Author: Alasdair North

Register now for the February viaLibri Virtual Showcase

After a successful first outing, the viaLibri Virtual Showcase will be returning on February 20th. Register now to secure your place in the internet’s premier book fair.

Why register?

Unmatched access to viaLibri’s audience

  • Every day over 4,000 collectors, librarians and dealers from around the world come to viaLibri to search for old and rare books.
  • Every day our Libribot matches over 180,000 active wants with the search lists of over 18,000 registered users and subscribers. Links to your showcase items will be emailed directly to interested collectors.
  • Over 35,000 searches are executed daily on viaLibri.

A brand new, custom built, book fair system

  • The Virtual Showcase provides powerful search tools using flexible unlimited, multi-lingual categories and tags.
  • Upload up to 50 images per item.
  • Include links to your recent catalogue PDFs in your profile.
  • If your website is already being searched by viaLibri then you will be able to easily copy your listings into the Virtual Showcase.

Enhanced features for February 2025

Based on valuable feedback from December’s exhibitors we’re making the following changes to the platform:

  • Real-time statistics on page visits and item views will be available in the Exhibitor’s Dashboard.
  • Item descriptions can now include bold and italic text, as well as links.
  • The categories and tags browsing experience will be simplified to allow easier browsing.
  • We’ve added “Previous exhibitor” and “Next exhibitor” buttons to make it easier to browse all the booths in the showcase.
  • Several other small tweaks and bug fixes.

Discount for viaLibri subscribers

As before, there is a 20% discount on all registration fees for viaLibri Premium Services subscribers. If you are a subscriber and you are signed in to viaLibri with the correct account then this discount will be applied automatically when you register for the showcase.

 

Register as an exhibitor

Find out more

Seller’s location filter now available in Libribot

It’s been almost a year since we launched the redesigned version of viaLibri! Time has flown by, but rest assured that we’ve been constantly working behind the scenes on improvements to viaLibri.

One of the new features that we added when we redesigned the site was the ability to filter search results by the location of the seller. This can be very useful for those wanting to avoid costly international shipping charges, among other uses.

Today we are making this feature available in Libribot, our saved search system. Your wants can now make use of the seller location filter too.

If you’d like to add the seller’s location filter to a large number of wants then please get in touch with us. We’ll be happy to update your wants in bulk for you.

We’re hiring!

We are happy to announce that following another month of continued growth we are looking to expand our technical staff. We’re searching for a full stack developer who wants to work remotely. If you think you might be interested in joining us please check our our latest job announcement, recently posted here:

We are now happy to report that the openings have been filled.

 

“Date added” is now a sorting option for search results

A few weeks ago we quietly released an exciting new feature for viaLibri. You can now sort results by the date they were put up for sale. This is a change that a lot of people have asked for in the past, and we think it will be very useful for a lot of people.

Under the surface this has required quite a bit of work to get right, and it’s not without its limitations. The amount of information we get about a listing varies greatly depending on what site it’s listed on. For some sites we know exactly when an item was put up for sale, while for others we can pin it down to a 24 hour period. There are three sites (Amazon, Booklooker and Buchfreund) for which we don’t have enough information to even take a guess at when an item was added. As a result items from these sites will be shown right at the end of the results when you’re sorting by “date added”.

The results may also be a bit patchy if your search returns a large number of results. This is a result of how we fetch data from some websites. For example, we can fetch up to 50 results from antiquariat.de, but those will either be the most expensive 50 items that match your criteria, or the least expensive 50 items that match your criteria. We have no way of requesting the most recently added 50 items that match your criteria. So if your criteria are broad enough to match more than 50 items from antiquariat.de then they will be either the most or least expensive items. They will be shown in the order that they were put up for sale, but there’s no guarantee that they’re the most recent items put up for sale. As a result of this you’ll always get more useful results by using the most specific search criteria you can.

One further thing to note is that this new feature is only available when you start your search from our homepage. You won’t be able to pick “date added” as an option when reordering a search that’s already been completed.