We online booksellers need to empower ourselves.

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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

12 thoughts on “We online booksellers need to empower ourselves.”

  2. Not yet. As for my own empowerment I find I’m doing well enough with my own website and my memberships with the Canadian Booksellers Asso. as well as the World Book Market (great peer group). I may look at the IOBA in the future and encourage folks to check out their site, thanks for the link.

  3. Michael,
    We’re not trying to slide in a little promo for the World Book Market just yet. At this point we have selected a small group to test our software and systems for a little while before making them available to all sellers. Things look promising but we still have a few improvements to make. Once we are ready to go full tilt you’ll see plenty of blatant plugging here. I love you blog by they way. If you ever want to put up a guest posting here you are more than welcome to do so.

  4. Long live the independents! Good stuff Guy.

    Significant issue to say the least and one that I have been talking about for some time over at Book Patrol.

    What seems a little strange to me here is why not come right out and plug your project, The World Book Market? Isn’t the World Book Market offering many of these great options for the individual bookseller like links to individual dealer websites, pooled inventory etc.
    It just seems like the perfect opportunity to get the word out.

  5. Could I have your opinion about the usefulness of sites like Gather.com as venues for book promotion and sales? For instance, I’ll be hosting a live chat there for an author soon and this helps get people to read more and buy more books. I am not sure if it segues into more interest in rare books but I sure wish you’d join (free) and put in a plug for independent booksellers. Write an article. Anyone can.

    There is a booksellers group there, by the way.

  6. The TomFolio people have been pushing the same basic idea of ‘independence for online booksellers’ as Mr. Weller for years now. So this controversy is certainly nothing New.

    TomFolio folks were ‘pioneers’ and for their trouble have taken a lot of abuse and had only a small number of joiners. Let’s give their site and their people some credit also.

  7. Good Point Chris.
    If anybody from Tom Folio would like to put up a post on what they can offer the bookseller they are more than welcome to do so. Just contact me via the email shown on the side.

  8. Pingback: A word or two about Tom Folio : Bookshop Blog...to help you be a better bookseller

  9. Well stated. We at Bibliopolis sign on to your manifesto. Perhaps we should organize a round table discussion with the very limited scope of “tools of empowerment”. Maybe an online “web round table” of some sort or perhaps at some book event. Perhaps the Colorado Seminars or a Book Fair. I think it is long overdue that we get a thinktank mentality going.

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