Reading Copy

Our friends at Small Beer Press are experimenting with free e-books.

They are currently offering John Kessel’s The Baum Plan for Financial Independence: and Other Stories, along with Kelly Link’s collection Stranger Things Happen for free download.

As Publishers Weekly reports Kessel has high hopes for the endeavour after a friend, James Patrick Kelly, did something similar for his novella Burn. “The people who know and like my work—the ones who have anticipated the book’s publication and been looking forward to it—are pretty likely to buy a copy of the physical book anyway,” he says. “But allowing free downloading will, I hope, help the stories reach people who would never seek out the collection in a bookstore.

Nab your free copy at the Small Beer website

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Earlier today came the announcement that AbeBooks.com had acquired Chrislands. The co-founders of Chrislands, Lance Christen and Jaymes (aka Jim) Sorbel, had been at our offices in Victoria, BC, on Monday and Tuesday this week to conclude the agreement so I had a chance to spend time with them.

Based on the outskirts of Washington DC, Chrislands is a company that builds, hosts and maintains online bookstores. They’ve been in business since 2001 and currently host more than 1,000 online bookstores. Lance and Jim spotted an opportunity in the online bookselling market and have worked very hard to develop their business. They have an excellent reputation within the used bookselling community and lots of sellers appreciate their very personal customer support. AbeBooks was attracted to Chrislands because 1) they’re all about books and online bookselling 2) they’re successful 3) there is plenty of opportunity for growth.

Lance and Jim are going to continue to operate Chrislands as an independent business. They won’t be moving to Canada but AbeBooks is giving them access to our resources. Chrislands is already working closely with BookFinder.com - the book price comparison search engine bought by AbeBooks in 2005. I know Lance and Jim spent a lot of time mulling over the offer from AbeBooks, thinking about whether it was right for them. They also talked to the folks at BookFinder.com too. We’re glad to have them on board.

Popularity: 44% [?]

AbeBooks.co.uk has finished joint top of a online retailer customer satisfaction survey conducted by UK consumer protection magazine Which? Congratulations to the AbeBooks.co.uk team and the booksellers who keep satisfying our customers in the UK.

Popularity: 52% [?]

For sale - one gently used bookstore chain.

Popularity: 36% [?]

AbeBooks has just launched a Canadian homepage making it easier for all of our Canadian users to find books from their home and native land.

Of course, we were founded by Canadians, our headquarters are located in Victoria, BC, Canada’s National Post newspaper once described us as “The Granddaddy of Canadian E-commerce,” and the majority of our employees are Canadian, myself included.

On the homepage, we will feature Canadian authors , content, some of the local projects we sponsor like the Claremont Review, and of course help visitors to more easily buy books from the over 680 Canadian Booksellers.

Popularity: 38% [?]

The Guardian book section has a Valentine’s Day quiz - always worth 30 seconds. Match the literary characters to the lonely hearts ads.

Elsewhere, romps and romances from author Freya North whose latest novel, Pillow Talk, recently won the Romantic Novel of the Year award.

Popularity: 11% [?]

AbeBooks.com today launched a brand new online marketplace for used, rare and out-of-print books. It’s called Gojaba.com and it targets emerging markets for online used bookselling, which means places away from North America and Western Europe where most of our buyers and sellers are located. Sweden and Russia are the first two emerging markets to be served, and Brazil will be the third sometime later this year.

Gojaba.com is a no-frills, low-cost online marketplace for used books. You can see it’s very different to AbeBooks.com with virtually no site content - just book listings. We’re going to connect buyers with sellers and keep things very simple

Why Russia and Sweden? Both nations are ‘book countries’ and they have a tradition of publishing but also a rare book culture sustained by dealers and collectors. Online used bookselling exists in both nations but simply doesn’t happen on the ultra-competitive basis seen in North America where AbeBooks competes with a number of large well-funded and experienced rivals.

The beauty of Gojaba.com is that this website has been built to handle multiple alphabets, including Russia’s Cyrillic and also Mandarin, and many others too. To use a piece of Internet retailing jargon, Gojaba is scalable - that means we can easily roll out the site into new markets with vastly different alphabets and currencies without incurring heavy costs.

The Yellow Pages operates on a regional level and successfully connects consumers and businesses – Gojaba.com will do the same on the Internet.

In case you are wondering where the name comes from, we staged a company-wide contest and an employee in our Canadian headquarters came up with the word. We wanted a word not related to ‘book’ so it could be introduced to as many countries and languages as possible. We wanted a word that could be remembered easily and that wasn’t offensive, and that, of course, was available as an Internet domain. Gojaba is a fictional word. We hope it’s going to become very meaningful to booksellers and book-buyers in Sweden and Russia.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I wonder if someone will put a used Kindle for sale on AbeBooks.com? A slightly foxed true first edition that hasn’t been price-clipped. Not a book club edition.

In the meantime, who’d have thought there’d be so many books with Kindle in the title?

A Kindle of Kittens by Rummer Godden - a nice children’s book from 1978.

To Kindle A Soul: Ancinent Wisdom for Modern Parents and Teachers - pretty much what it says on the cover.

