10.6092/issn.2240-3604/14345
Il presente articolo prende in esame i più importanti database e metasearch commerciali utilizzati nel mercato del libro antico da parte di commercianti, collezionisti, studiosi ed istituzioni. Conservando e mettendo a disposizione dati su milioni di libri (venduti o ancora disponibili per l'acquisto), questi siti specializzati contribuiscono a creare un vero e proprio mercato virtuale internazionale, consentendo agli specialisti di ricercare titoli ed esemplari che altrimenti sarebbero irrintracciabili ed irraggiungibili. Lo scopo del presente articolo è quello di descrivere quando sono state create le più importanti banche dati commerciali del libro antico, come funzionano e come hanno influenzato il mercato.
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TECA
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Online Bibliographical Tools for the Antiquarian Book Trade. Their History, Use and Impact
Text.Serial.Journal
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2022-07-28
2022-02-01
2022-07-28
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Fabrizio Govi
2022/07/28
10.6092/issn.2240-3604/14345
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Online Bibliographical Tools for the Antiquarian Book Trade. Their History, Use and Impact
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                                          FABRIZIO GOVI

     Online Bibliographical Tools for the Antiquarian Book Trade.
                    Their History, Use and Impact



ABSTRACT
The present article examines the most important commercial database and metasearch websites used
in the antiquarian book trade by dealers, customers, scholars, and institutions. Storing and listing
data on millions of books (sold or still on offer), these specialized websites help create a truly
international market by enabling specialists to search for titles and copies that would otherwise be
untraceable and/or too far dispersed. The purpose of the present article is to describe when the most
important commercial databases in the antiquarian book trade were founded, how they work, and
how they have changed the market.
KEYWORDS: Antiquarian Book trade; Commercial databases; Auction sales; Metasearch; Conservation

Il presente articolo prende in esame i più importanti database e metasearch commerciali utilizzati nel
mercato del libro antico da parte di commercianti, collezionisti, studiosi ed istituzioni. Conservando
e mettendo a disposizione dati su milioni di libri (venduti o ancora disponibili per l'acquisto), questi
siti specializzati contribuiscono a creare un vero e proprio mercato virtuale internazionale,
consentendo agli specialisti di ricercare titoli ed esemplari che altrimenti sarebbero irrintracciabili ed
irraggiungibili. Lo scopo del presente articolo è quello di descrivere quando sono state create le più
importanti banche dati commerciali del libro antico, come funzionano e come hanno influenzato il
mercato.
PAROLE CHIAVE: Commercio librario antiquario; Banche dati commerciali; Vendite all’asta;
Metamotori; Conservazione


                                 DOI: 10.6092/issn.2240-3604/14345
                           __________________________________



i
    n 2012 I paid a visit to the Bologna house of Luigi Balsamo (1926-2013),
    professor of bibliographical studies and director of the journal «La
    Bibliofilía», as he wished to sell part of his antique library, mostly
composed of early printed editions of authors, especially the Jesuit Antonio
Possevino, and topics to which he had devoted his career, notably the
beginning of printing in Sardinia. His collection included a history of the
Pomposa Abbey by Mario Salmi,1 which he told me he had been looking for

* All websites cited in the present article were last visited on June 1st, 2022.
** I am including here a few articles specifically dealing with the antiquarian book trade
and its relationship with internet that helped me frame the topics: ERIC HOLZENBERG,
Second-hand and Antiquarian Books on the Internet, «RBM: A Journal of Rare Books
Manuscripts and Cultural Heritage», II, 2001, 1, pp. 35-44; JANE A. WHEWELL-VANGELIS
SOUITARIS, The Impact of Internet Trading on the UK Antiquarian and Second-hand Bookselling
Industry, «Internet Research», XI, 2001, 4, pp. 296-309; BJÖRN FRANK-GUNTRAM HEPPERLE,
The Internet’s Impact on the Market for Antiquarian Books: Some Unexpected Empirical Results,
in Economics and the Internet II. Proceedings from the 4 th Berlin Internet Economics
Workshop, herausgegeben von Thorsten Wichmann, Norderstedt 2002, pp. 59-63,
available also as <http://www.berlecon.de/ services/en/iew4/papers/ paper21.pdf>;
RAJENDRA KUMBHAR, Websites of Antiquarian Books, «DESIDOC», XXX, 2010, 4, pp. 58-64;



