Community Bookstores Thriving Online, With Help From BookFinder.com

Community Bookstores Thriving Online, With Help From BookFinder.com

BERKELEY, Calif., April 19 /PRNewswire/ -- Big chains, ecommerce giants, and rising costs are causing problems for already-embattled independent bookstores, but some local retailers are thriving by expanding online book sales worldwide via venues likes BookFinder.com.

"Since launching in 1997, we've seen an increasing number of local booksellers expand online, using Internet sales to stay competitive in the face of Wal-Martization. 'Click-and-mortar' ecommerce supports the businesses that give meaning and character to our cities," says founder Anirvan Chatterjee.

BookFinder.com is a comparison shopping search engine for new, used, rare, and out of print books. Customers can visit http://www.bookfinder.com/ to find books for sale from over 70,000 booksellers around the world, 99% of whom are small independents.

How three community retailers are benefiting:

1) Volume I Books (Hillsdale, MI), has 80,000 books in stock -- ten books for every resident in town.

"There is simply not enough business across the counter to maintain a used bookstore," says owner Richard Wunsch. The store has its catalog online, attracting customers from as far away as Iceland.

Store manager Aimee England explains that "the Internet has given us the ability to move forward with doing local things, such as events and grassroots community activism."

2) Bookshop Inc. (Chapel Hill, NC) is a popular used and rare bookshop serving readers and academics.

Bookseller Melody Ivins tells us that they bought a collection of 2,000 German art books from a local collector some years ago. "How many German-reading art historians visit Chapel Hill? The books hit the Internet, the orders came in from all over, and the beautiful old books went off to good homes."

With online bookselling, "small stores can sell to people anywhere in the world as easily as to the people in the town next door."

3) Tavistock Books (Alameda, CA) sells rare books, with an emphasis on Dickens.

We discovered Tavistock, located a few miles away from our office, when we used BookFinder.com to purchase a collectible edition of A Christmas Carol. We picked the book up directly from the store.

Says owner Vic Zoschak, "My sales tend to be primarily out of state, and to those folks that collect books as a hobby (or obsession)...people who buy the sort of books I carry occasionally make a point of visiting my shop." Their website even advertises free pickups from the nearest subway station.

Independent local booksellers will typically list their books for sale on a variety of different websites, such as TomFolio.com, Biblio.com, Abebooks, Antiqbook, and dozens more. BookFinder.com offers book shoppers one-click comparison shopping across all of these sites. The combined catalog tops 70 million titles for sale, making it easy to track down books, popular or unique, while supporting independent booksellers all over America.

"Smaller listing sites and shops can compete with the juggernauts on the equal footing that BookFinder.com provides," says Melody Ivins of Volume I Books. "They also help keep prices honest by making it so easy to comparison shop, and easy to spot the agencies that charge oversized commissions on their sales. BookFinder.com is even run by true bibliophiles who have the concerns of other bibliophiles at heart. What more could a reader, or a bookseller, ask for?"

Bookstores:

http://www.volume1books.com/http://www.bookshopinc.com/http://www.tavbooks.com/

Source: BookFinder.com

CONTACT: Barbara Franzoia of Barbara Franzoia Consults, +1-415-291-0243, or barbara@franzoia.com

Web site: http://www.volume1books.com/ http://www.bookshopinc.com/ http://www.tavbooks.com/ http://www.bookfinder.com/

NOTE TO EDITORS: Anirvan Chatterjee is available for interview. More detailed background paper available on Booksellers.

------- Profile: Ent