Browsing the Bookshelves

So ebay claim to have caved into pressure from their "community" and prohited the sale of Live 8 tickets on their web site. Setting aside the rights and wrongs of reselling these tickets, this move seems to me to be groundbreaking :  A ecommence major web site responds to popular pressure from its customers, even though it will lose money, in this case commissions, from doing so.

So why can't some of the other major e-commerce sites listen to their community base in the same way.  ABE, for instance, one of the major on line sales venue for books, who persist in following a business plan which seems to want to treat books as widgets, against the loudly and frequently expressed wishes of its core client base.  There's no denying that books are the profit source for booksellers, but what ABE's approach seems to ignore is that not all books are equal. Two sellers may both have a copy of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities but those books may be wildly different.  They may be different editions, have different illustrations, or different binding. Perhaps one is a first edition, the other a mass market paperback printed by the thousand.  They may even be in different languages. And even if both books are the exact same edition, one may be pristine while the other has been well-read, stained by a coffee spill and had the illustrations removed.   While in one sense they may be same book, they are certainly not the same product. So how can any one justify using the same picture?

Despite its widely proclaimed move into the sale of new books in the autumn of 2004, the sale of second hand, rare and collectible books still accounts for over 80 per cent of the sites sales, at least according the statistics it released earlier this month.  Perhaps if second hand book sellers had Bob Geldof on their side, ABE would listen.  Perhaps we need a champion?  Where are you now, Arthur?