Online
Bookselling - where to find the books of UK
booksellers on the internet. Internet
sales have become a vital source of income for many of the dealers we meet in
their bookshops and at book
fairs. Buying on the internet from dealers like them helps to maintain their
invaluable physical presence. Whilst
an increasing number of bookdealers have their own websites, the majority still
rely on the multi-dealer
online databases. These
come in two basic flavours -- the corporate 3As (ABE,
Albris and Amazon)
and the other, independent sites. You can read a detailed comparison here. If
you want to try an independent British site, you have a number of choices. Biblion
(relaunched in July 2006 and now powered by Biblio) has 254 (n/a)* UK sellers
listed. Booksatpbfa
is limited to the stock of PBFA
members, of which there are currently 226 (+131)* listing books
for sale. ibooknet is
a co-op with 42 (-3)* members offering a wide variety of books. Membership of
the largest UK based bookselling database, UKBookWorld,
is restricted to British dealers and around 2.5 million titles are being offered
by the 460 (+110)* dealers there. Of
the other European bookselling databases, AntiQbook
in the Netherlands lists 181 (+116)*, and German based ChooseBooks
(ZVAB) has 221 (n/a)*.
Internationally,
Biblio.com
is American owned and probably the largest of the independents,
claiming some 50 million used, rare and out-of-print books listed.
Currently the site is home to 645 (+205)* British bookdealers. You
can find most of the UK's ABA
members on the ILAB-LILA
site.
WBM
(World Book Market) is a small but growing international co-operative
which supplys software tools to online booksellers, as well running
a selling site with unique features.
Like
it or not, ABE is still
the place to find the majority of British sellers, with a wopping 2163 (+339)*
giving UK addresses. Of course, many of these are hobbyist sellers, so the site
is awash with poorly described and sometimes defective books. You may also find
it difficult to contact the book's seller and you might have to pay 10% more for
the same book (plus higher postage) than if you ordered it through an independent
site. Notes.
(#)* change since 04.02.06. Updated 21.08.07. No figures are available for UK
based sellers on Alibris or Amazon. Figures for Biblio, Biblion and UKBookWorld
supplied by the sites, others calculated from dealers listed. | 
