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Looking for a book you cannot seem to find anywhere? While I do have a few tens of thousands of books in stock, that is but a grain of sand on the vast beach of books on the Internet. So here I will show you how I search for books on line. My searches are to see how many copies of a book are listed and to see what the average price range is. Then I decide if the book is worthwhile keypunching and listing on line.
One of the oldest and biggest book sites is abebooks.com. Abe is like a planet-wide shopping mall for books, as they carry the listings of over 10,000 sellers from all over the world. Abe provides the web site space, promotion, search engine, automatic order taking, and assistance to sellers and buyers. Their job is to bring buyers and sellers together on their web site with a secure and easy way to shop. There are currently over 100 million books listed and that number is always growing. Abe was the first site I started listing with back in early 1999.
On Abe’s homepage is a smaller version of their search engine for those who want to initiate a quick search. Simply key in the author, or title, or keyword, or the book’s ISBN number, or a combination of these, and you will soon get a list of what is available, based on your search parameters. A keyword is for when you don’t recall a book’s title but know what it is about. So you would key in any words that describe the book’s content. The more keywords you can come up with, the better. For example just keying in philosophy would bring you over 700,000 listings. The ISBN, International Standard Book Number, is a ten or thirteen digit number usually found by the Universal Product Code on the back cover, or on the copyright information page inside behind the title page. The ISBN system started in the early 1970s, so older books will not have ISBN numbers. Amazon loves ISBNs for some reason and so do libraries, but the general public doesn’t seem to use them for searches.
On top of Abe’s pages, there is a red banner which states, Advanced Search, Browse, Bookstores, Community, Sell Books. Clicking on Advanced Search will bring up Abe’s more detailed search engine. Here you can list publisher, date, your preferred price range, the country you would like to find a book seller in, paperback or hard cover, first edition, signed by author, and if you’d prefer the hard cover to have a dust jacket. You can ignore commas, and words like ‘and’, ‘the, ‘a’, when keying in the title, as the search engine ignores those anyway. When the search results come up there will be options on how to narrow down the results list which will be covered with an example below. The cost of shipping is also listed above the book’s description, so you can easily see the total cost of placing an order.
When I do my searches, I am looking for books that are worth the time and trouble to list on line. So, for example, if I wanted to check The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, I would key ‘grapes wrath’ in the title box. Then I’d put ‘steinbeck’ in the author box and then hit enter (don’t worry about capital letters). Since the abe search engine ignores small words like ‘and’, I don’t bother with them. Using an author’s last name is usually sufficient, unless the book has a one-word title. In that case the search would then bring up any title with that one word in it with same last name. So in a one word title situation always key in the author’s full name. Going back to the example, you will get something like 2000 listings of the Grapes of Wrath found. At the top of the list will be a narrow your results box and here is where you can narrow the search by clicking on particular book attributes you would like to have and your preference to locations of sellers. You will also notice that the books are listed in order of lowest priced books first. This is the default (something that annoys many booksellers). On the right side of the results box you can sort the results by highest price, by newest, by author or by title. The later two are more useful if you don’t know a title or author and have used key words to initiate your search. Newest refers to the most recently listed books.
There you have it, a quick and easy way to search on abebooks. They also have a book database program called Homebase. It can be downloaded off their site for free, and is the program I am currently using. |
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