Gift cards from chain bookstores might seem like a safe bet for the book lover on your gift list. But there are also a few indy options that remain convenient even if your gift recipient lives across the country.

The Book Sense Gift Card can be used at more than 300 U.S. bookstores. These stores are members of the ABA, a trade group for independent bookstores (largely dealers of new books or new/used hybrid shops). The gift card is available in denominations of $10-$100. You can verify that there are participating stores near your book lover using this search form. Cards can be purchased at stores or from many of their websites. Here’s a link to the gift card at Skylight Books’ site.

Gift certificate offerings are surprisingly absent from many of the indy-friendly book marketplace sites. Biblio.com is one of the few that has them. Gift certificates, delivered by email, are available starting at $5.00. Biblio.com is an online book marketplace with “over 5000 independent book sellers worldwide, listing over 50 million used, rare, out-of-print books, and hard-to-find books.”

Gift certificates can often be purchased, online or over the phone, from your book lover’s local bookshop. Also, many online book dealers, including Using Books, sell them.

Though I risk a deluge of comment spam by even leaving the comments open on an entry with “gift certificates” in the title, I’d love to hear of other indy gift certificate options for book lovers in the comments.

Comments(0)

There’s a recent post on Fine Books Blog about online booksellers requesting extra charges for shipping:

A bookseller copied me today on a complaint he sent to Abebooks. The gist of the problem was this. A customer ordered a book, and the dealer requested extra charges for shipping since the book was heavy. This happened over a weekend and the customer was out of email contact for a few days. Four days elapsed, and Abebooks cancelled the order automatically. The customer, thinking the book was not available, bought a copy from someone else.

I completely sympathize with the dealer’s anger at the lost sale. . . .

But I also think that the “extra charges” feature is plain bad business. We live in a world of one-click ordering online, and when book buyers place an order, they reasonably expect that they are going to get the book in the mail.

“Extra charges” is a messy solution to the equally messy question of how to set shipping rates. Online booksellers should always figure the extra cost of shipping a heavy book into its price. But the difference in postage cost between a one pound book and a four pound book is often much greater on international shipments and domestic Priority Mail shipments than on standard domestic shipments.

Listing services like AbeBooks could borrow an idea from Chrislands, a service that hosts online bookstores (including Using Books). The shipping matrix on Chrislands-hosted sites allows sellers to set a range of shipping rate levels for heavy and oversized items. (I haven’t taken advantage of this feature yet.)

Amazon Marketplace has a built in approach to the problem. Sellers can disallow international or Priority Mail orders on an item-by-item basis, which is more of a dodge than a solution. AbeBooks, Alibris, and Biblio have “request extra charges” features.

Recently announced on Amazon’s seller forums:

Over the next few weeks we will begin displaying the standard domestic shipping cost alongside the price of the item. Buyers will have the option to sort the display of listings either by item and shipping cost combined (this will be the default view) or by item price alone (this is how the page works today).

Very good. I’ll applaud all attempts to make shipping charges more transparent.

This affects Amazon’s non-media categories, where some sellers have more leeway in setting shipping rates, more than it does books, CDs, and movies. But Amazon does explicitly mention an aspect of this change that might be slightly controversial to their Marketplace sellers:

Products that are sold or fulfilled by Amazon may qualify for “Super Saver Shipping” or the “Prime” shipping subscription program; accordingly, these items will not display a shipping cost[.]

“Super Saver Shipping” is Amazon’s free shipping offer for orders of over $25. “Prime” is a program that allows customers to upgrade shipping on Amazon-filled orders for a flat annual fee. The affect of this is that listings for items that are shipped from Amazon’s warehouses will sometimes receive better placement even when the customer’s order won’t qualify for free shipping under the “Super Saver Shipping” program.

Comments(3)

I’ve been to enough Friends of the Library sales that I’m not usually surprised by the agressive tactics some dealers use to get an edge. But I was stunned by what I saw at the Friends of the Kirkland Public Library’s book sale on Saturday.

I arrived half an hour before the doors opened, earlier than I’d planned. There were a dozen people in line, most of them dealers and book scouts who I recognized. One group of four dealers were chatting together over the stacks of postal tubs they’d brought for hauling books.

A few minutes before opening, the sale’s organizer stepped out of the library (accompanied by a uniformed police officer) and explained the rules of the sale. Dealers should fill one box, he said, then pass it to one of the volunteers before starting on another box. He passed out some labels for people to use on their boxes and went back inside. The doors were opened in short order and everyone rushed into the small meeting room where the sale was being held. Then in a carefully organized fashion, the four dealers who I mentioned before each scooped up a boxload of books from the choice non-fiction tables and shouted, “Full box.” They handed off their filled boxes and, barely glancing at the spines, dumped the next pile of books into their next four boxes. “Full box!”

