FABLES BOOKSHOP

Abooksearch.com
A California based operation with around 200 dealers.

Advanced Book Exchange ABE is the largest online listing of out of print books claiming over 70,000,000 items from more than 14,000 dealers worldwide. This is not to say (from experience) that if you cannot find it on ABE you will not find it anywhere else. Some people never look anywhere else, but that is a mistake. However, you will find most titles on ABE.

Please do not order from them, their charges are high and payment to us is incredibly slow. Rather order from Choosebooks.com. We, at least would be grateful. ABE is a nice site for the buyer, but established dealers are discriminated against in favour of the 'from home' operation. Here's my link detailing the gripes of the book trade against these people. ABE position. Buy from their bargain basement dealers at your own risk. Many do not insure books despatched, many use surface mail only, many will pack an unprotected book in a plain envelope. In short, beware, as always, from who you purchase. As one might expect, the norms of the established trade have been discarded, and ABE cannot police this nor are then interested in doing so.

[For the bookdealer: Most busy site, most unhelpful operation, high fees, autocratic attitude, enforced processing of credit cards at high fee level, and slow payment if you are not in North America or Europe. Any one can join, even the janitor with a pile of books in his storeroom, the antiquarian trade has now been dumped].

AddALL
A metasearch engine based in USA that links to many independent online bookdealer databases and listings for new books as well as older and out-of-print items. Searches many of the links shown here and more. Recommended.

Alibris
As Interloc this was the original book database. As a purchaser you deal with Alibris and not with an individual dealer. Book searches with engines like Addall will show their listings. As a customer a good site, if the pages are cluttered and full of special offers and other irrelevant information. Beware that the purchasing process is irreversible, their are no order cancellations accepted from the instant that you place the order. It is difficult to empty the 'basket' and if you have your credit card details recorded there are no safety stops while they ask if you want to use that card or enter fresh details - it's all on one cluttered confusing page. When you click on 'Place Your Order' the transaction is completed. Rather exit the site and leave the item in the basket for them to cope with if you change your mind. However, there are reasons to like the site, don't let me put you off, just be careful.

Antbo
Another European site, claiming 5.3 million books. With dealers from Austria, Germany, Switzerland & Denmark, this is probably a good place to look for seriously Teutonic material.

Antikbuch24
All in German, antiquarische buche.

Antiqbook
A major European site with 5 million books, maps, and prints from 400+ dealers from all over the world, but especially from Holland, Britain, and USA.

AuctionExplorer books
This is an auction site run from South Africa. Dealers offering material for sale on this site are vetted closely and usually have to be members of their local book dealers association (ie. ABA, ABAA, SABDA, ANZAAB, etc). Intending purchasers can log on and bid for books. The process is automated and does run very well. You deal with the selling dealer after the sale has closed if you are the successful bidder. We recommend this site. Current auctions are running at a level of 500+ books offered by about 50 international dealers. Books are not limited to africana, dealers worldwide use this site and the listings are representative of this.

Biblio
The second largest site after ABE. The site of choice now for many dealers and anticipated to catch up soon with the leader. We list our stock on there at a 10% advantage over our prices on ABE.

Bibliology
"The online bookfair" and with only 13 dealers it can't be much else. Serves the higher end of the market.

Biblion
An undated press release on the site indicates a proposed alliance with Biblio.com

Bibliophile
A multilingual (English, German, French, Italian, Spanish) privately owned Swiss-based site listing over 3 million books from almost 400 dealers. The book search display is good and clear. An interesting site with links to European libraries (a must visit) and other useable resources. [Dealers: They offer interesting packages for hosting your own web site which will include free listing on the book site]

Bibliopoly
Operated by Bernard Quaritch along with select other dealers this is obviously the place to find the really old and rare books, manuscripts, and incunabula. About 100 upper-end dealers from UK, Europe, USA.

Biblioroom
A European-based grouping of only 4 dealers, heavily French dominated.

Books & Collectibles
"Antiquarian, rare, used and out of print books from Books and Collectibles Australia Australias only comprehensive book search engine". No info on how many dealers or books, but they appear to be either located in Australia, or to specialise in Australiana. Books in Australia seem expensive by world standards for some reason.

BookAvenue
A US-based site for out-of-print book searches. The site seems to be in permanent stasis. They are remarkably reticent about the number of books featured. I see 100 dealers. BORING!

Bookfinder
A metasearch engine now owned by ABE. Although they will claim otherwise, we can imagine that it will now be engineered to favour selections from ABE itself over other sites. Why wouldn't they? No one could make any sense out of why they purchased this, even the official statements made no business sense. We prefer Addall as Bookfinder has a clumsy interface that makes it a 2-step operation to find books with prices. With Addall you can compare finds directly which is not possible with Bookfinder.

choosebooks.com
Now the British end of the German ZVAB site (see below). Only recently set in operation, there is no information on number of books or dealers. They are selective on the type of dealers allowed to list on their site and you will only find the more reliable, knowledgeable, and established there. We list on choosebooks.com

The International League of Antiquarian Bookdealers
ILAB is the association for national bookdealers associations. The site features links to bookdealers associations all over the world and is a fine jumping-off spot for the more up-market dealers and the older, more rare and expensive items. They have their own database and search engine, as do a number of the national associations.

