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A Data-Driven Blog Post: Challenging Online Book Fair Assumptions

A second viaLibri Virtual Rare Book Showcase was recently announced and is now set to open on February 20, 2025.  The results from our first showcase in December exceeded my modest expectations and left me encouraged to see what would happen if we tried another round.  Exhibitor registration has already begun. Several of our original exhibitors have already signed up for our next virtual event and others have promised to join them.

After first open registration back in September I did start to worry that two weeks before Christmas might not be the ideal time to launch an event like ours. None of us had noticed until too late that there were 5 other virtual book fairs that had also scheduled their events for the beginning of December. Even an ardent believer in online bookselling like myself could not help wondering if there  could really be that much demand, especially at a time of the year when our hoped-for customers have so many other obligations and activities to divert them from buying and selling old books.

Fortunately, my concerns in the end proved groundless.  Over 250 booksellers at half a dozen web sites, including our own, did eventually sign up as virtual exhibitors in one place or another.  Buyers did also come and their numbers were eagerly counted, for those who were interested, with software like Google Analytics.

But for me the metric of most interest is not the number of buyers and vendors but, more importantly, the total value of the items that are  bought and sold. More than just page views, those are numbers you can take to the bank.

I don’t usually measure the value of my books by counting them, and yet it is not uncommon for a bookseller to talk about his success or failure at a book fair not in terms of cost or value, but in terms of quantity instead.   This is natural, of course. At the end of a busy online fair however, I often  find myself scrolling through listings and stopping most often to examine the books that have already been sold. These are frequently the most interesting and they provide one of the great benefits  of online book buying in contrast  to “live” fairs.  At a live fair a sold item is removed from sight almost immediately. An online item stays visible to an interested bibliophile until the virtual event has closed.  The amount to be learned from this kind of bibliophilic exploration should not be ignored.

There is, however, a great frustration encountered here.  All the text and images of sold items remain visible until the end of the event, except for the prices.  If you see a sold book that you might also like to own yourself it is difficult, if not impossible, not to wonder how much it sold for. Serious booksellers (not to mention collectors) are inevitably interested in the state of the marketplace.  If so, how do they evaluate a marketplace where they are unable to know the prices of the things that have actually been sold?.  Auction houses actively report the prices of the things they sell (or fail to sell) and report a grand total when the sale is over. Regular live fair organisers like the ABA and PBFA  diligently collect show slips at the close of a fair and then publish the results  for all their members to see. The virtual fairs, on the other hand, usually keep that information all to themselves. This seems like a mistake to me.  It is the virtual fairs that suffer, understandably, from the greatest skepticism regarding how much buying and selling their sites actual produce.  This is where buyers would want the maximum transparency. Without it they would only expect uncertainty, if not complete skepticism.  Exhibitors  who sold nothing would naturally assume that everyone  else did the same.  On the other hand, the exhibitors who did have strong sales might prefer to keep it to themselves – but still being sure to exhibit again at the next opportunity.

For our own contribution to the cause of transparency I would begin by reporting  that total sales at our December virtual showcase added up to $61,610 with sold items priced from $20 to $17,500, including 8 with prices in 4 figures or more.  53 exhibitors sold a total of 58 items  while 33 exhibitors did not sell any of the items they had listed. (These numbers have been adjusted upwards to include a €7000 library purchase that was not formally approved until January.)

The median price for sold items was $395  while the mean price was $1030.  The listed prices had a median of $1200 and a mean of $4137.   Of the 22 exhibitors who reported sales, 13 sold multiple items, while 8 sold at least 4 or more. (These are the original calculations, published earlier).

In its entirety the overall profitability of the virtual showcase was, I think, satisfying. While gross sales came to a total of $61,598 the total participation cost for all 57 exhibitors was only $11,634.   That would mean that overall the average exhibitor’s virtual booth rent came to only 21% of what they sold.

