ABEbooks.com - what is is that has upset the established book dealer community?
Why has ABEbooks abused its position as market leader to alienate the very people responsible for its success?

ABEbooks.com is without a doubt the largest and most productive site for book dealers to list on. Other sites do not have the pull and do not garner orders for participants in the same way as ABE. Why is this?

ABE provided the right product to enable independant book dealers to list their books on a worldwide accessible internet site at the right time and established book dealer community supported them. At the start they were not without competition in the form of another site called Biblio (not the current site by that name however). Biblio were mysteriously hacked and the integrity of their credit card database broken. They were absorbed by Amazon and no trace remains. Dealers left in droves to join ABE, and the rest is history.

The ABE site is a good site for dealers and customers in that all the features are in place and it is well sorted, well promoted, and by now has a huge client base.

The rot started when they decided to up the sales commisssion. This was upped from 5% to 8%. Commission-free sales to other member dealers were stopped. The subscription fees were upped. And now the latest most contentious move involves the way that the billing of the book is handled.

When the customer enters his credit card details onto the ABE site for a purchase the dealer has two options. The smaller dealer without a credit card machine will opt to have ABE process the card and credit his bank account with the proceeds less a %age transaction fee levied by ABE. The larger dealer with his own credit card machine would retrieve the client's card information from ABE's secure server and process the transaction himself.

At a stroke, commencing April 2006, ABE implemented 'mandatory billing' whereby all sales are processed by ABE at a 5.5% transaction fee. The rationale by ABE for doing this was to generate a new 'revenue stream'. In plain English, to attach more money from the sale to their own account. Since they are likely to be paying on the sheer volume of transactions involved, several thousand per day to be sure, only 1 to 1.5%. they are taking around an extra 4% or more for themselves.
As a result of this, dealers have experienced the following.

• Interruption of cash flow
• Delayed payment, meaning a large outlay in cash on free extended credit terms to ABE for p&p costs
• Removal of sales normally passed through their own credit card service provider, thus affectiong this relationship and in fact perhaps jeapordising it on account of sales reduction (ie they may find their %age increased by their provider to offset the sales reduction)
• Removal of decisions relating to whether to process a given transaction or not (security considerations)
• Delay of processing transactions while ABE cover their asses requiring the customer to fax and fill in their forms. (claiming that this is the requirement of their credit card processor)
• An inflationary and prejorative charge of 5.5% which is far more than any dealer would normally be paying, often double. This is applied in a discriminatory fashion in that German dealers alone are charged 3.5% in apparent contravention of EU regulations. Coincidentally ABE for Europe is headquartered in Germany!
• Members of ABE outside of North America and Europe have to wait for a cheque in the mail. This is likely to take on average a month or more (from middle of sales month to middle of next month). ABE have refused to send the cheques registered mail, they claim that 'there are no facilities for electronic transfer to South Africa, Australia, etc.
• The Euro cheque will incur a fee from the bank (here in SA probably close to £10.00) which of course is more off the bottom line.
• The new Agreement that ABE has implemented to cover this change also gives them carte blanche the right to cancel sales for non or late deleivery. This agreement is very disadvantageous to the dealer, removing all control from him save posting the book and putting all the responsibility for delivery onto him (which was always the case) but at the sole discretion of ABE (which never was). In short, ABE decides when the book 'is not delivered', refunds the client, debits your account, leaving you with no money, no book, and little chance of retrieving it from the postal service. Something that is bound to be the subject of abuse by savvy purchasers.

Despite protests from dealers, representations from associations, ABE's attitude has been to accept it or leave. Like it, or lump it. Effectively they told the ABAA that they were not now interested in the antiquarian trade.

Why does ABE feel that they can get away with this without denting its revenues? Why do they feel that they can discount the protests of so many individual antiquarian book dealers? They apparently feel that quantity is preferable to quality, and that they are in the business not of supporting the worldwide body of individual small antiquarian book dealers, but rather they are in the volume discount business where their infrastructure can be better used to generate the same or more revenue with less effort. What ABE have done is to saturate their site with other sources of supply, viz.

