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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
The Grolier Club recently hosted an important bibliographic exhibition entitled “Five Hundred Years of Women’s Work: The Lisa Unger Baskin Collection.” The collection focuses on early and rare books demonstrating the under-appreciated activities of working women in all areas and periods. Baskin gave a fascinating talk on her collection which can be viewed using the link above. It is well worth the time.
While the exhibition was taking place Baskin also lead several walking tours of 170 selected books from her collection that were on display. Those tours have now ended, but we can thank the Grolier club for also recording a video of one of them and making it available to all of us via Vimeo.
We can also highly recommend the illustrated catalogue that was published to accompany the exhibition, which had been held previously at its home in the David M. Rubenstein Library at Duke University. You can buy it here:
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.
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.
Provenance Meets Big Data – Do they have a future together? by Jim Hinck from The Grolier Club on Vimeo.
If you regret having missed last month’s “Who Owned This?” symposium at the Grolier Club you can now see the video version that has just been published to Vimeo.
A link to my own contribution is shown above while the full program can be accessed here:
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.
Regular eBay buyers (and we have learned that there are many of them) should be happy to hear that we have just expanded our coverage to include eBay sellers in Australia, Canada and Ireland. This will bring another 3 million books to the roughly 35 million eBay titles we brought online in July when we first began searching eBay.com (U.S.) and eBay.co.uk (U.K.).
Today’s expansion makes it possible to search in one place all 5 anglophone eBay sites. We know of no place else where that can be done. (Not to mention the other two dozen international sites we search.).
But it won’t end here. While our English-speaking customers are now fully served, we still have multiple European eBay sites that also beg to be searched. We plan to get those included as soon as possible.
And don’t forget that searching with viaLibri puts important tools and filters into your hands that are unavailable when searching on eBay itself. For example: do you sometimes search for early items only to be annoyed by a flood of modern reprints that you must endlessly scroll through instead. Click “No ISBNs” and “No PODs” and viaLibri will help you cull what you don’t really want. Or you can filter your results by the exact date range you want. Or sort by publication year. Interested only in books on Chicago from before 1872? Good luck trying that directly on eBay.
This should also be good news for viaLibri users who have recorded their permanent wants in our Wants Manager: Libribot will now also search daily for listings from the the newly added eBay sites. To take advantage you don’t have to do anything. Your latest matches will be emailed to you automatically.
But if your desiderata have not yet been added to your Wants Manager then this would be a great time to do so. Those 3 million new items mentioned above are now about to be matched against want lists for the very first time.
Get ’em while they’re hot.
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.
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.