There is one other interesting thing I discovered in our showcase statistics. Like everyone else, I took it for granted that all the heavy  buying at online book fairs takes place on the first day, usually Thursday, if not just the first 2 or 3 hours after things go live. Until we had our own data to look at I had no way to test this assumption. After the showcase was finished, however, I was able to look at some real numbers. What I found was that total sales on Thursday  were only $292 greater than those Friday, Saturday and Sunday combined. Thursday still lead the pack, but not by much.  I also wondered what our data could tell me about measuring visitor traffic as opposed to sales.  Here I found that over all 4 days we had a total of 3693 unique users.  As expected, the largest number came on Thursday  (1796). But after that, to my great surprise, Sunday came in second (975), Friday came in a close third (941) while Saturday dragged in far behind (466). And these were buyers, not just browsers. On Sunday they bought a total of 6 books at an average price of $224. I thought that was a relatively encouraging number, not so terribly far behind the average for all 4 days.

Once having noticed these unexpected results I wondered if it was my negative expectations about weekend sales that had always been wrong, or if there was something we did differently that might explain these results. Eventually a likely explanation came to mind.  Most book fairs, whether live or virtual, are stand alone events.  They are destinations for bibliophiles who already know about them and have planned to attend.  They will want to be there when doors open.  If they come on Sunday it will most likely be a return visit.  In the case of a virtual showcase, however,  there will also be collectors who know and regularly use the viaLibri search engine but may not be aware of our virtual events. They could be browsing or searching at any hour of the day on any day of the week, including Sundays. If they are already looking for books on vialibri.net they may easily decide to take a look at what is happening on vialibri.net/showcases since they will already be there.

As mentioned at the beginning, we are now planning another virtual showcase for Thursday, February 20 through Sunday, February 23. Exhibitor registration is open now. If you would like to be notified and receive further details please click one of the links below.

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

Ten Days To Go

It was almost 5 weeks ago that we announced the dates for our first viaLibri Virtual Showcase.  Antiquarian Booksellers from around the world were invited to display on our virtual shelves a selection from their best and most desirable recent acquisitions. 

Once that call went out the suspense began – at least for me.  Our platform was ready, but who would show up to present themselves on it? What would they bring to show? Would there be items to interest everyone? Would most of the sellers and buyers be familiar faces or new contacts? Would the best things be early or modern?  Expensive or cheap?  Or both?

The eager buyers would just have to wait to fia nd out. But as I thought about it I realised that there was already calculation I could generate that might satisfy some of my curiosity as well as the interest of collectors waiting for the Showcase to open.  For example, a query of our early numerical data tells me that the median year for the books uploaded so far is 1882. A scan of the items that have been loaded so far tends to confirm that figure and reassure me that the things I find in the showcase will be mostly antiquarian in nature. 

Statistics on prices can also be generated. For those we have 2 different figures  of possible interest.  The items that have been entered so far have a median price of $1203. That is probably  the most useful figure for us since it reduces the distortion from books with extreme prices. A “mean” or “average” price of $3534 can also be calculated. That number will seem impressive, but is largely a  reflection of the inclusion of a handful of very expensive items. 

I wouldn’t suggest for a moment  that these simplistic calculations are useful for anything other than the kind of idle speculation that easily entertains the likes of me. A knowledgeable bookman knows that the most valuable information to gather before the opening of a book fair – live or virtual –  is a list of who is exhibiting.  Use it to identify and locate the booksellers you know and buy from, then check out their offerings as soon as you can. Equally important, after that, is to identify the dealers you don’t know but whose specialties suggest that they may have the type of things you are looking for. 

To help you with this we have just added a list of exhibitors that you will be able to consult while waiting for the showcase to begin. You will find it in a long column on the right side of our showcase home page. If you go there I promise you will find many booksellers you know well along with many whose books you have never seen before.  I hope you will visit them all and find many wonderful things.

If you are a bookseller and think you might like to join them you still have 10 days to register and prepare your display. Over a thousand items have already been chosen to appear in the virtual showcase. If you want to add yours to them please let us know

https://www.vialibri.net/showcases/december-2024/

 

viaLibri now searching Getman’s Virtual Book Fairs

Attentive users may have noticed that we recently added another new source for items to be included when searching for books and ephemera on viaLibri. We were already searching 160 different sources, and are always looking for more, so in January we again added to the count and began including books and ephemera from Getman’s Virtual Book Fairs – the oldest, largest and best known virtual book fair platform.

I’m confident that our customers will be pleased to find these books now included in their results when they search for them manually.

