Bookselling has always had an aura about it that many people find attractive. The sellers, variously stereotyped as garrulous old scholars, frustrated writers, postgraduate bookworms or gentlemanly Hugh Grant types, are purveying a respected product. This image, and the sheer love of books, has compelled people into the bookselling trade since the invention of moveable type. Simultaneously, many others, including the barely literate, are attracted to bookselling by its mathematics. Few commodities, particularly among collectibles, can be found so readily and converted into a profit as easily as books.

In the past, many people fulfilled a dream and opened brick and mortar bookstores only to find they could not pay the rent with walk-in traffic, or were squeezed out of business by chain stores such as Barnes and Noble and Borders.

With the advent of online bookselling, all that has changed. Droves of brick and mortar bookstores have sprung up in obscure backwaters and are able to support themselves with the worldwide market for books provided by the Internet. In fact, there are now few entry barriers to selling books online beyond the acquirable knowledge of what sells and what doesnt. Anyone who possesses or can buy, beg or steal books can have their own bookstore online - limited in size only by their ability to scare-up books and store them - and their willingness to do the work.

Metasites: Everymans Friend
Besides the worldwide market provided by the Internet, the key factor that makes this possible are the Metasites, or book search sites. Prior to the Internet, rare and out of print bookselling was an insular world where book values were often scrupulously guarded secrets - knowledge that was acquired through years of experience or the purchase of expensive sets of Auction Record books and piles of catalogs.

Today, thanks to the Internet, book values are completely transparent: easily researchable online with a few typed-in words and mouse clicks. Metasites, or sites that check the availability and pricing of books for sale on virtually all Internet book listing services, are a boon both to buyers seeking a title and sellers seeking pricing and bibliographic data on their books.

The result has been a stampede into the online bookselling market Today, retirees, "one cent wonder" booksellers and the semi-literate can list their books alongside the largest established stores and the most venerable/snootiest high end specialists - in an egalitarian ocean of e-commerce.

The Parallel Universes of Online Bookselling
The vast majority of Internet bookselling takes place in two very separate domains: retail book listing platforms and eBay and other auction sites. (Some booksellers maintain their own websites but count on traffic steered from the listing services or eBay.) To a surprising degree, seldom do the two domains meet. Many, many eBay book auction buyers simply do not check the book listing services for availability and pricing on books they are bidding on in eBay auctions. Conversely, many book buyers purchase strictly from the book listing services - never bothering to trawl for books on eBay, Amazon or Yahoo! Auctions.

Book Listing Services: the Slow Dime
There are currently 24 online book listing services of any significant size, charging either monthly fees based on books listed or commissions on sales - or both. These range in size from 100 dealers to 20,000, with a total dealer listings of anywhere from 100,000 to 70 million books. Of these The Big Three" or the "Three As" generate the lions share of sales: Amazon, ABE (Advanced Book Exchange,) and Alibris.

Amazon focused on new and in-print books for their first four years of business acquiring a database of 6 million people. Long a great platform for selling new and in-print books, Amazon has now expanded into hosting rare and out-of-print books - and, by all accounts, sell many.

The Advanced Book Exchange, or ABE, located in Victoria, British Columbia, is the largest of the out-of-print and rare bookselling venues, claiming 13,000 dealers listing 70 million books.

Alibris was a pioneer in the online book listing business, starting up in 1996 under the name Interloc. Changing their name and much of their format, they remain a major player in the field.

Further, there are smaller sites popular among experienced booksellers such as Biblio, TomFolio, AntiQBook, ChooseBooks, etc., that tend to charge lesser fees than the Big 3. (More on this in Part II)

Both ABE and Alibris offer their sellers "affiliate programs," wherein the sellers books are computer listed for sale in all Barnes & Noble stores, library and international sites. All of the Big 3 services charge monthly listing fees based on the number of books listed and a per book sale commission ranging up to 20 percent of the retail price. They all offer credit card services to sellers who are not set-up for accepting credit/debit card payments at an additional commission.

The Upside of Book Listing Services
Book listing services are inexpensive. Listing fees per book are pennies or fractions of pennies per month; some of the smaller sites charge nothing to list books, taking instead a commission on books sold. (By contrast, eBay auctions charge listing fees for all auctions, and a commission on sell-through auctions.) For those with the stock and willingness to do the work, the listing services allow the seller to run a book store in a worldwide marketplace for a tiny fraction of the cost of maintaining a brick and mortar store.