As you will have seen from yesterday's post, many independent booksellers have a strong online presence. This is an additional sales venue for those independent booksellers who still have a brick & mortar presence, and a lifeline for those who don't. While the great joy of a serendipitous discovery is greatly reduced by the closing of so many brick & mortar bookshops, this is offset somewhat by easy access to the enormous variety of titles available online:
Many independent booksellers have their own websites, with a built-in mechanism that allows you to search their inventory and place an order online. Many of these same booksellers also make their inventory available through various online consortia, such as ABEbooks--formerly Advanced Book Exchange & now wholly owned by Amazon, Bookfinder (also owned by Amazon) and TomFolio (owned by a consortium of independent booksellers).
Our favorite way to search the inventory of independent booksellers, though, is through viaLibri, which not only searches individual bookseller websites, but also several consortia similar to those mentioned above (e.g., Maremagnum, Bibliopoly, Antiqbook, etc.).
Tomorrow, we will look at a few ways to use the bigbox retailers to your advantage....
Recent Comments