To Kindle The Yule Log: A Booklet of Verse - something for Christmas from 1899.

This one looks very interesting….Pen, Sword, Camisole: A Fable to Kindle a Hope - a book set in Brazil.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Yesterday, I logged on to bbc.co.uk/news to see what’s happening back home and I was confronted by an advert for a watch! Adverts on the BBC… oh, the horror! The BBC techies in London detected I was an overseas visitor and they are now slapping ads in front of us expats who are no longer paying the licence fee that funds the BBC.

To be honest, I am more angry about that than the news today that some UK libraries are going to be slipping advertising inserts into books. The Guardian is whining about it but an insert is easy to toss into the recycling bin and they make excellent fire lighting material. If some cases, commercial partners make ideal stablemates for certain books and authors - especially if the partnership has some humour to it.

Popularity: 11% [?]

I find it quite amusing that less than 1,800 readers actually went through the process of claiming a refund after the James Frey made-up memoir debacle over A Million Little Pieces. I wonder if Oprah was one of the 1,729? It would appear Random House’s lawyers did very well out of whole thing and, in the end, Frey did OK. He’s continued his career as an author and A Million Little Pieces keeps on selling.

Popularity: 11% [?]

AbeBooks.com is hosting its first ever Open House today, so if you are in Victoria, BC, and wondering what it takes to work for us then pop down. We’re at 655 Tyee by the Bay Street Bridge. Look for the big glass building with Bala Fitness on the ground floor - we’re on the fifth floor. The Open House runs from 12 noon to 2pm today (Friday 2 November).

Popularity: 28% [?]

Over at Fine Books they are discussing the concept of the bookstore-barbershop business combo. Not only do these bookstores have great names but business concept is second to none! You have nothing but time on your hands while getting your hair cut so why not browse some books. This gives my previous favourite joint business model, the pub/Laundromat, a serious run for its money.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Here is Cathy Waters’ third and final posting of the week - this time she explains why the book business is the best business in the world

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When I started my first bookstore, it was my first foray into the retail world. Honestly, my first job was as a short-order cook at a fast-food joint and when I finished school, I entered the business world. I was doing consulting work for the British Columbia government and on my lunch hour, I would go to the library. I was always reading books about businesses and how to start your own business. I had it in the back of mind to open a craft supply store so was looking for any book that may assist me in that endeavour. I came across a book on how to open a second-hand bookstore. I thought, “hmmm, this could be interesting.”

I took the book out of the library and read it cover to cover over the weekend. All I could think about was, ‘I can do this!’ The big challenge was getting Keith, my husband, on-side. I had to be sneaky. I told Keith I just read the most interesting business book and he should read it too. After he read it, he had that gleam in his eye I have come to know well. I had to pretend I wasn’t too interested, but when he said ‘We could do this’, I knew we were going to have some fun.

We got a map of Victoria and a pack of new highlighters. One colour was for libraries, one for new bookstores and one for second-hand bookstores. At the time, there were more than 30 second-hand bookstores in town. We wanted to find out where all of these businesses were in the city, so we could then identify where there was a need for our bookstore. Once the general location was settled, we got down to some serious book-buying. We put an ad in the paper, but our most effective method of book acquisition was by hitting the garage sales. Our kids were young, so each weekend, we would split up and take a car, a child and $100 each. We would then meet up later in the day when we ran out of money. It was a lot of fun opening our first bookstore.

Aside from a love of reading, I didn’t know that much about bookselling when I started. I took more and more books out of the library. I read anything I could get my hands on about book collecting and the value of books. Read articles about great collections and libraries. As well as all of the reading I was doing, I talked to my customers. I’ve never really been shy - I strike up conversations with perfect strangers while in lines. I asked my customers about what they liked to read and why. If a customer is a collector, I asked them why they collected, what they collected, how they collected. Through their knowledge, I became better at buying the books my customers wanted. More importantly, I became a better bookseller.

I have been able to share information my customers have provided with other customers. If a customer comes in asking for a particular author, and I don’t have any of their books in, I can make recommendations for another author they might like. One of the truly gratifying things about being a bookseller is helping my customers find the books they’re looking for. Or introducing them to a new author and have them come back looking for more books by the same author. I love it when customers come in to my bookstore with their list of books they’re looking for.

Right after I bought The Grafton Bookshop, I had a lady ask if she could look at the books in our first editions cabinet. I said, sure, go ahead. She opened the cabinet and reverently took out two books from the cabinet. She was crouched down with the books in her lap and she lovingly ran her hands over the covers. As she gingerly opened the cover of the book, she heaved a sigh. I had to help another customer, so I lost track of her for a little bit. I looked up later and she still had the two books hugged to her chest and she was wandering around the store browsing the other sections of the store. When she was ready, she came up to the cash desk and told me how much she loved the author and how his books had been such an impact on her. She had read all of his books in soft cover and never imagined she would ever see his earlier editions in hard cover, let alone first editions. She bought both of the books and she justified the purchases as a Christmas present to herself.

This is what I love about this business. I can hear the cynic commenting about the fact I made a sale and that I’m making money. The business side of me is right there with the cynic, but the booklover in me just loves the fact that I’ve brought a booklover together with the book they’ve been looking for.