I’d say that at least two-thirds of the sale’s books were claimed within three minutes. It was entertaining.

After things had settled down, I wandered over to the fiction section — always more hit-and-miss than most non-fiction genres and therefore less appealing to the organized group — and picked out a few books. I noticed that most of the books were almost brand new — published in the last couple of years. This may be a reflection of this affluent suburb’s donor base. Most of the books were likely bought new from end of the aisle displays at Barnes and Noble, read once and donated. (This may be an unfair demographic generalization.)

One of the slash-and-burn dealers (who works at a respectable store in my neighborhood) came over to browse through the fiction. She immediately snipped at a commodity dealer who was hunkered down over his barcode scanner-enabled cell phone scanning ISBNs without glancing at book covers. “You’re the rudest person I’ve ever encountered at one of these book sales,” she said to him. “Me?” he asked, apparently bemused.

This was a bad scene. I paid for my little pile of books and headed back to my side of the lake and made it to the Edmonds Library Book Sale.

Comments(13)

The Seattle Antiquarian Book Fair was only a modest success for me financially. But it served as a confidence boost and reinforced notions I’ve had that I need to be better connected with the larger bookselling community.

My booth mate was Michael Kerstetter of Tall Tales. Michael has an impressive stock of signed first edition science fiction hardcovers. He is a true pro.

Jerry Shepard and Jay Chee were a steady source of conversation. I only chatted briefly with the guys at Modlitbooks, but I admired their eclectic, yet still coherent, collection.

The Old London Bookshop’s booth had some beautiful books and I hope to visit their shop sometime to look through their treasures and pick up some John Buchan.

I didn’t have a lot of time to browse, but would have liked to have a better look at the travel and exploration books at the booths on the back wall of the front room.

I also chatted with non-exhibiting booksellers Catherine O’Toole and the folks behind Brick Road Books, and was happy to have a good conversation with Jamie from Twice Sold Tales.

I owe thanks to the show’s organizers, my neighbor Louis Collins and my neighbor at the Fair David Gregor. I’ve heard good things about David Gregor’s bookselling seminar and hope to take it soon.

Comments(0)

In this article, The New York Times mines two studies that conclude the used book market strengthens new book sales:

When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there’s another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later.

(via The Millions)

Comments(0)

Anirvan Chatterjee follows up one attendee’s notes on a Book Expo America panel called “Toward Quantifying the Used Book Conundrum” with his thoughts on the attitude of some segments of the publishing industry toward the used book market:

“The words “Used Book Conundrum” remind me of historical terms like the “Chinese Question” or the “Jewish Question,” in the way that the concept is defined as being inherently problematic, so as to confirm the interests and prejudices of relatively powerful or entrenched interests.”

Comments(0)

I want to thank the Florida bookseller who anonymously referred a customer to me today to buy a copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Thanks for the business of course, but thank you also for the short conversation I had with the customer — an elderly woman who told a slightly off-colored story from her childhood about innocently trying to break the ice in awkward social circumstances by asking about a vocabulary word she’d learned from an Oscar Wilde book that she’d borrowed from her father’s library.

Comments(0)

The big splashy headline on the cover of the catalog that came with my order of shipping supplies yesterday made me snicker. It said, “A World of Tape at Your Fingertips”. But then I found myself consumed with comparing the small variations between the new supplies and the old ones, and I could sort of see their point. I guess I’m more of a box man than I am a tape man though.

I ship most of my orders in these rectangular flats with flaps that fold up and over a book into a custom-sized box. At Amazon they called them VDFs, which it turns out stands for “variable-depth folders”. In the past I’ve ordered locally through Northwest Shipping Room Supply. But they’re sort of pricey. This new shipment came from Uline. Uline only ships in increments of 100, but their prices are almost half of Northwest Shipping’s, even after shipping. Northwest Shipping might be able to price their’s a little lower if they offered a range of them in plain brown, instead of just the more expensive bleached cardboard.

Now that I’ve written a post about boxes, there’s nowhere to take this weblog but up.

Comments(5)

Using Books begins it’s first big advertising push today. I’ve invested $10 in a small ad on The Comics Curmudgeon. Okay, it’s not exactly the Super Bowl ad, but at least it will run for longer than thirty seconds.

Comments(2)