viaLibri Virtual Showcase – Your questions answered

It has already been two weeks since we opened registration for exhibitors in our forthcoming virtual showcase. Since then we have have been asked a variety of good questions regarding how our showcase operates and what you can do with it. Anticipating still more questions to come, I thought it might be useful to compile and answer a list of frequently asked questions (FAQs) that addressed many of the things our exhibitors, current and future, may want to know.

The list that Al and I came up with will be found below. If you have any other questions that have so far been overlooked please don’t hesitate to send them on. An FAQ Chapter 2 will surely follow.

FAQs For Virtual Showcase Exhibitors

Is there a discount for viaLibri subscribers? How do I make sure I qualify?

Yes, 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.

Can I increase my item count after I’ve signed up?

Yes. You can upgrade at any point until 48 hours before the showcase opens. All you will need to pay is the difference between the price of package you currently have and the price of the package you’re upgrading to.

See our help page for more details on how to do this.

Can I replace items once they’ve sold?

No. Once the showcase opens you will not be able to replace any items that have sold. You will be able to remove an item from sale if needed, but you will not be able to substitute a new item in its place.

Does Libribot also look for matches that appear in viaLibri Virtual Showcases?

Yes, the viaLibri Virtual Showcase is fully integrated into the rest of the viaLibri system.

Libribot is our wants matching service. Over 175,000 sets of search criteria have been saved in our database by our registered users, and every one of them will be checked against the listings in the showcase. Any users whose wants match items in the showcase case will be emailed a list of those items just before the showcase opens.

Normally there are limits on how many wants are searched per day for each user, depending on subscription level. We are waiving those limits for the showcase, so all wants will be checked against showcase items, regardless of subscription level.

Are there any limits on the number or size of images that can be uploaded?

Not that you’ll notice, no. You can add up to 100 images for each item, and each image can be up to 50MB in size. As long as you’re uploading normal JPEG photo files you shouldn’t have any problems.

Can I import items from my own website?

Yes. If your website listings are already included in viaLibri’s search results via our Harvest service then they can easily be copied over to the showcase. See our help page for instructions on how to do this.

How do payments for items in the showcase work?

viaLibri will not take any payments as part of the Virtual Showcase checkout. When someone buys an item from the showcase you will receive an email notifying you of the purchase. It is then your responsibility to get in touch with the buyer in order to specify the final postage charges and arrange payment.

Will buyers be able to reserve items?

Yes, buyers will be able to reserve items by clicking a button on the item page. This reservation will only last for 20 minutes: long enough for them to do some further research, but short enough that it shouldn’t get in the way of another sale if they’re not a serious customer.

Exhibitors can also reserve their own items (i.e. put them on hold) via the Exhibitor’s Dashboard. There is no time limit on these reservations.

When do I have to add my items by?

All items must be added 48 hours before the start of the showcase. After this point you will still be able to edit items and add images, but you will not be able to add new items.

Will items still be visible after they’ve sold?

Yes, items are still visible in the showcase once they have been sold. They will be clearly marked as “Sold” and their price will be hidden.

Can I set the order that items are shown on my profile page?

Yes. Once you’ve added your items in the Exhibitor’s Dashboard you can drag them up and down to set the order of items. These changes are saved automatically so there’s no need to press a button once you’re done.

How many categories or tags can you assign to each item?

There is no limit. You can use as many categories as you need to effectively describe your items.

What can I do if my item doesn’t belong in any of the existing categories?

You can easily create your own more useful categories and add them to the large selection already provided.

Do item listings include the name of the exhibitor?

Yes. Every item found when searching or browsing will have its seller clearly identified.

Can the Showcase translate items into foreign languages?

Yes. Located at the bottom of each item page there is a “translate” link which can translate item descriptions between 33 different languages.

Does the Showcase convert prices into foreign currencies?

Yes. Prices can be displayed in 13 different currencies.

To browse all the items in the showcase do I have to view each exhibitor’s items separately?

No. One click is enough to browse all items. To facilitate browsing, those results can then be sorted by year of publication, price, author, title or exhibitor.

Can descriptions of items of interest be saved for later reference?

Yes. On each item page there is a link labelled “Add to clipboard.” Clicking this link will save the item to your viaLibri “clipboard” where you can easily find it again later, even after the showcase has closed.

Can items be purchased directly from exhibitors without using the showcase checkout form?

