![]() Bookgilt is a good meta-search site for antiquarian and rare books. For non-Amazon alternatives to Bookfinder, viaLibri is a slick search tool that I only recently discovered, although it’s not quite as comprehensive as Bookfinder. is another marketplace, serving mostly collectors. For a non-Amazon version of AbeBooks you might try Alibris, founded by Martin Manley in California in 1997 (it’s been passed around to a range of venture capitalists and holding companies and is now in the hands of private investors). These days a lot of people want to shop for books anywhere but Amazon or its subsidiaries. That prompted some 600 booksellers in twenty-seven other nations (a third of AbeBooks’ members) to withdraw their 3.5-million books from AbeBooks. Run by tech types, Amazon’s solution was to say ‘fuck Russia, South Korea, Hungary, and the Czech Republic.’ Bookshops in those countries were told they were no longer welcome on AbeBooks. In 2018, Amazon installed on AbeBooks a new payment service provider which didn’t work in several countries, including Russia, South Korea, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. Amazon’s ownership of the sites has been rocky. Eight years after that, Amazon put its own person in charge of Abebooks and Bookfinder, although both are still run out of Victoria. In 2008, Amazon bought both AbeBooks and Bookfinder, among other sites, from Hubert Burda. Not long after, AbeBooks, under its new ownership, acquired Bookfinder. AbeBooks, in short, is a retail business while Bookfinder is a search tool.ĪbeBooks sold out in turn to a German company, Hubert Burda Media, in 2004. AbeBooks also sells the books it represents on other platforms, including eBay, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon. What differentiates it from Bookfinder is that you make your purchase right on the AbeBooks site. It is a digital marketplace that allows you to search the stock of a wide variety of established retailers. Chatterjee sold out to AbeBooks in 2005.ĪbeBooks is a Canadian tech success story, originally operated out of Victoria by Rick & Vivian Pura and Keith & Cathy Waters. You compare editions and prices, make your choice, and click through to the bookseller’s site to finalize your purchase.īookfinder was launched by a Berkeley student named Anirvan Chatterjee in 1997, just a couple of years after Amazon was born. Type in a title and it will cough up an array of purchasing options: new, used, good condition, poor condition, former library copy, first edition, signed, etc. ![]() is a meta-search portal that allows book shoppers to scan the inventories of 100,000 booksellers at once. The internet also allowed used bookstores to put their wares online, and came along to organize their inventories. I make the visits (none in the past two years) in part out of a sense of nostalgia for the waning era of brick-and-mortar, and also because well-curated shops often suggest books I might otherwise overlook. in Manhattan (below, the world’s most perfect small bookstore), Politics & Prose in DC, City Lights in San Francisco, The Last Bookstore in LA (further below), to name a few. I still go to my favorite bookstores when I travel-Daunt’s in London (top of page), Prairie Lights in Iowa City, Three Lives & Co. Amazon had every new title one could want. Then came the internet and suddenly the whole concept of book scarcity blew up. There were always new acquisitions, whether I was traveling or not. I’d rummage through them, once or twice a decade, and throw out the ones that no longer interested me to make room for new acquisitions. Over the years, I accumulated tens of thousands of books. (I was never disciplined enough to be a collector I only bought for my own use). It was especially the fear of blowing that one chance of acquiring something special that turned me into a book hoarder. There was a genuine excitement about entering each store: you never knew what you were going to find, and you were acutely aware that at any moment you might see something you’d never seen before or something you might never see again. Before going to any new town, I’d make a list of new and used bookstores and hit the best of them during my stay. Back in the late twentieth century, I used to build my vacations around book searches.
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