In June we identified 20 auction houses that we expected to find with a ranking in the top 500,000. We evaluated these sites on June 27th and again on July 20th and 21st. Generally the ratings in July declined, a predictable outcome given that the summer months are more associated with siestas and beach reading than auctions. Of the 17 that registered a ranking in June, 11 had lower rankings in July. This also implies that, with the coming of fall, auction rankings will rise again. We'll see. In the meantime Freeman’s (of Philadelphia) registered a big jump, moving from 411,830 to 370,160. Other houses whose rankings rose were Sotheby's, Christies, Doyle, and Eldred's. eBay, the largest site, by far, in this category held its place at number 8 among all websites, kind of like Mighty Joe Young holding onto the top of the Empire State Building while Sotheby’s was this month's Fay Wray. None of those advancing are pure book auctions and most of these traffic gains are attributable to the other types of material they were selling.

Okay, it is now official. People buy fewer books in the summer than in the winter. A look at the rankings of book sellers shows that virtually all the players, big and small, lost some standing in the rankings over the past month. Alapage and ABE were the exceptions and their gains were small but impressive because everyone else was losing ground. We also found two more sites to add: Bauman Books and Oak Knoll who no doubt are working hard to achieve improving ratings. No one makes these lists by accident. All who play this game do so because they know that the future of books will include a substantial, if not dominant, internet component.

In the book site search engine category both Bookfinder and Add-All lost some ground while Usedbooksearch and Abooksearch gained some. These search engines are particularly crucial to the more than twenty smaller web sites that host booksellers, many of whom are dependent on these search engines for their traffic. For these lesser flowers the search engines are the bees.

In the final category, institutions, associations and paid sites, you can immediately see that the summer months are slower because even the Library of Congress lost ground falling from 920 to 1,075. I guess school is out. Right across the board the rated informational sites gave up some ground. Americana Exchange alone gained a little. Click on “next page” for a July comparison to the June ratings.