This will be especially good news if you are among the many viaLibri users who let the Libribot automate searching for the items listed on their want lists.

As we all know, when a virtual book fair opens its imaginary doors there is always a virtual rush to find and claim all the choicest items first. That can be difficult if you have a variety of interests and wants, all of which need to be searched for separately, one after the other. With a Getman virtual fair, however, viaLibri can do the searching for you and then email you a notification when matches have been found. The Libribot does all the work for you before the doors open.

This will also be good news for the exhibitors. viaLibri has over 160,000 active wants. All of them will be matched against the items in each new Getman’s Virtual Book Fair and then continue to be included in active viaLibri searches until the fair is closed on Sunday.

The next opportunity for all this to happen will be the Greenwich Village Virtual Antiquarian Book and Ephemera Fair, open to everyone on Saturday February 24th at 12 noon ET.  A paid charity preview will also take place on Friday at 12 noon.

Artificial Intelligence Writes an Anthem for viaLibri.

For those who may be curious (or frightened) about how the development of artificial intelligence may find application in the world of antiquarian bookselling our CTO Alasdair North has asked ChatGPT to “Please write a song about viaLibri in the style of Guns and Roses.”  This is the result:

In the realm of knowledge, where words come alive,

There’s a place that stands tall, where bookworms thrive.

A digital haven for literary souls,

viaLibri’s the name, where the story unfolds.

(Pre-Chorus)

With a click of a button, the world’s at your feet,

A treasure trove of wisdom, where history’s complete.

In the shadows of libraries, where legends reside,

viaLibri’s the key, to the secrets they hide.

(Chorus)

viaLibri, take me on a journey, let my mind ignite,

Through the pages of the past, we’ll rock through the night.

Oh, viaLibri, where the written word will roam,

In this world of vintage books, we’ll find our way back home.

(Verse 2)

Lost in the whispers of forgotten tales,

viaLibri whispers back, lifting the veils.

From ancient manuscripts to modern first editions,

The rhythm of knowledge fuels our addictions.

(Bridge)

Oh, the shelves are lined with stories untold,

As we dance with the words, our hearts unfold.

viaLibri’s the rhythm, the soundtrack of our souls,

Guiding us through eras, where time unfolds.

(Chorus)

viaLibri, take me on a journey, let my mind ignite,

Through the pages of the past, we’ll rock through the night.

Oh, viaLibri, where the written word will roam,

In this world of vintage books, we’ll find our way back home.

(Guitar Solo)

(Verse 3)

Axl, Slash, and Duff, they’re the rock ‘n’ roll kings,

But viaLibri’s the stage where knowledge sings.

In the spotlight of wisdom, we’ll stand tall,

Together we’ll rock, one and all.

(Chorus)

viaLibri, take me on a journey, let my mind ignite,

Through the pages of the past, we’ll rock through the night.

Oh, viaLibri, where the written word will roam,

In this world of vintage books, we’ll find our way back home.

(Outro)

viaLibri, the rhythm of our quest,

With every turn of the page, we’re truly blessed.

Let the words guide us, as we march on,

viaLibri, forever, our knowledge anthem is born.

(It’s nice to feel appreciated, even if it’s only a machine)

Welcome Uniliber

We are pleased to announce another increase in the number of  bookselling databases we now search. Our latest addition is the Iberian website Uniliber.com, which currently offers 5.4 million items from 278 Spanish and Catalan speaking booksellers.

It was formed  in 2005 by the Asociación Profesional del Libro y Coleccionismo Antiguos with members from nearly all the Autonomous Communities of Spain.  It operates as a non-profit association owned and controlled exclusively by its members.

We are very happy that they have decided to join us and will now look forward to introducing them to the customers who have been searching for their offerings in the global marketplace for old and rare books.

 

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

viaLibri Beta Chapter Two

No, we haven’t finished yet.  It was more than three weeks ago that we first announced the public launch of the beta version of the redesigned viaLibri website, but it was still a work in progress.   The new site had already been under development for over 3 years and in that time had undergone a substantial update in both features and appearance. We knew that change is always dangerous when attempting to update a website that already had a loyal and contented following.  We also knew that over the years our regular users have always been generous with suggestions and  feedback.  Their observations had always been a valuable guide to our evolving design.  For those reasons we were eager to know how they would react to the changes we were preparing to show to them.  We were also eager to receive their feedback and make sure that the website we were trying to build for them would still be the tool they actually wanted to use.

