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www.ecommerce-guide.com/solutions/article.php/3712001
By November 19, 2007 Getting Started The expression "condition is everything" in collectibles applies strongly to the book-selling trade. Before all else, a seller of used books has to have a sense of how to grade books by condition. Here are the grades with definitions. Plus (+) signs are used for books that exceed a grade but do not quite reach the next grade.
The meta-sites, or book-search sites, have revolutionized book selling by making pricing and bibliographic data available to the masses selling on and off the Internet. For checking book prices, the meta-sites are far more comprehensive than the eBay search pages — or even the largest listing services — because they search the databases of all the major listing services, many large bookstores and parts of eBay and the Barnes and Noble site. Just by simply typing in the authors name and title you'll get up to hundreds of listing results and searches can be refined by edition status, signed copies and other qualifying filters. Dynamic Duo of Meta-Sites There are two main book search meta-sites and both are free. The first, BookFinder.com, recently purchased by ABE, remains the larger and more comprehensive of the two sites, and does not appear to be slanted in its search results. Bookfinder claims a search of over 125 million books offered on 29 listing services and over 50 large international bookstores. Searches are multilingual. Because of its wide net, searches can take up to 24 seconds. The second is Add/ALL, which claims a search of over 40 sites and 20,000 booksellers, resulting in a quicker but somewhat less comprehensive search. AddALL offers the advantages of sorting by lowest and highest priced books, by dealers and offers alphabetized searches. It also offers entertainment in the form of famous quotations shown during the search times. Uploading Listings, Forums for Support So, once you've decided on what books to sell and where to find them, what next? In order to sell via the book listing services sellers must have an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program to upload listings from their computers to the listing service's servers. As mentioned, ABE offers a free and competent standard in the field, its Homebase program is compatible with Alibris, Biblio and several other listing services. Those lacking Homebase will need a commercial program such as Booktrakker, BookHound or software compatible with Excel spreadsheets. Given that all of the Three As publicly rate bookseller reliability (based solely on order completion rate on ABE and Alibris,) it is important to delete sold books immediately from sites other than that which generated the sale to avoid redundant orders that will count against your rating. Bookseller forums are also a worthwhile resource for anyone wanting be successful in book sales. Two years ago I wrote that if you put all the booksellers in paradise, half would complain about the room service — and nothing since then has dissuaded me from this opinion. Booksellers are a notoriously garrulous bunch, a little time spent in the chat rooms will verify this, but among the bellyachers and those posting off-topic political rants in the forums, are many generous folk who are glad to help and answer questions on or off the sites at your request. The forums are also an excellent source for up-to-the-minute book selling news and solutions. Frequented by some of the most sophisticated booksellers and bibliophiles, joining is recommended for novices and experienced sellers alike. It is also recommended to subscribe in "digest" form unless you enjoy being bombarded by dozens of separate e-mails every day. Two of the better chat rooms are the free Bookfinder's Insider's Digest, accessed from Bookfinder's search engine page; another is Bibliophile's Biblio Insider, which allows the listing of books for sale but charges $30 per annual subscription after a two-week trial. In the second part of this report we'll investigate the pros and cons of the parallel book selling universe that is eBay auctions (and Stores,) and offer more general book selling suggestions and advice. Frank Fortunato is a frequent contributor to ECommerce-Guide.com.
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