The ILAB has organised a ZOOM webinar for members of the worldwide book trade to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on their business now and in the future
Lead by a panel of 7 prominent international booksellers, the event is scheduled for 2pm London time on Thursday April 9 and will be open to everyone via the internet conferencing platform “Zoom.”
Details about the program and how to participate will be found here:
https://ilab.org/articles/rare-book-trade-invited-ilab-webinar
According to a report we have just received from the ILAB [International League of Antiquarian Booksllers] the recently announced US tariffs on Chinese imports will apply to used, old and rare books as well new ones. This will even include books with only partial Chinese content and will apply to books imported from any country and produced at any period in time.
More details will be found on the ILAB website: https://ilab.org/articles/new-us-tariffs-chinese-goods-applicable-antiquarian-material
French language version is available here: https://ilab.org/fr/articles/nouveaux-tarifs-americains-sur-les-marchandises-chinoises
I recently listened with great interest to an online recording of the 2019 Malkin Lecture delivered last month at the Rare Books School in Virginia by Heather O’Donnell and Rebecca Romney. Its provocative title was: “The Right and Wrong Ways to Collect.” If you missed the live performance and haven’t yet caught the recorded version then I would strongly encourage you to click this link – bit.ly/2xNOE9z – and listen to what they had to say.
Their title captured my attention because it connected directly with the topic of another lecture I had, myself, presented at the University of London’s Senate House some five years earlier. For my lecture the title was: “Taste and Technique in Book Collecting – An Update for the Digital Age”. In my case, however, there were no recording devices present. I had instead intended to rework my original oral presentation into something more readable and then post it on our website where I knew that, if nothing else, our friend the Googlebot could be counted on to find and read it.
Of course, as often happens, action did not readily follow intention and the notes from my talk soon found their way, instead, into an archive folder on my laptop where they were eventually saved and forgotten. They would likely have stayed there, too, if listening to Heather and Rebecca had not brought them back to mind. I was thus nudged to update my own thoughts on the subject and put them into a form more suitable for appearing online. You can now find that here:
https://blog.vialibri.net/taste-and-technique-in-book-collecting-updated-for-the-digital-age/
Both lectures focused, in particular, on the ways in which the established “rules”and practices of book collecting have been altered, if not made completely irrelevant, by the internet and related technologies. Traditional collectors, and the booksellers who serve them, regularly bemoan the resulting loss of “standards” and complain of a general decline in book collecting as the inevitable result. I was happy to hear that Rebecca and Heather have seen a very different and more encouraging horizon. Theirs has been informed, in particular, by the numerous young collectors who have submitted entries to their annual Honey & Wax Book Collecting Prize. They give us a glimpse of a very positive future and I was pleased to hear about them.
Many of these young collectors have no interest in following in the footsteps of their predecessors. Nor should they. Some of their interests may seem incomprehensible to the collectors of my generation; they may have confessed to the prize judges that “I know I’m doing it wrong,” but what we learn from them is that, in fact, there is no such thing as “doing it wrong.”
My own lecture concluded with a similar message. It leaned heavily on the prescriptions of John Carter, the English bookseller who did more than anyone else of the previous century to explain and defend the “rules” of book collecting that guided my own generation of bibliophiles. Those are among the rules that are now being being tossed aside, or simply ignored, by a new generation – one that is mistakenly accused of having no interest in books. I personally find it fascinating to examine the origins and evolution of those rules, but it is even more exciting to think about the huge opportunities that are now opening up to this new wave of collectors who feel no need or interest in being told how or what to collect.
So if you are among the many who are skeptical and pessimistic about the future of book collecting I would like to direct you to the two links above. I hope they will cheer you up.
Are you getting more Libribot matches than you really want?
This is not a problem we expected, but we have, in fact, recently received a handful of emails with requests from users who were unhappy because they were getting too many matches. The source of their discontent: eBay.
This is not, of course, the majority view. Since we started including eBay in our searches last summer we have received many appreciative emails from regular users thanking us for this expansion. I was, frankly, surprised at how enthusiastic the response was. The number of clicks, and purchases, has, as a result, significantly increased.
While the addition of eBay was applied generally, it is the Libribot matches that have, in particular, increased. While most of our Libribot users have been happy with this, two or three have written to complain about getting too may matches and that eBay was the primary source of their surfeit. These particular users told us they hardly ever find what they are looking for on eBay and wanted to know if there was some way to eliminate all the eBay items from their Libribot search results. When they wrote to us about this our answer, unfortunately, was “no.”