We were thus very gratified by the initial response from our bookselling colleagues and other long time users.  We were happy to hear several of them describe the new design as “modern” (which they liked) and that they were pleased that we are at last mobile-friendly, a step which had been long overdue.

But the most useful responses were the ones we received from many of our long-standing and regular users, some of whom we had never heard from before, who waited for several days before sending their long and carefully described verdicts.  From these we learned many useful things.  The first thing we learned was how much our users liked viaLibri as it already was and how unhappy many of them were to see it change.  For some it was just a matter, readily acknowledged, of annoyance at needing to replace old habits with new.  But there were also some whose habits were natural and productive. We did not want to replace them with others that would not serve as well. Fortunately, in most cases, updates and redesigns were possible and we were able to incorporate them into the new version in ways that generally made the site better than it would otherwise have been.

One complaint that was especially frequent and strongly felt was a factor in many of the latest  changes we have made.  We now know that our customers very much prefer a compact site.  They don’t like to scroll and prefer a cramped page to a spacious one if that is the price for minimising  the  number of screens that must be scrolled.  And they don’t like empty white space for similar reasons.

This is just a sampling of some of the things we learned and have incorporated into this latest version of our redesign.  I don’t doubt that there will be even more helpful feedback following this latest release.  We look forward to receiving it, because we haven’t finished yet.

ViaLibri Redesign Goes Live

We are finally ready to launch our newly redesigned website. It’s time to celebrate at last.

We hope you will like our new look and feel, but appearance is probably among the least important changes we have made. Alasdair has added many useful and unique features that I’m sure will make your book hunting both easier and more productive. Among them we hope you will be pleased to discover the following:

  • Our site is now mobile friendly and easy to navigate across the full range of devices from smart phones to desktops.
  • We have added a sidebar to the left-hand column of the search results page that lets you examine and filter the data received in your search results. This provides a distribution breakdown for location; sources; first editions; signed, and dust jacketed copies; PODs; ISBNs and illustrated items. Use these to create refined and targeted results when initial results are too numerous to read to the end.
  • Searches can be limited to books shipped from specific countries only. Multiple countries can be selected, but if only a limited number of satisfactory results are returned from your home country you can try looking elsewhere guided by the totals shown in the sidebar .
  • Our popular library search tool has been updated to allow users to mark their most frequently used catalogues and automatically group them at the top of the list.
  • Browsers can limit their searches to illustrated items only.
  • Timed online book auctions are now also being included in searches.  At present this is limited to eBay and Catawiki, but we expect to be adding other auctions in the future. Libribot will start searching those auctions soon.
  • We can now block from all your search results any booksellers you may wish to exclude. Clicking on the round “stop” symbol next to the dealer’s name is all you need to do.  We are also often able to recognise when one bookseller is listing the same books using different names.  In that case we will consolidate the multiple listings under a single name, and if you choose to exclude one of those sellers then we will exclude them all.
  • On our home page we now have a simple search form (author, title, keyword) as well as our usual advanced form that includes over 20+ filtering options.
  • We now have a flexible selection tool that simplifies several bulk operations including Libribot and clipboard management, special list creation, social media sharing, search result pruning and social media sharing.

This is only a partial list of the new features and improvements that are being introduced today.  If you want to explore even further how to make the most of viaLibri we suggest that you try reading the lengthy search help pages that have also been updated to accompany our redesign.  You will find them here:

https://www.vialibri.net/content/search-help

And more exciting things are on the way. In the future we plan to continue adding new features as they are developed rather than waiting to group them together in a single major update, as we are doing today.  Going forward, we plan to always have some new feature or upgrade in the works.  The “beta” badge you see next to our logo reflects that. We will probably remove the badge before too long, but the condition it refers to should be perpetual. And for the substance of that future content we hope that the valuable suggestions and feedback we have always received from our users in the past will also be perpetual.  The newly redesigned website you see today has come from there.

“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.