Yes. You do not have to make a purchase using the showcase checkout form. However, if you know that you want to buy something it is to your advantage that the item be marked quickly as sold so that no one else can buy it before your order has been received by the exhibitor.


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Something new will be coming soon to viaLibri.

As we all know, one of the unexpected side effects of the recent pandemic was the wave of Virtual Book Fairs arriving in its wake. These were a logical and welcome response to the vacuum that resulted when lockdowns had suddenly erased physical book fairs from the calendars of bibliophiles everywhere.

It seemed obvious to me that a new online bibliophilic marketplace was in the process of being created and, in particular, that viaLibri was in a unique position to host and support it. The benefits and opportunities, for both consumers and vendors, were compelling.

They could not be ignored.

We set to work immediately designing and building our own online platform for virtual bookselling. We wanted something more than just another internet book fair. We wanted something that would fully leverage the power of the internet to provide an online marketplace focused specifically on the needs of bibliophiles, whether buyers or sellers. We wanted something that would be more than just a digital facsimile of a traditional book fair. What we wanted was a Virtual Showcase for old and rare books, enhanced with tools that will, we believe, enable serious collection building in new and exciting ways.

As ever with projects like this, it has taken us much longer than we had planned. New possibilities continued to present themselves. Our vision of what the future of online bookselling could become quickly expanded as we went forward. But a finish line is now in sight.

We are currently completing the final touches before the official launch and we’d like to invite you to join our new viaLibri mailing list, which we have launched today. It will keep you informed of future plans as they are announced. 

Join our mailing list

If you are curious to read some of our previous blog posts regarding this subject you can find them here:

Our thoughts on virtual book fairs

 

Our thoughts on Virtual Book Fairs

It has not gone unnoticed that this summer has marked three full years since the first virtual book fairs suddenly arrived on the bookselling scene and attempted to fill the vacuum created by COVID 19. At that time there was widespread concern within the book trade that the resulting universal closure of book fairs would bring in its wake the end of bookselling as we knew it. Much panic and moaning inevitably ensued.

In retrospect we can see that the COVID-related anxieties of June 2020 proved to be a bit inflated, at least with regard to antiquarian booksellers. There is, of course, no published statistical data on the subject. Looking at our own data, along with the anecdotal information we were receiving from others, tells me that the first year or two of lockdown was, in fact, profitable for many and manageable for most.

This pleasant surprise was due, I think, to the fact that while nearly everyone we knew had little or no trouble imagining the likely disastrous outcomes that would result from cancelling the fairs, few had yet anticipated the many good things that would occur when all the complications and constraints of physical book fairs were removed and alternative events arrived to take their place. It did not take them long to do so.

In the beginning the tactile and olfactory pleasures of handling old books were regularly cited as an essential feature of bibliophily. These are, of course, fine things and no one denies them, but the opportunities for appreciating them is restricted to those lucky collectors who are fortunate enough to find themselves regularly within travel distance of the locations where traditional book fairs regularly take place.

For booksellers who regularly exhibit at book fairs, geography also places constraints. To sell books you must travel. For the smaller fairs there is loading and unloading; packing and unpacking; petrol and, as often as not, a rented place to sleep. For the large international fairs convenient hotels are expensive while the merchandise will usually need to be shipped globally at an ever mounting cost.

In other words, physical book fairs are expensive, not to mention a lot of work. But in spite of it all, they were almost always popular, and even profitable – bearing in mind, of course, that many exhibitors are there mostly because of the opportunities to buy rather than sell.

Before COVID, all of this was taken for granted. Once the closures and quarantines had begun many collectors and dealers cautiously turned their attention to the internet where they soon began to notice that there were definite benefits to hunting for books online.

Librarians and archivists were especially responsive to the benefits of virtual fairs. They rarely have the time or budget for the kind of travel that regularly attending live book fairs requires. None of these restraints apply when the book fair is taking place right on your desk, or wherever it is that your other professional obligations may require you to be.

Of course, this applies to collectors as well. They have their own set of frustrations. Among these is the awareness that, while the retail customers are patiently waiting outside for the doors to open, the exhibitors inside have already been busy buying and trading for hours, if not days. I don’t fault them for this. The time required to unpack and prepare one’s booth makes it unavoidable. But it does give the insiders a tactical advantage over those who must wait patiently for the doors to open before they can begin.

