Overheard at ABE.com  another insightful comment from OZ’s Guy Weller.

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We online booksellers need to empower ourselves.

The larger bookselling sites – Amazon, eBay, ABE and even some of the smaller sites – are dictating far too much to us as to how we should fashion our listings, and how we should list on their sites.

This we need to turn around, in our favour.

We cannot, of course, dictate to the larger sites as to how they should carry our listings, nor even to the relatively minor sites, like ABE, or even the tinier ones.

But we can, and must, empower ourselves as independent on-line booksellers.

We must build our own private websites, or our Chrislands ones, into as powerful a selling tool as we can. Real work is needed here, for many of us.

We must seek out independent, smaller listing sites, and throw our support behind them, so as to enlarge the overall online selling picture, and guard against any hegemony in this regard.

We must particularly seek out those sites (Antiqubook, Booksandcollectibles.com.au, et. al.) which offer us direct links to our private websites, and which provide a commission-free selling platform (in exchange for a simple annual fee).

If we do not, as a group, actively do this, I am afraid we are likely to find ourselves doomed as an industry segment, small chip of a one though we might currently be.

Lazily depending upon Amazon, Abe or any other mix of the larger listing sites to deliver our bacon in unending fashion is NOT, I would propose, a very wise business choice for us.

For a whole stack of reasons.

I think the future of online bookselling is rich and sound, but ONLY if we (the constituent listers at all these larger sites) act decisively and powerfully to protect our own business interests.

We actually hold the power instruments in the game. We are (collectively) more powerful than Amazon, even, with all its $billions of “turnover”.

Let us make sure we exercise these instruments fairly aggressively, in our own interest.

Cheers,

Guy Weller (Mr Pickwick)

Member of www.worldbookmarket.com