But we hate having “no” for an answer (Al especially). So we (mostly Al) pushed this forward on the to-do list. We have now added another new feature that provides check boxes for all the sites that Libribot can search. If you don’t want books from a given site (or sites) all you have to do is go to your Account Details page and uncheck its box. It will look like this:
Unchecking the box for an individual site will tell Libribot to ignore that site when it is searching for books on your want list. It will not, however, have any effect on the conventional searches you make using the home page form. The way that works has not been changed.
You also need to be aware that this Libribot site exclusion will apply to all your wants. If you only want to exclude a site from searching some of your more fertile wants, but still want to leave that site active in searches for other rarer items, then you need to do something else.
You may already be familiar with the exclusion filters that prevent matches on books that include specified keywords. The same filters will also work with the names of bookselling sites. For example, if you want to exclude eBay matches from your searches then all you need to do is put [ebay] into the keywords field of the Libribot search form. This will exclude everything that has the word “ebay” anywhere in the description, including the name of the site where the item is for sale. You will have to do this individually for each of the permanent wants you have saved to your Wants Manager. If you have a large number of wants then this could take a long time. However, if you are like most users with multiple wants you probably find that it is only a small portion of those wants that produced a large volume of unwanted results. If you set up an exclusion for just those wants you will probably find that your results become quite manageable and you can leave the rarer items unchanged.
However, if you are certain you never want to see any books that are for sale on eBay then you can simply put [ebay] into the “Keyword Filters” box on your Account Details page. This will prevent eBay matches being made not only by Libribot, but by all the one-off searches you may make manually from the home page.
Of course, these techniques are not limited to eBay. You can use them to create an exclusion filter for most of the sites we search. Most, but not all. For example, using [bibliophile] as a keyword exclusion will filter out all the books from the bookselling site with that name, but it will also exclude all the books where the word “bibliophile” appears as part of the title or description. This might filter out items you actually want. There are several sites where some caution may be necessary.
We think this new feature will be helpful for many of you. More are in the pipeline. If you have any suggestions for other additions please let us know.
I was pleased to be asked to present a paper at the recent symposium “Who Owned This,” sponsored by the ILAB, ABAA and Grolier Club on 5 March, 2019. The event took place at the Grolier Club with 120 registrants in the audience and, I am told, an early and lengthy waiting list.
The 8 speakers spoke on various subjects relating to the difficult but timely problems faced by booksellers and librarians in connection with provenance, theft and forgery. I was honored by being assigned the closing position and used it to consider these subjects with a particular regard to the use of databases to protect from theft, recover stolen books and establish provenance. At the end I ventured a few general speculations about how the database technologies of the future may be even more useful for these purposes, including a preview of some of the things that viaLibri will be doing to make use of these technologies. The title of my paper was: “Provenance Meets Big Data – Do they have a future together?”
The full symposium was videotaped by the Grolier Club and will, in the future, be available on their website. I will make an announcement of that here when it happens.
In the meantime, a few colleagues who had not been able to attend the symposium have asked me to send them a printed version of my paper. On the chance that there might be one or two others who remain curious about what I had to say I have posted the full text of my presentation elsewhere on my blog. You can read it here:
Provenance Meets Big Data: Will they have a future together?
Comments have been enabled for that page and will be very welcome.
We are pleased to announce another addition to the wide range of sources we are search. Beginning today we are including over 2 million books from the new ChrislandsSearch website. All these items are for sale on independent online bookstores built and hosted by Chrislands.
In addition to now being searchable with our home page search engine, new items being added to the ChrislandsSearch group inventory will also soon be matched by our Libribot against all the want lists of our registered and Premium Services customers. If you have wants saved to our Wants Manager you may soon start receiving matches from hundreds of ChrislandsSearch booksellers.
Of course, if you don’t yet have any wants stored in your Wants Manager then we will have nothing exciting to report. So maybe this is finally the time for you to create a want list and discover the power of Libribot.
Charges were filed today in the theft of rare books at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So far the most extensive public information about the crime and indictments has appeared int the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette under a headline reading:
Two men charged with stealing more than $8 million in rare books from Carnegie Library
Unfortunately, the Post-Gazette website is completely blocked to visitors in the European Union, making access to these latest details difficult for anyone on this side of the Atlantic to obtain. We have, however, been sent a PDF copy of the online version of the newspaper story and are thus able to provide it here.
PDF Version of Post-Gazette report on Carnegie Library thefts
Clicking the link above will open up a printer screen that will allow you to print the full story (14 pages). Click Cancel if you prefer to display a scrollable version of the same story.
