarly reference books for Wikipedia entries?)
But:
U.S. publisher HarperCollins said Monday that it plans to convert some 20,000 books in its catalog into digital form in a bid to rein in potential copyright violations on the Internet.
Really this is a way of insuring they can enforce their intellectual property rights against Google which is scanning books.
But the day is coming when people will download books instead of buying physical copies.
Scary, no?
Amazon's new SellersAnswer (Scam)
Archive: Online bookselling
A couple of weeks ago we got an email from someone on eBay apologizing for failing to pay for something. But no one owed us for anything. Holding the cursor over the reply link showed that while the visible text of the link was http://ebay.com/ … the actual hyperlink was to another site.
A reasonably clever bit of social engineering I thought.
Yesterday this arrived:
Hello,
I was just emailing because I haven't yet received this order, and was wondering if you could please tell me the status of it? Please fix this problem and email me soon! What is happened?
Thank's!
There was a link to Amazon's new SellersAnswer. For half a second I was fooled. Then I realized that nowhere in the email was a Amazon transaction number. Again, looking at the link and not just the visible text that it wasn't really a link to Amazon.
At the bottom of this phishing expedition was:
If you receive a suspicious e-mail with a link to update your account information, do not click on the link—instead report the e-mail to Amazon.com for investigation.
Almost all emails are supicious nowadays.
Every page is inspected in detail!!!
Archive: Online bookselling
This is the most hilarious description of a book I've seen in ages, emphasis mine.
Looks brand new-gentlyused!!! I believe in 100% accurate book description!!! Every page is inspected in detail and accurately reported!!! Minor self wear!!! Every page is white, crisp, and sturdy!!! There are no pen marks, pen writing, , or tears. Does not have pencil or pen underlines. Does not have any highlights on no pages!!! Comes from a smoke-free home!!! Ships same day before 4p.m. or next business day!!! I will always leave feedback for the buyer, which is very rare for sellers to leave feedback. I will a feedback of 5 for the buyer no matter what with a nice response!!! I believe in 100% guest delight and happyness!!!Thank you very much and godbless!!!
Cheesecake Bookends
Archive: Richard Evans Lee
Been a long time since I posted a bit of bookish cheesecake. But this happy pair of bookends Edward D'Ancona was irresistible.
The $2.00 CD Gambit
Archive: Secondhand Music
Standing on the store's porch smoking a cigarette I watched a young man start picking up litter in our parking lot. A litter fetishistic or someone almost dementedly annoyed by scattered wastage?
He even picked up a dozen cigarette butts. After a couple of minutes he tossed his gatherings into the garbage can.
Approaching me he asked my name. I told him.
Addressing me as “Richie” - truncating or modifying my name is impermissible unless I'm in love with you - he invited me to sell him a CD for $2.00.
I told him we weren't open. (Having the most damnable sleeping habits I get there three or four hours before opening.)
He pointed out that he'd picked up trash in my lot.
“Uh. Huh,” I replied.
The young man stalked off with a disgusted swagger.
At first I thought this was a novel approach until I remembered that winos do the like all the time.
Pathetic Book Description
Archive: Online bookselling
One day I'm going to make a list of all the amazingly dumb book descriptions I see.
My latest favorite says “Pick me!” Sort of like a begging schoolchild hoping to be chosen by the teacher. The listed reward for picking this person is a free bookmark.
No description of the book.
Scooter Libby's Collectible Novel
Archive: Used Bookdealer
Another transitory “collector's item.” Remember when Lynne Cheney's softly lesbian Sisters was hotly sought after?
An inscribed copy of The Apprentice: A Novel, which Libby wrote in 1996 when he was a relative unknown outside Washington, was on sale on online bookseller Amazon.com on Monday for $2,400. Unsigned hardcover copies were going for $700.
“Wow, who would have thought that clean living, family values man Scooter Libby was capable of writing such filth,” said one reviewer on Amazon. Another Amazon reviewer noted its “lavish dollops of voyeurism, bestiality, pedophilia and corpse robbery.”
Libby novel becomes hot online item
My Debt to Bookfinder
Archive: Online bookselling
I remember when I first started buying books online. It was from Powell's, a bookshop that was very early on the web.
And I recall how annoyed I was that they didn't describe condition (at least back then, haven't bought from them in years). Nothing more regrettable than getting a book that someone scribbled in.
I'm not sure if I bought from anyone else until I discovered Bookfinder. It was through Bookfinder that I discovered Bibliophile (do I have that name right) and ABE.
We joined ABE which happily offered HomeBase enabling us to sell not just to them but to Book Avenue, Antiqbook and Amazon.
Just imagine cataloging your books in, say, Excel, not being sure what you should do and then having to massage it for each listings service.
It was at least a year after I started buying used books online before our shop started selling via the web.
While I was pretty internet-literate for the time we might not have started as early if it hadn't been for Bookfinder.
I miss those early days. Money was so much easier to make.
Bookfinder Sold to ABE (Ouch?)
Archive: Online bookselling
I suspect Bookfinder being sold to ABE feels like a kick in the stomach to many of us in the trade.
Despite Amazon's A9 you don't think of an impartial search service mixing well with a vested commercial interest.
And I can only wonder how well Anirvan's technical gifts and competence will blend with ABE's abilities.
I'm just going to hope he got lots of cash and find the work satisfying.
And mention the one thing I wish Bookfinder had: the ability to specify the publisher of the book. You try checking for a certain edition of the Arabian Nights without it.