The Independant Online Bookdealers Association
An association of online dealers, based in the USA, aimed at a quality vetted membership, for the smaller dealer shy of ABA membership (difficult for lesser-established dealers in the USA). Nearly 300 members, mostly all in the USA.

The Independant Bookdealers Network
Appears to be an association of some 50 dealers.

MareMagnum Librorum
An Italian hosted site with over 5 million books from 300+ dealers. Many UK and USA dealers included.

Provincial Book Fairs Association
This is one of the two national associations in Britain and started by uniting the smaller dealers and organising book fairs. They now run their own book site which is only open to members of a properly constituted dealers association.

Used Book Central
This is a smaller USA based site. Very reticent on the number of dealers and books.

ZVAB
A major European site (located in Germany) claiming over 5,500,000 books from 1100 dealers in 18 countries. Members predominantly specialising in English and German texts. They have apparently cornered the German market. Now there is also Choosebooks.com which is the English side of this operation. See above.

Some search tips

1. Type in a 3 or 4 word part of the title only. You can make mistakes, so do plenty of the listing dealers if you look closely. Don't type in long titles or you may not find what you were looking for.
2. Put the title thus "title for search" with the inverted commas. This will cause the search engine to find that exact phrase within the title field (or at least those words in that order) and not some other combination of those same words.
3. If you don't succeed, try the title on its own in case you have the author misspelt, and try the author on his own to list his titles in case you are guessing at the title.
4. Use the advanced options where you can set binding, s/h only, etc. This can make it quicker.
5. If the search engine allows, put in the publisher to cut out the clutter from the other side of the Atlantic ocean. Also set sort order to show you the cheapies first or the signed presentation copies first as you want.
6. If the title pops up as not found, check your spellings

How do I know who to choose from, I am overwhelmed. It's tough. You have to be really aware. The internet has not only made books more accessible, but has flushed 'here today, gone tomorrow' operations out of the woodwork like never before. Many of the dealers listing are not in fact real dealers, but part-time people with little experience, mass marketers of end of line or damaged publishers rejects. They'll send books around the world in the worst packing possible, they'll mis-describe books. You have to know exactly what you want. Inspect their own web site if they have one, the static look-alike pages from sites such as ABE are not of any help. See when they were established, do they have a storefront, is there a clear return policy, are they a member of their local trade association, do they appear to describe their books in line with established trade standards or are they listed with minimal ambiguous wording? Are their prices at the $1.00 level plus high postage rates? Auntie Annie's Books may sound cute, but are you going to get what you want. Email the dealer direct and ask questions about the book, p&p. Try some of the smaller sites, they are more selective about who can list books than the giants like ABE.

BOOKER PRIZE TITLES

BOOKS PRIOR TO THE WWW

EASTERN CAPE, 1820 SETTLERS AND ALL THAT

USEFUL SOFTWARE LINKS

These web pages were originally designed using Arachnophilia. This is an html editor that allows you to work at the code level. Very customizable, it provides Table and List Wizards and lots of other great features such as Beautify Code that will set the code out neatly and find those unpaired tags. If you end up with spaghetti code and never seem to get it right with a wysiwyg editor, try this as a powerful and easy alternative. You can do much better than these efforts which have been deliberately kept un-graphicked in the interests of those in Africa limited to slow dial-up access that turns the www into the world wide wait. The package is distributed as CareWare, which involves no monetary charge. The new version 5.2 that I use now available is coded in Java which means you also need to download the Java Runtime Engine. Will therefore run on any platform (Mac, Unix, Linux, even Windows). One nice feature that has nothing to do with its operation is the 'look and feel' which is most un-windows-like. A nice change. If you code in html, Java, or C++ this is for you.

For email you might try Pegasus Mail This is a full-featured email client, for standalone or network applications, single or multiuser installations. The new version 4.2 is AWESOME! Again there is no charge for this (you pay for the manual if you want one), and if you think that this must be a cheap handout, you certainly know a lot less than you think you do. This is one of the big ones, and is prominent in the academic and institutional world. It has so many features that I am at a loss to select some of them to list here. Multiple identities, multipop, encryptation, glossary expansion, annotations, mail filtering rules, content control (spam filtering), selective mail download, mailing lists, and customiseable toolbar are some of those that I make use of. If you spend a lot of time doing email, you should be using something better than what you are probably using ;)

I am less than an efficient person, every piece of paper that I make a note on gets lost fast. Desk Notes is a programme that I found after investigating every PIM, organiser, and note-taker going. Desk Notes is a small fast package dedicated solely to creating and managing pop-up notes. The notes can be customised to look the way you want, they can be alarmed, sorted, and there are really sensible useable organisational tools. You find a note by searching for any word or phrase that a note is likely to contain. For $25 this is a good deal and it has been used every day 7/52 since I bought it.

If you have to upload your html pages, or need to retrieve other files via ftp, then the chances are you use something from Ipswich. Have a look at Filezilla No charge, neat, very fast and reliable, etc. About time that Ipswich did a facelift on their lite product. This beats it hands down.

Abakt is a great backup programme for writing to cd. I use it across Linux to back up files from old dos computer :)

I use Xenu link sleuth to find the broken links on the Fables web site. A must if you have a complex site.