A few days ago, under the online banner “Amazon’s Curious Case of the $2,630.52 Used Paperback,” the venerable New York Times reported with surprise on phenomena we are all too familiar with: second hand books for sale at absurd prices. The first book in question was a 2009 romance novel, for sale on Amazon, entitled “One Snowy Knight.” Having brought this information to the attention of David Streitfeld, the Times’ respected Amazon authority, the author then innocently asked “How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?” She then alternatively wondered whether Russian hackers might not have taken up the manipulation of used book prices to keep themselves busy during their spare time.
The answers to the questions are: 1-we will be astonished to ever see evidence that books with similarly absurd prices do actually sell, even on Amazon, and; 2- Russian hackers have better things to do, even when there are no elections available for them to subvert. The inflated prices reported in the the story are, almost certainly, the products of imperfect algorithms created to continually reprice products without any human intervention. Booksellers call it “robopricing,” a term of general contempt.
How this works and what it means for the future of second-hand bookselling is a dismal subject. I have already written a lengthy blogpost about it, which can be read HERE. I will refrain from going over it again. The New York Times article did, however, bring up a few interesting questions that I did not cover in my earlier post.
The focus of the Times piece was, of course, Amazon. Certainly the automated pricing tools are effective there, and it would be hard to argue that price adjustment is not a natural, even essential, part of retail sales. And when a price is obviously off the mark then it is probably due to a flawed algorithm rather than a scheme to fleece a naive and price-indifferent buyer.
But I am also wondering if there might not be more to it than that. Could there be other ways to benefit from putting a crazy price on a used book? In this case I couldn’t help but notice that the $2,630.52 bodice-ripper in question was out of print and the colourful tweet that illustrated the online version of the story made it a point to mention that a new reprint was scheduled for release in July. It can’t have been bad publicity for this news to appear on page B1 of the NYT when it did. Was it just a fortuitous coincidence? The author, Deborah MacGillivrary, is no ingénue in the art of influencing book sales on Amazon. Perhaps she has discovered some clever method for boosting the sales rank of a new book by drastically inflating the price of second-hand copies. If so, she is not letting us in on her secret.
However, someone from MacGillivrary’s publisher, Kensington, is also quoted in the story and prefers to point the finger of blame in a different direction. “Amazon is driving us insane with its willingness to allow third-party vendors to sell authors’ books with zero oversight… It’s maddening and just plain wrong.”
Streitfeld also sees culpability in the third-party sellers. He writes: “Amazon is by far the largest marketplace for both new and used books the world has ever seen… (Amazon) directly sells some books, while others are sold by third parties. The wild pricing happens with the latter.”
The problem with this is that third-parties are the only sellers of second-hand books on Amazon, which is only interested in selling new books on its own account. Without third-party sellers its book offerings would be limited to what is in print (or recently remaindered). At that point Amazon ceases to be “by far the largest marketplace for new and used books.” That status (which is quite arguable to begin with) would then belong to a metasearch site – like viaLibri for instance – where the number of independent sellers and second-hand book offerings substantially out-number those available from the Big A, even when its new titles are added in.
But this strays, of course, from the primary focus of the story, which gaped at an incomprehensible price attached to what should have been a cheap used paperback. It is not clear how this threatened the sanity of the featured publisher, who we presume is not also a third-party seller and does not traffic in used books.
We are also warned about “the wild pricing specialists, who sell both new and secondhand copies”. I have some experience in this particular world and this is not a category of bookseller I have yet encountered – at least not one who was active as a third party bookseller who sold both new and used copies with ‘wild’ prices. This explanation comes from Guru Hariharan, a former Amazon employee who now heads a company “which develops artificial intelligence technology for retailers and brands.” Referring to these wild pricing specialists he explains that “By making these books appear scarce, they are trying to justify the exorbitant price that they have set.” If Mr. Hanrahan has indeed discovered a method for making common books appear scarce then the prospects for his company would be rosy. I wouldn’t count on it. Internet search engines now provide a definitive measure of scarcity that is visible to anyone in the market place for old books. While it might be possible to make a scarce book appear common, I have not yet learned the secret for making a common book appear scarce. When I have mastered that bit of magic I will be sure to keep it to myself.
Unless I’m too late. The Russian hackers may already have started to work.
We are pleased to announce that viaLibri now includes books from eBay as part of its search results. If you look in the “Where to Search” panel in the upper right hand corner of our home page search form you will see two check boxes for eBay.com and eBay.co.uk. When these have been ticked the old, rare and out-of-print “Buy It Now” book listings from those two sites will be added to all the items from all the other sites we already search. This means that over 30 million more items have now become searchable.
