Goodbye Antiqbook

Archive: Online bookselling

We pay a penalty for listing lots of cheap books: it jacks up our listings fees. I'm too lazy to go check but I'd guess we have about 20,000 books listed. On some sites like Amazon it won't matter until we have over 50,000 (there's a scary idea). It pumps up our ABE fees a bit, but not harmfully.

It also caused up to drop Bibliology after the month's free trial. Unless a site has a huge volume of browsers and buyers (e.g., ABE) we can only pay so much for having our books listed.

Sadly, today I had to email Piet at Antiqbook to say we would be discontinuing our listings. We've been with them longer than anyone except ABE. But as our simple quantity of cataloged books incremented our sales did not. We'd been losing money for months.

It wasn't a factor but since Antiqbook was kind enough to show the information almost all of our sales through their site came from people searching BookFinder and AddAll. A tiny number of Europeans went directly to Antiqbooks. But not enough.

I'd prefer to support as many small used bookselling sites as possible. Having the economic clout clustered in a few powerhouses is fearful. I'm a small shop owner in a small city, I can't subsidize the listings services (anyway I'd be more likely to give excess cash - should I ever know that luxury - to AIDS research or recovering antiquities in the Middle East).

Life is richly contingent, commercial life for those of us far down from the top very much so. The second time we tried Book Avenue our sales were so healthy we paid for a year in advance. Those sales vanish, moving on perhaps to a better life elsewhere. I don' t think we recovered our investment. The folks at Book Avenue didn't do anything wrong. But the moment our subscription expired we quit.

Even now I suspect there are people who feel they can start a used book listing service. My advice would be don't do it unless you have deep, deep pockets. The web is fatter every day and it is too easy to vanish within the folds of internet flab.

If you are an obdurate know-it-all you might consider making your fees based on your customers (the booksellers, not the book buyers) success. Choose Books isn't making us rich but we sell enough to keep me uploading (which wasn't true of one very cheap listings site). I'd never have considered Choose Books if the monthly payment weren't based on our sales.

I won't even look at a used book-listing site anymore unless the cost is rooted in results.

Two other suggestions:

1) If you can't design a web page don't try. I seriously considering listing with a company but when I go to their site it looks so plain damn awful and the navigation is so obscure that I get too pissed to think about wasting my time with them.

2) Make sure the website works. I tried to sign up with a service a couple of weeks ago. The part of the form where I specify the state my shop is in didn't work. I found myself trapped in a terribly vicious circle of being told I hadn't supplied all the registration details and being wholly unable to.

It is easy to badmouth eBay and Amazon. Big evil companies, &etc. But: everything is simple, context sensitive help is available for almost all options.