I tend to think of AbeBooks.com as one of those common Internet resources that everyone knows about, like Google or Wikipedia. But just last week I learned that a good friend of mine, who buys books by the truckload (or maybe it just seems like it), didn’t know about it.
AbeBooks (American Book Exchange) is a Canadian company that provides a front end for a worldwide network of thousands of bookstores. They’ve got a search engine on their front page where you can query by title, author, keyword, and/or ISBN. You get back a list of books being sold by the various stores. Advances search lets you specify binding, first edition, signed copy, etc.
How does this beat Amazon.com, or using your local bookstore? For new books, it doesn’t really. For used books, on the other hand, it’s great. For example, consider Eric Frank Russell’s The Great Explosion, which Jo Walton recently described as “practically unfindable.” AbeBooks lists 89 copies for sale, all in one list, from a beat-up $1 paperback to a $350 first UK edition. (Some of those books may have already been sold by the time you read this.)
When I do the same search on Amazon, my list is much less orderly. It’s all broken up by editions, and I’ve got to click each one (twice!) to check out the individual used book listings. The cheapest copy I can find is $1.70.
Amazon also slaps a surcharge on top of the price. A search on AbeBooks for The Codex Seraphinianus finds me a copy for sale at Beech Leaves Books in Los Angeles for $375. Amazon lists what appears to be the very same book from the same vendor, but for $500. [Update: Booksellerbill sets me straight in the comments.]
I stopped using them when they decided to send email about their forthcoming IPO to all of their customers.
Spam me once, and you have to work real hard to get my trust back. They haven’t.
I love ABE! I’ve been able to find all sorts of books through them that I coulnd’t find elsewhere; like Shane Stevens’ WAY UPTOWN IN ANOTHER WORLD and Patricia Geary’s STRANGE TOYS.
I used their ‘Want’ function to wait for a copy of the Stevens book that was in my price range.
I work in a used bookstore that sells via several online services, including ABE Books and Amazon. Amazon doesn’t add any sort of surcharge.
The seller may have it on Amazon at a higher price for any number of reasons: Amazon charges seller a higher commission than ABE; Amazon reimburses sellers a fixed price for shipping and does not allow you to modify it, while ABE lets you set a variety of shipping rates, and lets you adjust shipping charges if necessary (for example, with a heavy book).
In my experience, many of our customers have one used bookselling site they cling to, even though they can often find better deals on the same book through other sites.
Addall (used.addall.com) is a nice meta-engine for finding used books. You enter the appropriate information and it searches all the major used bookselling websites (ABE, Amazon, Antiqbook, Biblio, Half.com, ILAB, Alibris, and several others).
Second the plug for addall.com. It allows users to set the shipping destination & currency.
That way, you get the final total cost of landing the item of interest at your doorstep (in your own currency), without having to go through the checkout process. Very handy when buying from another country.
Rant – Sadly there is no utopia.
On the one hand I’m glad to be able to just buy a book I particularly want at the moment I want it and be done with it.
On the other hand I hate to be at Goodwill say on a half-price day and queued up behind any number of bookscouts with their pocket electronics matching the stock on the shelf to the market on the web.
So on the gripping hand I get to buy the books I know I want but I don’t get to buy the books I don’t know I want.
Fortunately I already have many books I’ve been meaning to read real soon now that have passed from remaindered to vintage in the wide world and so are grabbed before I could buy them used today.
In the same vein as addall is bookfinder.com. Addall and bookfinder hit a lot of the same sites (including abebooks and alibris), though they each get a few the other is missing, so it can be worth trying both.
My three stages of ABE (so far):
1. Ignorance. I had never heard of it.
2. Proselytization. I told everyone I knew about the wonder that is ABEbooks!
3. Assumptions. Everybody knows about ABEbooks by now, right?
So yes, it’s a great site! But I feel like by now I must have told the world about it, so I don’t think of it unless someone mentions they’re having a hard time finding a book (and sometimes not even then).
Score! I was one of those that hadn’t heard of the service before, and just picked up some missing books in Eric Flint & David Drake’s mostly sold out alternate history Belisarius Saga that were a better deal than through Amazon’s used books.
Thanks for the tip.
ABE stands for “Advanced Book Exchange” not “American Book Exchange.”
Another rec for bookfinder.com here. (I’ve used ABE as well.)
The very first Internet purchase I made was via bookfinder.com. A long time ago I bought a 25-volume set of Alexandre Dumas’ works at a library sale.
24 volumes, actually; one book was missing. The missing book was, of course, the second half of a two-volume novel (THE TWO DIANAS). And so for years I figured that the odds of my stumbling across a separate copy of that volume were astronomical.
Then I heard about bookfinder, gave it a try, and lo and behold, a bookseller in Texas had a copy of that missing volume. Had it in my hands a week later. Yee hah!
For all the words spent enthusing about the Net’s social capabilities (blogs, MySpace, etc), I really appreciate most that it’s enabled the consolidation of titanic amounts of information and data, and enabled the public to use those databases with a fair amount of ease.
isbn.nu is my favorite all-store search. Its interface is less cluttered than addall and bookfinder, and you can get RSS feeds for the search results so that you’re alerted when a new listing is added.
I’ve been using alibris for years now. I got really interested in Edgar Rice Burroughs back in… middle school(?) I think. I later used sites like this to snatch up missing pieces of the Mars and Venus books among others.
Still, nothing compares to wandering around inside an actual bookstore and stumbling across a book you’ve wanted for ages. Having to hunt is part of the fun, if you ask me.
I realize this is at best tangential to your point, but anyone looking for Codex Seraphinianus would probably prefer to buy the 2006 reprint from Rizzoli – I think it’s E90 or so, so even with the horrible conversion rate and shipping, a lot less than the old American edition.
The ABE/Amazon distinction may now be moot, as ABE has just announced it is being acquired by Amazon (although it will allegedly remain its own entity).
Anyone who buys lots of books needs to check out BookBurro, it is an addon for Firefox that appears when it detects you are on a website with books. It makes it very easy to compare prices and it will tell you if your local library has the book. I have gotten in the habit of finding a book on Amazon (where I can read reviews) then using bookburro to get it from the library or buy a used copy from Abebooks. It is an amazing tool, I could never go back to Internet Explorer because I would lose bookburro :)
http://bookburro.org/
I have been saddened now by the current price of my favorite book as a child — 58 for an iffy copy, 100+ for better condition, original edition (what I had).
I have a passing interest in acquiring some of the books I liked as a teen, and I’ve actually found out that Amazon does a better job of finding low-priced copies than abe.books. “Mind-call” for example was $7.00 at Amazon, and $35.00 at abe.
I wonder if abe self-selects for more expensive volumes?
Some online prices for books are amazing. When I was trying to get more information on a big weapons encyclopedia I’d picked up for £4.50, I found at least one seller advertising it at £100+.
I don’t think Abe self-select for more expensive books; I’ve found many good deals on American books (I’m in the UK, and many of my favourite authors aren’t published here).
Neither Amazon nor ABE “finds” books as such – they are both places where sellers can list books for sale. ABE runs more to traditional used-book dealers than Amazon, so the prices there can be somewhat higher.
Check out Bookase – price comparison of books
I am looking for a book I believe was named “The Good Earth”, it was about a man that was hiking in the mountains and was bitten by a snake. While he was recovering from the bite most of the world died from some sort of sickness. The rest of the story involves his efforts to restore civilization. I believe it was set in the San Francisco area or somewhere else in California.
#21 – Earth Abides