And there are more to come. We expect to start searching auctions on eBay in the near future and plan to expand to other international eBay sites as well.
But beyond just adding numbers to our search results we are also creating a better way to search eBay for books. You can now use viaLibri to search for books on eBay in ways that are not possible on any other site, including eBay itself. Once you have given us a try we are confident you will not want to go back to whatever you did before. Here are some of the things you will now be able to do, for the first time, when searching for books on eBay:
Authors: What could be more essential to the identity of a book than the name of its author? Nothing that we can think of. When a book is listed on eBay the author’s name is just another undifferentiated tidbit of information. Searching specifically by author is not possible. To overcome this limitation we have developed techniques to extract the author’s name from most eBay book descriptions . This means, for example, that if you wanted to search for books written by Martin Luther you could have results that were not also cluttered with books about him. You can also combine this with our exclusion feature to make sure that your search for books by Martin Luther did not also fill your results with books by or about Martin Luther King. This is something you cannot do when searching on eBay itself.
Publication Dates: The year in which a book was published is, of course, an essential element in determining its interest and value. One of the most useful tools that viaLibri offers to collectors is the ability for search for books within a specific date range and to sort results by date. If you are only interested in books on a subject before a certain date we can filter your results to eliminate the things you don’t want. This is something else you can’t currently do when searching on eBay directly.
Fuller descriptions for search results: Native search results on eBay show only a title, price and photo for the books that are returned. To see any details you need to click through to another page. Our results will in most cases show, in the results list, the notes or condition information provided by the seller. In this way, much needless clicking is avoided.
Bookseller easily identified: In addition to details about the book, our results list will also give the name of the seller who is offering that item, this helping to identify favoured sellers and eliminating what should be an unnecessary click.
First Editions: We have built our own eBay tool to find books which have been identified by their sellers as first editions. After testing the results we have found that we usually return significantly more eBay firsts when we search on viaLibri than when we search on eBay itself.
Signed copies: The same thing applies when we search for signed copies. In fact, with signed books we do even better than with first editions. In one case, for example, we turned up 3 signed copies of books by a particular author, while eBay had none, and did not even get an option for trying. If your collecting interests are focused on signed copies we should be able to help you find more of them.
Clipboard: The viaLibri clipboard is available for saving details of items you have found on eBay, along with items from any of the other sites we search. Even after the book is sold or withdrawn, the information about it will be stored indefinitely for future reference, or until you decide to delete it.
Exclusions: When searching on viaLibri you can specify words or phrases that help identify items that you want to exclude from your search results. eBay lets you use a single word in the title to select items for exclusion; viaLibri lets you use multiple words or phrases, and the exclusions can be applied specifically to the author, title or keyword fields. For example, this would be useful if you were searching for books about Charles Darwin but did not want books written by him. This can be easily done with viaLibri, but is impossible when searching directly on the eBay site itself.
No ISBN: A checkbox on the viaLibri search form lets you filter out books which have ISBN numbers. This is useful for identifying and excluding modern reprints of early editions when it is only the early editions that are of interest.
Translation: When an item is described in a foreign language you can use the viaLibri translation feature to translate the text into the language of your choice.
If you are only interested in looking for books on eBay then we feel quite confident that viaLibri is the best way for you to do it. All you need to do is go to the “Where to Search” panel and uncheck all the options except “eBay (UK)” and “eBay (US).” But why would you want to do that? We have over two dozen other boxes you can check that will lead you to books from many thousands of additional booksellers from around the world. eBay is an excellent place to look for books, but if it is the only place you have been looking so far, then I think you are in for a pleasant discovery.
If you are, on the other hand, a long time hard-core eBay buyer then I think you will also be in for a pleasant surprise. Give it a try and see for yourself if we don’t make your hunt for books on eBay both easier and more productive.
The York Antiquarian Book Seminar will take place again this September for the fifth year running. It is an excellent educational opportunity for anyone interested in becoming an antiquarian bookseller, or just wants to learn about the marketplace for old and rare books. Three full days of courses will “provide an opportunity for leading specialists to share their expertise and experience with booksellers and collectors in a comprehensive survey of the rare book market, both antiquarian and modern.”
We are strong supporters of this program and will, this year, be making our own contribution to the benefits of participating by giving to all YABS students a free one-year subscription to viaLibri Premium Services. (This is normally a $150 value).
For more information about YABS you can go to their website here: https://www.yabseminar.com/. You should also note that there are several organisations and individuals who are offering scholarships to cover the full £495 tuition fee. A list of these can also be found on the site.