Rare Book Monthly
Articles - October - 2004 Issue
Searching the Old Book Sites:<br>Something Old, Something New
ZVAB has been selling a few books for American booksellers.
Another site that was mentioned is Choosebooks. This is not a bad option. I don't recall ever hearing a bad word about them from booksellers, and booksellers generally tend to be rather free with their comments. I've heard many, many unpleasantries said about the major sites.
Choosebooks offers a most reasonable pricing structure for the seller. It's 10% up to a certain monthly cap (not that high) based on number of items listed. For example, the cap is $25 for up to 10,000 books online. You will pay 10% until the commission reaches $25. To put it another way, you pay 10% of your first $250 of monthly sales. After that, the commission drops to 5%. And, that is a cap, not a minimum. If you sell nothing during the month, you pay nothing.
For buyers, Choosebooks offers a very good search. It provides not only standard search fields like author and title, but keyword searches, including a negative (exclusion) keyword search. You can also choose several options on how to have results displayed. They don't have a publication date field to search, which is about the only drawback I can find. Results are displayed in an easy to follow form.
What is the drawback to Choosebooks? For buyers, there aren't as many items offered. They say they have 8 million for sale, and while this is a decent number, it's still only 15%-20% of what the largest sites have. A buyer will get a reasonable enough number of responses on a more common title, but they get thin as books become rarer. For sellers, the drawback, from what I hear, is they don't generate a lot of sales. There are sellers who wish more of their volume came through the lower priced ChooseBooks, but so far, it appears that this site provides only a small drop in the bucket for the typical online bookseller.
ZVAB is generating a surprising amount of interest, particularly from American dealers, since it is a European site. For those wondering what ZVAB stands for, the answer is "Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher." You're probably still wondering what it stands for.
ZVAB was something of a surprise, at least for me. As someone with a distinctly American orientation, I was surprised by the number of English-language titles I found on this German site. They claim to have "over 10 million antiquarian books" from "over 1,600 antiquarian book dealers all over the world." Perhaps it's the word "antiquarian" that made this site more productive than I expected. Abebooks may have over 50 million books, but most are "used" books, not "antiquarian." If ZVAB has a greater concentration of true "antiquarian" books, then ZVAB may have more to offer those who seek such books than a 10 to 50 ratio might imply.
