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Maintained by Moseley Associates, Inc. We welcome any additions or corrections, which may be sent here. |
An assortment of links about on-line bookselling -- to consumers, businesses, and college students |
PORTALS about Retailing and Retailers Last Update: 11/1/04 |
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CONTENTS |
Portals |
BookWeb from the American Booksellers Association: Focused on the independent bookseller.
Book Marketing Update: Help for booksellers as well as for publishers.
NACS, Inc., the National Association of College Stores: A useful resource containing much industry information, including Higher Education Retail Market Facts & Figures.
Bookwire:
A helpful site for the bookseller, now owned by R.R. Bowker (Cahners), with a not-surprising emphasis on Bowker products and services.
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PUBLISHING LINKS
Websites We've Liked |
Booksellers (Trade) |
Amazon: In spite of distractions, still the book site. Try the eerie Recommendations section.
Barnes & Noble.com: Still second; now includes its college-store textbook operation. Borders.com: Still third, and now hosted by Amazon; tries to instill its online presence with some of the special quality of its bookstores. A [British] Countrybookstore.com: Not exactly 84 Charing Cross Road, but the site attempts a nice, comfy feel, plus 1,000,000 titles to choose from. 1Bookstreet.com: Massive discounts, narrow selection. Free shipping: a new business model? Bookfinder: A site that dredges other used-book sites and compares price, condition, and terms for desiderata. AddALL: Prices and discounts of on-line booksellers are compared by this thorough service. Includes shipping charge, taxes, processing time, and shipping time in its calculations. Optionally handles overnight dispatch charges. Octavo: On line seller of its own titles -- brilliant digital replicas of such rarities as Copernicus' De Revolutionibus and Redoute's Roses. Co-founded by John Warnock of Adobe. Books are available in PDF format and on CD-ROM. |
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Booksellers (College) |
Varsity Books: The sole survivor of the on-line college textbook boom started in the summer of '98. Big discounts mostly gone, Varsity operates a tidy site.
textbooks.com [actually Barnes & Noble College Stores On Line]: Created as a free-standing site, this Barnes & Noble operation is now lodged within B&N.com. Discounts mostly modest. ECampus.com: Essentially an on-line student store including trade books, clothing, and souvenirs. eFollett [Follett's Online College Store]: A well-thought-out service based on the Follett chain's hundreds of stores and campus connections. |
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eDistributors and Aggregators |
books24x7.com: (Formerly Modern Age Books.) This growing intermediary sells technical books online for information technology professionals. Most of the usual suspects in computer book publishing (Sybex, QUE, etc.) seem to be here. Also offers licenses for on-line access to its entire library of computer books.
netLibrary: Founded in 1998 as "the world's premier provider of electronic books, netLibrary helps academic, public, corporate, and special libraries create a richer, more productive learning environment for their patrons." This aggregator, now owned by OCLC, views the library as its customer. ebrary.com: "We make authoritative content and advanced tools available on line to patrons, students, and researchers worldwide through libraries and other institutions. "Co-founder Christopher Warnock, is the son of John Warnock (Adobe).
Questia: Another aggregator whose customer is the student. Originally set out to amass a complete undergraduate library of 250,000 volumes. Near term, however, Questia offers help to students working on (late) term papers.
Ingenta: Acquired the better-established UnCover and has more recently merged with Catchword.
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| Printing on Demand: eBookmakers | Lightning Source: Established as Lightning Print in 1998, this early adopter of the IBM Infoprint 2000, a huge web-fed one-up printer with optional binding attachments, is now the leading demand-print provider. Its facility would easily fill an old-time independent bookshop. A division of Ingram, supplying publishers and others with short run demand-print items.
The On Demand Machine Corporation: Supplier of the on-site, on-demand BookMachine System, offering printing and binding equipment for smaller-scale processing at a lower price. InstaBook Corporation: Offers a remarkably compact device "to bookstores and libraries". Price may be compact as well. |