Product Review: AbeBooks Book Marketplace

About the company: AbeBooks makes it simple and safe to find and buy—or list and sell—new, used, rare, and out-of-print books online. Book buyers love the variety of over 70 million books offered by more than 13,000 booksellers. This great selection delivers value for all: readers find bestsellers, collectors find rare books, students find textbooks, and treasure hunters find books they’ve been seeking forever.

The big pitch: The best deals on new and used textbooks, free shipping, no minimum purchase.

Unless you've been living under a rock for the past dozen years, you've undoubtedly heard of Amazon.com and its ilk. Amazon grew from Jeff Bezos' garage into a multi-billion dollar operation during the internet bubble in the late 90's, and when others crashed and burned, Amazon stayed (barely) alive by virtue of its huge customer base.

Well, Amazon may be many things, but 'the only alternative' is not one of them. In the past few years several companies have waged war on the book giant's dominance, and as the market leaders diversify into toys and power tools, the true book sellers have been building their stock in trade from the ground up.

AbeBooks is one such company. A book marketplace where booksellers from around the world can hawk their wares of new, used, rare, out of print and textbooks, this company charges the sellers a set flat fee as a 'membership' each month, which allows them to see as much as they want, to whomever they want, without limitation. Contrast that to Amazon, where the marketplace sellers pay no subscription fee, but have set postage and handling fees that rule them out of doing any business with overseas buyers, and you begin to see where the big guy is going wrong.

To try AbeBooks out for ourselves, we did a search for books by Hunter S. Thompson, and not only found several rare titles from that author for a few dollars each, we actually found one book selling for as little as a dollar.

That's right - $1.

AbeBooks understands that Amazon's independent sellers have precious few checks on the quality of the product being sold, so they've developed a system where timewasters and fly-by-nighters just aren't likely to hang around. By charging a membership fee to sellers, you eliminate scammers and frauds, because it's much easier for them to ply their trade elsewhere - where they don't have to pay for the privilege.

Selling your textbooks? You can do that through AbeBooks, by virtue of a partnership with Buyback.com, where you simply enter the ISBN number of the book you want to sell, then their system gives you the price they're willing to pay. If you accept, you send the book in, they pay for the postage (within the US), and they'll send you a check.

Looking for a book club? AbeBooks has that too, with a free membership allowing you to talk about the books of the month online with other users.

Looking for a line on a cheap Harry Potter book? No problem - you can get as new copies of the latest Potter release for just $9.53, as of the time of writing. Looking for a first edition? Just click the 'first edition' link. Maybe you're after a signed copy? That's no problem either, with ten different signed copies available when we checked.

If boy wizards don't interest you, how about the book everybody is reading - the DaVinci Code - which you can buy in good condition for $4.67, or signed by the author, Dan Brown, for $125.00?
There are many things we like about AbeBooks, from the free shipping to the easy as pie search facility, to the tendency towards supplying not just cheap copies of books, but also rare copies, first editions, out of print texts and new and used school text books. This is a book community for people who love books, and who want more than just the latest copy of the South Beach Diet - they want a great read.

The Product Trends rating: Four and a half stars - Take a look for yourself, and see what the little guys in the book business are doing that puts Amazon to shame.

To try AbeBooks for yourself, click the image below:

posted by Oz @ 4:43 PM