One of the first consumer commodities to have really taken off on the Internet is books. The changes to the marketplace have certainly made it easier for me to purchase books for my flag book collection and my profession as a computer administrator and network engineer. Amid purchasing all those books over the last three years, I have come to find some useful sources. Some are well known. Some are more obscure. All are decent sources for a wide selection with little hassle.
This is by no means an attempt to list all dealers in books on the Internet. For that I would suggest that you look at BookWire's index of booksellers. They do a decent job at a thankless task, though you can find some inaccurate links and places where a dealer's plans were bigger than his follow-through. The American Booksellers Association maintains a directory of members which also includes a few dealers outside of the U.S. A list maintained for the benefit of acquisition librarians can be found at AcqWeb, though this list is a mix of publishers and retail book dealers.
Latbook can supply books from Argentina. They have a searchable catalog, and maintain a U.S. address to ease North American transactions.
In Australia I have no strong preference. I've happily dealt with both The Co-op Bookshop and Dymocks Booksellers.
The German Amazon.de has a page at www.amazon.at for Austrians.
Chapters.ca is the Internet presence of the Chapters, a national chain of book superstores.
Alapage is the most comprehensive on-line catalog of French books that I've found. They have a fully searchable catalog of books and music. I have found their service to be good too.
Amazon.de is the third of the bookstores in the Amazon collection; it lives up to the standards of the first two. I've also found Mail Order Kaiser to have a very flexible search engine and good service.
Lilli Zachariadou's Bookstore has proven most willing to sell anything in-print in Greece.
This dealer has recently installed a searchable catalog of Mexican publications. I've found Librerias Gandhi to be most congenial in dealing with e-mail requests also.
See international section.
I've found Livraria Arco-Iris in Lisbon to be a pleasure to purchase books from.
See international section.
See international section.
While I've purchased books from several general book dealers in the U.K., my favored one was Bookpages. It appears that Amazon.com agreed with me, as they purchased Bookpages, and as of October 1998, have renamed it Amazon.co.uk.
I've been most consistently happy with Amazon.com for some years now. There have been arguments as to what "the largest bookstore on the Internet" really means, and I'm glad that they no longer trumpet that they have all books in print, as they never even had all the books published in the U.S. (not that anyone does). Nonetheless, when I need a general book published in the U.S., Amazon.com is where I look first.
While Amazon.com sells computer books, sometimes a specialist dealer can be useful. When searching for the obscure works from smaller publishers or organizations, I tend to head for Fatbrain.com [formerly Computer Literacy]. When searching for the best price from the major publishers, I tend to head for Readme.Doc.
Bertelsmann AG, a large media company strong in the European and North American markets, is building a global bookselling presence. Not only did they make a major investment in Barnes & Noble.com in the U.S. market, but they have, as of the second half of 1999, opened 6 European operations on the Internet. Going under the name of BOL (which once stood for "BoulevardOnline", but now appears to stand for Bertelsmann Online), they sell books in France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and United Kingdom. I placed some orders in September 1999, and found that they were still working out a few web site bugs, but that orders were handled smoothly.
I use several multi-dealer search sites that have a primarily North American audience. This market, however, has even more blurred national borders than the new book market, and there are a large number of British, Australian, and New Zealander dealers to be found here. Consider them English language sites.
Advanced Book Exchange (ABE) gives you the ability to enter permanent want lists, where matches are e-mailed to you. ABE claims to be the "World's Largest Source of Out of Print Material", though they are not the only ones to have made that claim. When you use ABE, you purchase books directly from the dealer who holds the book.
A much newer service, Alibris, works on a different business model. When you order from them, they act as your agent in the purchase. The advantage is that you can make a single credit card purchase of a whole stack of books, without worrying how many dealers may actually have the books in their stock. Alibris also guarantees that the book is as described and that you are satisfied.This service is run by the people who ran Interloc, which is now defunct.
Bibliofind merely claims to be the largest bookselling site on the Web. I suppose it's all in how you count. Bibliocity makes no such claim, but is also worth searching. Not surprisingly, many dealers list their stock with more than one of these search sites.
A front-end site that will search most of the above sites all at once, but has some limitations on the results that it will return, is BookFinder.com, formerly known as MX BookFinder.
If you're interested in online auctions, check out eBay. I've found nice things there, but beware that many of the sellers are amateurs, and, while deliberate fraud is not a big problem, you have to watch out for sellers who are confused about what they actually have.
France Antiques provides a search engine for the catalogs of some dealers of the Syndicat National de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne (SLAM).
A cooperative book dealer site has formed in Germany, Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher. Unfortunately, conducting business here is not quite as easy as on the US analogs; some of the dealers don't correspond using e-mail and many of them are not prepared to take payment by credit card. I have, however, conducted several satisfactory purchases of books found here.
©2001 Jon Radel
Last Modified: 2001-05-22
