100 Million Used Books, All Available on One Web Site

Every direct marketer aims at “one-to-one marketing.” But the business of “book search” for one-of-a-kind used and out-of-print titles may hold the record for being a more completely one-to-one business model than any other Internet operation.

The concept of selling books by mail is as old as the United States. Ben Franklin himself offered the country’s first money-back guarantee. Now, avid readers and collectors can make super-detailed searches online for any book ever printed.

Book dealers previously found books for customers. Before the Internet, when you requested an old book in a shop for used and out-of-print books, you seldom heard, “we don’t have it in stock.” Even if you asked for Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone With the Wind,” published 70 years ago in 1936, the bookseller usually said, “We’ll find it for you.” This was possible because all booksellers, from one-person book barns in small towns to the big stores in New York, constituted one nationwide book-search market through dealer-to-dealer communications. Many dealers’ best customers were other dealers who were searching for out-of-print titles.

We personally owned a small used bookshop, Medallion Books in Wellesley, MA, for 10 years. Book searches to find specific out-of-print titles requested by customers were the most successful segment of the business, almost 60% of our sales. Customer’s names were indexed manually with their specific search requests. They were delighted to find books that they had requested many weeks before. The customer want lists came from in-store customers, browsers at annual used book fairs, and respondents to “Books Wanted” ads that collectors placed in the New York Times Book Review.

One magazine made searches easier. A national used book dealer network was held together from 1948 to 1999 by one national magazine, the “AB Bookman’s Weekly.” The content was chiefly ads jammed with listings of “Books Wanted” and “Books for Sale.” Every dealer scanned these lists assiduously to find books their customers wanted. Dealers published their weekly wants; other dealers would quickly quote prices on the books that dealers wanted for their customers. Almost all the business was dealer-to-dealer.

Jacob Chernofsky, the editor and publisher, described in a published interview how “AB Bookman” became indispensable to used book dealers. “The trade needed AB critically — not just the people who advertised their wants, but also the people who advertised their businesses. There was no competition for AB until the Internet came along.”

“AB Bookman” ceased publication in 1999. Chernofsky described its decline: “The arrival of computers (before the Internet) allowed dealers to mail more search lists of books to dealers on their own, but they still kept up their AB advertising.” Then the Internet took book searches out of the hands of dealers. “As soon as the Internet came along,” Chernofsky said, “many dealers went out of business. A lot of collectors did their trading on the Internet