There is much else that can be said on this topic. Shortly after the first wave of virtual book fairs went online in June of 2020 I published a blog post on this subject (https://blog.vialibri.net/did-you-go-virtual/). I was curious to hear from our users whether or not they were happy with this sudden innovation and so solicited their opinions about what had just taken place. I was also curious to hear what suggestions they might have to offer regarding what they would like to see when next era of virtuality has arrived.

I think that this time has now definitely come. I don’t have an official count showing how many virtual fairs are currently taking place, but what statistics I do see all show that attendance at individual digital fairs is significantly larger than at comparable live events. This is certainly the case in the U.S. and I expect that the trend will continue in other places as well.

We now have more than three years of experience with virtual fairs built on a variety of digital platforms.I cannot help being curious to know what an updated survey would tell us about how our users now feel about the current state of digital bookselling and the future direction they would like to see it take.

But I must confess that I am motivated here by more than mere curiosity. If, as I believe, online virtual events will be an increasingly crucial part of antiquarian bookselling in the future then this is something that viaLibri will want to participate in. And we have plans to do just that. As you may guess, this is an important motive behind soliciting input from our users today.

If you are like us and have your own ideas about what the next transformation of internet bookselling should look like then please share your thoughts with us here.

The early history of Online Bibliographical Tools and Marketplaces.

Anyone with an interest in the role of antiquarian bookselling  in relation to the broader study of  rare  books, bibliography, and early printing will want to read an article recently  published by Fabrizio Govi in the Italian scholarly journal TECA entitled “Online Bibliographical Tools for the Antiquarian Book Trade.  Their History, Use and Impact.”

A well established and highly respected Italian bookseller from Modena, Govi  explores his subject broadly from both economical  and historical perspectives.  As the origins of online antiquarian bookselling slip further into memory the latter of these has become increasingly of interest, at least to me.

Sharing that interest, Govi began his research by identifying 17 different international websites that have focused primarily on the used and rare book market. He then attempted to contact  all of them to request information about how they started and what information they might offer about the online book market as it exists today.  Only three of these chose to respond.  Nevertheless, Govi was able to dig through a variety of primary and secondary sources to  compile a significant amount of interesting data on the origins of the antiquarian market and how it became what it is today. He tells me that what he has just published is only a preliminary study.  I’m encouraged that there  could be even more to come.

You will find the article here:

https://teca.unibo.it/article/view/14345/14505

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.

 

A new look for viaLibri

For at least a couple of years now we have been hard at work building a new and improved version of viaLibri. That task is now nearly done.

A section of the home page can be seen above. All that remains is a bit more “beta testing” as we track down any elusive bugs and gather still more helpful feedback from our valued customers, colleagues and friends.

So, if you are at all curious to see what the new incarnation of viaLibri looks like then please visit our beta site and have a look for yourself.

https://beta.vialibri.net

Finishing touches are still being worked on, so please forgive any faults you discover. If you do notice anything buggy we hope you will alert us to it.

You will find a contact link among the other features now gathered at the bottom of each page.

Likewise, if you find that there are new features whose behaviour you believe could be improved then we will be happy to hear from you about them. There may not be time enough to include them in the current release, but the next to-do list list has already been started.

You don’t need to do anything special when you arrive, but if you want to try out all our new features we recommend that you start by logging in to your existing account. Your clipboard, Libribot matches, want lists, and other personalised data and settings will still be available as they are now. For the immediate future you will be free to switch back and forth between the old and the new. Nothing will be lost. But once you have become comfortable with our changes we hope you won’t want to stay in the past any longer than necessary. But don’t worry. The final transition will be finished very soon.

How Do You Like Virtual?

The most interesting phenomenon of the last month or so, at least from a bibliophilic perspective, has been the arrival of a new way to buy and sell books online: virtual book fairs. The idea followed in the wake of the cancellation of multiple traditional physical book fairs as a result of the coronavirus.  By my count there have already been at least seven virtual fairs, beginning with a digital version of the Paris Book Fair opening on April 23 and followed by fairs organised by IOBA, PBFA, Marvin Getman, ABAA, ABA (“Firsts”) and, most recently, the Rose City Virtual Book Fair.

For those who did not join in, the fairs were basically of two types. The first group consisted primarily of  a listing of “exhibitors” with links to PDF catalogues available for browsing.  This replicated the fair lists that are now regularly sent out by many of the dealers as a preview of what they will be offering in their booth at a traditional physical fair. For many dealers the sales generated by these lists often exceed what they receive at the actual event.  In this way the virtual fairs were able to do much to compensate revenue lost when planned-for fairs did not take place.