• Print-on-demand issues (who wants these is any body's guess, and the copyright implications are far from clear)
• Mass marketers offering repeats of each title which are trade remainders, offering stock at low prices, limited postal options, and inflated p&p charges
• New book sellers selling new in-print stock.
• Small dealers with little or no experience, operating from home, and (obviously) with no credit card machine, and who (I speak from experience) will despatch items surface mail to Africa in the sole protection of a plain brown envelope. In a word, people that should only be selling at the local flea market and not to the international market that has higher expectations. ABE have no implemented policy of screening 'dealers' for the protection of customers
• Dealers selling material which they do not own, and thereby do not have clear title to sell, and which is ordered specially as needed (or perhaps supplied & despatched by a third party as their agent). They add to ABE bulk listings from their suppliers, with little or no individual description save an Author / Title / ISBN and a disclaimer on detailed condition save that the item is 'acceptable' or some other ambiguous and non-descriptive phase. They do not even adhere to the condition recommendations given on the ABE site (which themselves are the possibly the lowest common denominator of any condition descriptions to be found anywhere).
• Dealers who download other dealers listings, en masse, and relist them as their own stock when in fact they have none. LivreNoir, who have 3.5 million items on line with ABE, and whose prices are invariably double that of other listings, stand accused of this. They then ask the originating dealer to send the item 'drop ship' to their customer. This makes a mockery of ABE's claim to list 100 million books, how many are there really? With the recent additioon of a quantity field to suit the mass marketers this is clearly a figure that means little and is hyped for their own benefit and not as a guide for comparison to any other book sites.

ABEbooks.com is apparently positioning itself to be a combination of Amazon and Ebay. Amazon in terms of the spread of merchandise offered and Ebay in terms of minimal responsibility for transactions 'facilitated' on their site. I beleive there will be further moves by ABE to corner the market. I believe that they will act to remove the individual dealer from the interface between themselves and the client as far as is possible. If not a move to an Alibris-like operation, they will at some stage remove dealer details from their site so that the only contact bewtween dealer and client will be at the stage of order acceptance and despatch. This will see names and contact details dissappearing from their site which will then lose its advertising advantage for dealer's specialisations. We will then be reduced to the level of supplier and postal agent.

Some smaller dealers may be left wondering whether in fact the playing field is at all level. Have ABE in fact done deals with some of the larger mass-marketers, letting them in fact process their own transactions, while they cream the small and middle-sized bona-fide dealer? It is hard to imagine that some of these would be prepared to accept this imposition from ABEbooks when selling books in quantity for $1.00 which leaves them little margin other than that which they can clear from savings on their standard p&p rates.

All in all, there are many unhappy dealers on ABE. The immediate result has been to alienate many of them. It would appear that many are now listing on other sites as well. We have listed on Biblio, but pragmatically we can only wait for them to do the same as ABE since they, too, are committed to generating the maximum possible revenue. Some dealers have removed their stock from ABE and left. This would perhaps be a fair number, but not a great percentage. However, if ABE are going to make more money from fewer dealers and fewer transactions, who is going to blame them?

One disappointment is the lack of real intervention by the various international book trade Associations. Since ILAB is the association of the Associations, it should have been at the forefront of representing its members and their interests. I see nothing on the ILAB, ABA, ABAA, AANZAB sites. Surely they should be making public their positions on this? It is said that they represent the more elite book dealer, who is not apparently not too concerned about the position since little really rare and expensive items are sold through this pipeline. A dubious and unsupported assumption in the instance I would say since most of the trade also sells much middle-value stock and very few sell items priced at stratospheric levels. A myopic view if true. Their main contribution has been generally to advise members to list elsewhere, which anyone could have told them in the first place. Apart from a symbolic boycott organised by the ABAA, they failed their membership as spectactularly as ABE took advantage of them. Not that I am a member of ILAB, but just what does the trade pay these people to do?

Where do we stand? It is too early to say. ABE have taken advantage of a small fragmented community peopled by individualists and go-it-aloners. Few antiquarian dealers, however large, are that large in corporate terms. However, dealers do have to work out how to take advantage of the internet without being at the mercy of ABE and the like. I believe that we have to find ways to sell on the internet without seeing the ABEs of this world as the b-all and end-all of book dealing a la internet.

What can we do, specifically? I suggest the following as interim measures.

• Dealers to list on other sites. There are plenty.
• Dealers to use higher prices on ABE than elsewhere.
• Dealers not to purchase via ABE, either buy direct or from another site.
• Dealers to upgrade their own web sites. Text listings are spidered by Google and other search engines.
• Dealers to advise all customers from ABE of preference and or lower prices available by dealing direct or on another site.
• Pressure associations to coordinate actions together. Specifically to have a position ready for future actions by ABEbooks, and to identify and consolidate dealer-friendly options for online selling - maybe even to contract sites to do so at advantageous rates and conditions friendly to individual member book dealers.
• Advise customers to use Addall rather than 'Bookfinder' (which ABE own) which will expose them to other book sites

This page written rather ad hoc on my 'update my own site' day, so any more specific comments, ideas, suggestions or corrections gratefully received.

Ian Balchin
Fables Bookshop
Grahamstown
South Africa
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