Dear ,

RE: IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING RESELLER PROGRAMS

This afternoon Amazon confirmed to us that as part of their efforts for improving the customer experience, they are officially moving away from what we call an “aggregator” business model. That means they will no longer be allowing sites like ours (which list multiple booksellers under one account) to sell on their website, since every seller must be responsible for their own account. We expect the closure to happen sometime in October.

While we understand that this will be disappointing news for many of you, as it is for us, we believe that in many ways this is also a new opportunity for us all. Abebooks has grown rapidly over the years, and the reseller programs have become increasingly complex to maintain while at the same time less important to our overall growth. It is increasingly important for us to focus our resources internally, and so we have decided that the time has come to say good-bye to Half.com as well.

We recognize that our strength is in our booksellers, and in the vast inventory of unique, quality books that you list with us that are not available everywhere else. Moving away from a reseller model that actively encourages you to provide your unique books to our competition can further secure our position as the world’s largest online marketplace for books, but only if we are able to improve our own sites to meet and exceed the expectations of our customers. We are committed to doing this.

I had hoped to be able to make this announcement this morning, in time for our Roundtable discussion in the Bookseller Community Forums, and I’m sorry we weren’t able to do so. If you didn’t have a chance to participate in the Roundtable, please try and take a moment to review the questions and answers at your leisure: http://forums.abebooks.com/n/mb/listsf.asp?webtag=abecomeng&ctx=1048576

It was a very productive discussion focused primarily on our recent product launch, and we hope that you will find the information helpful.

Sincerely,

Hannes

Hannes Blum
President & CEO
Abebooks, Inc.