Oh, in case you were wondering, the author was Robertson Davies.

Cathy

Popularity: 27% [?]

Today, Cathy Waters recalls how the founders of AbeBooks used the media to spread the word.

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One of the interesting things about starting a new Internet company, in a time before Google, Facebook and iTunes, was how to promote the website. I don’t mean promoting the website as in banging your own drum, but how to get buyers to come to the site so our booksellers could sell books.

It was an interesting dilemma because we didn’t have a lot of money to advertise. We put ads in book magazines when we could and even took out a three-line advertisement in the classifieds of the New York Times. Not a cheap proposition.

We brainstormed and determined that as we did not have a lot of money, we had to promote AbeBooks through word-of-mouth and by getting written up in the press. As much as we didn’t want to bang our own drum, that kind of publicity is what drove customers to our website. The interesting thing about AbeBooks, was that it was a great story. Two couples build this terrific website from scratch without investment. It’s the great American dream (although we’re Canadian). I remember when the Globe & Mail (one of Canada’s major newspapers) wrote an article on us. We were thrilled when we saw it come out on the front page of the business section. Pretty heady stuff! The local press in Victoria was always favourable to us. We live in a city where hi-tech is one of the largest employers, and the press loves touting the successes of our local companies that are competing, and making it, in the global marketplace. In a way, the principals of these hi-tech companies become minor celebrities.

When I purchased my store, The Grafton Bookshop three years ago, I hired a wonderful lady to handle marketing and promotion. The goal was to let the public know the store had changed hands, but that the store would continue to be the charming English-style bookshop that everyone loved. She contacted one of the business writers at our local paper, Victoria Times-Colonist. The reporter interviewed me and they sent a photographer around. I was expecting a small mention in the weekly business column. Imagine my shock when I picked up the paper the next morning to see my face splashed on the front page of the newspaper (albeit, below the fold, but still!). That kind of press brought so many people to my store.

When AbeBooks had its 10th anniversary last year, I was more than happy to help with the promotion of the big event. Again, there was a good story. It was about my coming full circle, from owning a bookstore, to creating AbeBooks, to going back to my roots as a bookseller. That kind of publicity has brought more people to my store, not just local people, but people from all over the world.

It’s very strange having my store as a tourist destination. I’ll be in my store and as people walk by, I have heard them comment about AbeBooks and that the lady who owns that store started AbeBooks.com. I didn’t really start Abe, it was a group effort. Even now, a year and a half after the birthday celebrations, I have tourists coming into the store and they tell me they read about my bookstore and they wanted to come in and thank me for starting AbeBooks. Again, it wasn’t just me. I am glad we started Abe. I believe in and support the staff’s continuing efforts to help book buyers find the books they’re looking for and to help booksellers sell their books.

I can’t really describe how odd it is to be recognized for what we did. Complete strangers (although, not for long) have asked me “Do you know what you’ve done?” Well, I like to think it was a good thing.

Cathy

Popularity: 38% [?]

Today, we have our first guest post from Cathy Waters - one of the AbeBooks’ founders

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A lot of people ask me what I’ve done since we sold our interest in AbeBooks. Well, Keith, my husband, and I decided we would take a year off, do some travelling, then decide what we wanted to do for the rest of our lives. We got some travelling done, but with three older teenagers at home, it was a little stressful. Do you remember being a teenager and having your parents gone for a weekend? Well, try that for a few weeks at a time. You can understand our predicament.

I didn’t quite make it to a year. I think the one think having AbeBooks taught me was that I’m pretty much a workaholic. Sad, but true. I got bored. I started looking for a business to buy. I checked out Internet cafes, candy shops, and craft shops. When I found there was a bookstore for sale, I stepped waaaay back. I wasn’t sure I wanted to get into the book business again. I thought long and hard about it and almost bought the store, sight unseen. Keith, my voice of reason, told me I couldn’t do that. I knew the owner and knew it would be a quality shop, then I went to see the store. I fell in love and absolutely had to have it. I even kept the name of the store because, to me, it personified the look and feel of the store. The Grafton Bookshop. The name reminds me of an old English bookshop and that’s exactly what the store is.

The main floor of the store is around 900 square feet with 12 foot ceilings and dark oak floor to ceiling bookcases with ladders on rollers around the shop. There are fantastic antique cabinets with lovely leather books in them. There are several antique lamps situated around the store and a very quirky “monkey” lamp on the glass display cabinet. The monkey lamp always reminds me of Robinson Crusoe. We even have a pith helmet on the wall. Whenever someone asks us where our travel section is, we point them in the direction of the pith helmet.

The lower floor of the store is our nerve centre. This is where we take the new books that have come in to the store. We clean them, make minor repairs, ‘Brodart’ the dust jackets and price and inventory them. It is also our main shipping hub (a corner, really). We ship our books all around the world and we get such a thrill with where our books find new homes.

Keith decided being retired fit him to a tee. This is what I’ve chosen to do for the rest of my life. My name is Cathy and I am a bookseller, by profession and by passion.

Cathy

Popularity: 27% [?]