Another used book site closes

Archive: Online bookselling

ChooseBooks has announced that they'll be folding.

I don't know anything about the owners' background or skills but the site's passing left me wondering how adequately people who want to go in the used book listing service plan ahead.

There've been a couple of operations I half suspected we started by someone with enough know-how to setup cheap Linux servers, had taken an MySQL course at night school and bought himself Mastering PHP in 10 Days.

Easy to imagine someone technically savvy enough to get started from scratch but who doesn't take into account the need for:

Adequate redundancy: sites that go down from one server failure are a bad sign. I forget how many machines makeup Google to use the most extreme example. But we've seen even Amazon and eBay with the best hardware money can by have their slow days. I'd imagine Bookfinder has a good-sized server cluster powering it without having to provide ecommerce services.

Time: the big sites have expensive database technicians sitting at hand and on call just in case something fails at 3:00 a.m. their time. Back to Bookfinder again, a comparatively small site we're all familiar with. Anirvan surely spent many nights without sleep keeping the site up.

The time it takes to get things working correctly. Bookfinder one more time: there must've been months of fiddling coming up with the algorithm for querying the book listings sites. Amazon keeps new sections in beta for months trying to root out all the unexpected glitches.

Whether it is a computer guy or someone with lots of money who thinks he can hire the computer wizardry necessary my guess is that what is most likely to be forgotten is:

Scalability: the more books you list the more hardware you'll need, the more finely your database will have to be tuned and the more people you'll need to maintain the technical operation as well as to answer angry emails from book buyers and clients. Having the cash to grow into profitability will be tough for anyone who wants to be a competitor to ABE.

This ignores the deep pockets it will take to advertise any new website selling anything nowadays. Since we all (well, almost all - there are those suckers who wind up with spyware infested PCs) ignore website advertising it'll take many billions of impressions to attract enough visitors to come near profitability. And you have to get the book dealers to list.

An email arrived yesterday from somebody. They've setup a new bookselling site. The moment I saw mention of their low fees I deleted the email. I'm one of those reluctant booksellers. I'm glad Biblio allows us to pay based on what we sell. We are making enough to more than warrant the time it takes to send them the data.

Though I do wish more used bookdealers felt like joining TomFolio. I'm surprised they don't see it as an investment based on enlightened self-interest. Some can't afford it I'm sure. For many it is a matter of personalities and the greater pleasure to be had in newsletter spats and flammage.

Oh, I claim no expertise in anything written about above. I do keep meaning to setup a Linux box again. If it weren't for phpMyAdmin I'd be helpless with MySQL and I know just enough PHP to make my weblogs work. And, regrettably, I'll never be a merchant prince.

You can view this entry an instance of the Devil's Playground Effect.