The second group consisted of books that were aggregated into a joint data base where each exhibitor was able to include a fixed number of items  (12 to 50) that could be searched, sorted and filtered in a variety of ways.  This is not too distant from the group search engines that we are already familiar with, except that here the individual dealers are given much more prominence and are better able to present themselves to potential buyers than in the search engine venues that people are already familiar with.  Buyers were also encouraged to believe that the books that were on offer were all new to the market.  Those who took the time to double-check this on Google, or even viaLibri, often discovered that this was not always the case, but it was for sure that at most of the fairs the sellers made an effort to put some of their best or most unusual items onto their virtual stands.

Most of the data-driven fairs were also interesting because they left the sold items on display, still priced, but flagged to let you know that someone else beat you to it. Unlike traditional fairs, I doubt if there were any books that passed through 2 or 3 virtual stands before the doors first opened to the public.  And given the number of sold stickers I saw at some fairs it is clear that, at those fairs at least, there were many sales taking place. I will admit that I had limited expectations regarding attendance, and the organisers apparently did too.  The ABAA and Firsts fairs were overwhelmed by visitors at their openings,  which resulted in both sites being virtually frozen for at least twenty minutes, if not more.  Whether those visitors waited, came back later, or just gave up, I don’t know. But I think the prospects for future online book fairs are very good.  Several of the sponsors of the recent fairs have announced that they plan to have monthly fairs in the future.

I am very interested in hearing the comments from other buyers and sellers who participated in any of the VBFs that have just taken place.

Did they find them a good way to buy or sell?

Will they show up at future fairs?

Will the old-fashioned  book fairs return to their same prominence after the call for social distancing has been revoked?

ILAB Amsterdam Congress and Fair cancelled

The sad but generally expected cancellation of the ILAB  Congress in Amsterdam was announced yesterday, along with  similar news for the book fair that would have accompanied it. That news was followed today by cancellation of the September York fair, Europe’s largest.

 

The status of other future book fairs,  or at least those scheduled for sometime in 2020, is now an open question.

The most notable response, so far, has been a quick scheduling of  the alternative online events now generally referred to as “virtual” book fairs. At least a couple of these have already taken place and another 3 that we know of  are planned for the next three weeks.

Everyone is hopeful that these virtual fairs will find enough real buyers to help sustain booksellers and collectors until they are ready to emerge from lock down.   If you are interested in doing a bit of virtual book hunting we list below 3 events already on out calendar. If there are others you know of please let me know.

Virtual Grand Palais Book Fair and ILAB Webinar

Many of you may not be aware that a “virtual Book Fair” has been organised to fill the void left by the postponement of this year’s Salon du Livre Rare, traditionally held this week at the Grand Palais.  The familiar physical fair will now be held in September, but a new virtual version will also now be held on the usual dates.  Some details will be found here:

https://ilab.org/articles/next-ilab-webinar-paris-virtual-book-fair-launched-week

In connection with the virtual book fair there will also be a pair of Zoom webinars (French and English) scheduled to begin at 1 pm (Paris time) on Wednesday. These will provide the launch for the virtual fair, which opens on Thursday at 5. A more complete brief on the focus of the webinars has not been provided – to me at least – but I suspect they will extend themselves beyond just the idea of virtual bookselling.

Links for joining the webinars will be found by following the link shown above.  I haven’t yet found the url for the virtual fair itself, but will post it here as soon as I can get it.

Here is where you will find the virtual book fair, starting on Thursday at 5pm (Paris time):

https://www.salondulivrerare.paris/

Zooming The Coronavirus & Book Trade Lockdown

Last week’s ILAB-organised webinar on COVID-19 And The Rare Book Trade was a fascinating event for bibliophiles in general and the rare book trade in particular. (See last week’s blog post for more about this). Seven prominent booksellers from seven countries shared insights into how they are coping  with lockdown. For myself, I found it noteworthy how similar the experiences were around the globe.  In was yet more testimony of how much  Amor Librorum Nos Unit.

I’m told that over 170 people plugged into Zoom to listen to the conversation live and ask a few questions after the remote panelists were done.  Fortunately for those who could not log into the live event a recording was also made.  It can be watched here:

ZOOM

I hope everyone else will get as much out of this as I did.