Tag: Libribot

viaLibri Virtual Showcase. Sign up now

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. 

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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

 

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.

More Good News For eBay Fans

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.