Antiquarian and Rare Booksellers

NB This page is still under construction.

Buying Used Books on the Internet - Some Notes

1. Internet bookstores are often cheaper than walk-in bookstores. Many internet booksellers operate by undercutting the prices of their global competitors. This makes it a good time to buy books.

2. Few internet booksellers sell from their own individual website. Internet booksellers upload their own stock lists to the vast databases of sites such as www.abebooks.com, www.alibris.com, and several other sites. This is great for the book buyer, who can browse the stock of thousands of booksellers on a single website.

3. Some booksellers may upload their stock lists to several sites. This doesn’t mean they have multiple copies. When a book sells on one site, they will remove their listing of it from the other sites. This is why the same copy of a book may appear to be listed twice on used.addall.com (this is a site that searches all the used book sites and then compiles the results - wow!).

4. There are a few internet booksellers who don’t have any stock of their own. They work by listing titles at relatively high prices, and then trying to buy the title from another internet bookseller should they receive an order for it. This is not the cheapest or easiest kind of seller to buy a book from. Where there is a feedback system operating, you can often spot this kind of bookseller by noticing the number of negative feedback comments for unfulfilled orders or misdescribed books.

5. The vast majority of internet booksellers are wonderful, honest, friendly, and caring. Ditto for internet book buyers. Otherwise it would never work!

6. Bargains and exceptional items can be found on auction sites such as eBay. Checking the feedback of sellers is again a sensible precaution.

7. Not all packaging methods were created equal! A book packed inside a box travels far better than a book inside a cardboard envelope. A basic principle behind good packaging is that the packaging should be larger than the book - then the packaging gets beaten around, not the book. Quality packaging should be demanded and expected as the norm.

8. Some personal preferences: Abebooks is a great site for obtaining detailed descriptions of a book’s condition. Amazon, with its reviews and sample pages, is a great place to browse when you don’t know what you’re looking for. Addall is a great place to check out to possibly save a few cents.

9. Dustjackets and book collecting. When you come to the realisation that a book without its dustjacket is only half a book, you’ve past the point of no return. NB the condition of dustjackets is conventionally described by the letters after the ‘/’, e,g, VG/G = a book in very good condition with a dustjacket in good condition.