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You want to get a special book for a special person. Say, a copy of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, which includes a chapter on President Andrew Johnson's 1868 impeachment, for a fence-sitting member of Congress.
You could buy a garden-variety reprint at your local bookstore or at a big online new-book outlet. But you want to make a deep impression -- maybe by sending an autographed copy.
That means leaving the mall and shopping at a rare-book dealer.
Using one of the several online services listing rare, out-of-print, and used books, you track down your quarry. Among all the motley copies of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize winner that turn up in your search, you find this: In Omaha, Nebraska, a dealer is offering a copy the late president signed during a 1960 campaign trip through the Cornhusker State. The seller notes, "white of dust jacket shows some soil; minor edge wear." Price: US$1,500.
The e-commerce boom is radically changing the trade in out-of-print books. The newest arrival on the scene: San Francisco Bay Area-based Alibris, a 20-person company attempting to extend the laser-efficient customer-service model of Amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com to the dusty, idiosyncratic world of antiquarian bookselling.
Alibris, which launched last month with an undisclosed amount of angel and venture-capital funding, is part startup, part reincarnation. It grew out of one of the earliest online rare-book lists, Interloc.
Renamed, the company is setting itself up as a do-all middleman: It handles online orders, offers secure purchases, and allows customers to shop with a "bookbag" (instead of "shopping cart") order list. It also promises to adopt the trappings of a book-lovers' community: events calendars, discussion groups, and features on the book-collecting life.
Alibris president Marty Manley says that like those sites -- the leaders in an online industry one forecast says will bring in $600 million this year and $1.14 billion next year in a US book market of about $13 billion -- service is the difference in a very crowded bazaar. "A lot of people are selling books on the Internet -- you do a Yahoo search and you come up with 10,000 or something," Manley said. "I'm not sure they're all real. But whoever can deliver the best service and the best products wins."
The company, along with 40,000 other booksellers, is affiliated with Amazon.com, but Manly refused to comment on the affiliation or on speculations that Alibris has plans for an IPO.
Manley took an unbookish route to his current job. He declined to detail his professional background, describing himself as "a former senior official in the Clinton administration" (he was, in fact, assistant secretary of Labor for the American Workplace) and as a former health-care executive (he worked through mid-1997 for Kaiser-Permanente).
The guts of Alibris' service marks a sharp turn away from the way used-book stores have been selling online.
The principal function of established used-book clearinghouses like Advanced Book Exchange, based in British Columbia, and Bookfinder, started as a class project two years ago by a student at University of California at Berkeley, is to connect buyers and sellers. They'll show you all the available copies of Profiles in Courage, give all the basic information, detail the payment and shipping terms, and tell you who to call or email if you spot the book you want.
Alibris does all that, too. But there are several important differences: Buyers do all their business with Alibris and never know the name of the dealer offering the book for sale. Both buyers and sellers pay to make the deal. Sellers are charged a commission, and buyers pay a markup that averages about 20 percent, Manley said.
After purchases are made, sellers send books to Alibris' fulfillment center in Sparks, Nevada, where volumes are inspected, repackaged, and shipped. The company also maintains a warehouse in which about 10 of its 800 member dealers store 100,000 books -- a step supposed to help expedite shipments. Although both Amazon and B&N list out-of-print titles among their offerings, Manley said he sees two differentiating factors: Alibris deals only in out-of-print books, and the company wants to develop well beyond being an online shopping site. He says sales to libraries, research institutions, and retail stores outstrip the current 400 to 500 orders a day from individual buyers.
"It would be easy to see this as just another Web store, but it's not," he said. "We're as much a business-to-business operation as a business-to-consumer company."
Cathy Waters, director of marketing for the Advanced Book Exchange, noted that much of the used-book trade is based on sellers developing specialties -- military history, for instance -- and relationships with individual customers. And she expects the desire among collectors to find the highest quality books will prevail in any struggle among online used-book services.
"It will be chaos for awhile, but eventually things will stabilize," Waters said.
The 30-month-old ABE -- which claims 4,000 member booksellers that pay between $10 and $35 a month, depending on how many books they list -- handles about 3,000 single book orders a day. She said that's a small fraction of the total sales transacted by dealers through the site.
Anirvan Chatterjee, the University of California student who created Bookfinder as a class project in 1996, said he sees Alibris as an effort to create an overarching antiquarian book brand -- a strategy Manley confirms.
"It's a neat thing, a good introduction to buying rare books online," Chatterjee said. But he added that he believes Alibris's markups -- small compared to the reported 100 percent charged by barnesandnoble.com, but competing with the no-markup price on other sites -- will catch up to it. "People are going to compare, [and are] going to say, 'Look at this on Alibris. I found the same book on ABE or Bookfinder for 20 percent less.'"