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many years and had intended to give as a gift to his friend and colleague
Giuseppe Billanovich (1913-2000). The search for that book, issued in 500
copies (a significant number for a book printed only 60 years earlier), had
taken so long that by the time Balsamo was able to get his hands on a copy,
Billanovich had passed away. When I returned to my bookshop after the
visit, I began to catalog and price Salmi’s book. I searched the title on the
metasearch Vialibri2 and to my astonishment immediately found 5 copies,
all available for purchase with a simple click and ranging from 300 to 600
euros in price.
   From the late 1990s, when Balsamo was looking for that title, to 2012,
when I met him, so in just slightly more than a decade, the internet had
revolutionized the trade of antiquarian books and the very meaning of
collecting; not only had institutional libraries started putting their
catalogues online and making available digitized copies from their
collections, but also antiquarian booksellers from all over the world and, to
a minor extent, private customers had begun uploading online, on a
massive scale, millions of books, many of them previously considered
extremely rare and almost unobtainable, and now buyable with just one
click and shippable to every corner of the world. If a large part of the
pleasure and meaning of collecting in a certain field is the discovery of items
that slowly, over time, gather to form a new collection, what remains of that
pleasure if 80% of that would-be collection can be found in one hour sitting
at your desk and is immediately available for purchase? This has
completely changed the psychological and cultural aspects that historically
drove people towards collecting.
   As a matter of fact, over the last two decades, there has been a boom in
online commercial databases and metasearch websites that have
revolutionized the trade both from the seller’s and buyer’s side.
   The aforementioned Vialibri platform, founded in 2006, is by far the
world’s largest search engine for old, rare and second-hand books.
However, it was not the first of its kind, as others previously had already
existed, like AddALL,3 another metasearch that is still in use but was over
the years overtaken by Vialibri in the same dramatic way as Yahoo was
replaced by Google. Vialibri searches for books that are listed for sale on 147
different databases, 33 of which are multi-dealer websites world-wide,




KENNETH KARMIOLE, Collecting the Physical Book in the Digital Age, «Journal of the Book Club
of Washington», XI, 2011, 2, retrieved 28 April 2013.
1 MARIO SALMI, L’Abbazia di Pomposa, Roma, Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1936.
2 Vialibri, <https://www.vialibri.net/>.
3 Addall Book Search and Price Comparison, <https://www.addall.com/>.




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among them AbeBooks,4 Amazon, Biblio,5 eBay, ABAA,6 ZVAB,7
Maremagnum,8 Alibris,9 Antiqbook,10 Booklooker,11 Bokbörsen,12
Buchfreund,13 Antiquariat,14 Livre-rare-book,15 PBFA,16 NVvA,17
Antikvariat,18 Books and Collectibles,19 Bookzangle,20 ChrisLandsSearch,21
etc. The remaining 114 databases are the stock of single independent
booksellers.
   The main purpose of Vialibri, according to its founder and managing
director Jim Hinck, a former antiquarian bookseller for 40 years, is that of
facilitating the search of antiquarian books online and comparing prices if
more copies of the same title are available at that particular moment:

     The main thing I wanted was to create a website that would allow you to
     search with one click all the old and rare books for sale anywhere on the
     internet. I also wanted it to be something that could focus, in particular, on
     early and rare books. There were already a couple of comparison-shopping
     sites, but these were mostly designed and used for finding the cheapest copies
     of specific used books. They leaned heavily on ISBN numbers, which meant
     that they ignored the special needs of collectors and other bibliophiles who,
     of course, were mostly interested in books from before 1970. In my view the
     most important thing that was lacking was a way to filter and sort books by
     publication date. It seemed to me to be the one essential tool for book hunting
     and we included it in our very first release. But there were other goals, all of
     them focused on things that would help collectors find books. Another thing
     I wanted to have, from the beginning, was a tool that would do daily searches
     for new listings of all the books that are on my permanent want list. It took a
     long while to build it and many of our regular users still do not know it exits,
     but many of those who do consider it our most valuable feature and are even
     willing to pay for a subscription that gives them an enhanced version of this
     tool.22




4AbeBooks,   <https://www.abebooks.com/>.
5 Biblio.com, <https://www.biblio.com/>.
6 ABAA-Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, <https://www.abaa.org/>.
7 ZVAB-Zentrales Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher, <https://www.zvab.com/>.
8 Maremagnum, <https://www.maremagnum.com/>.
9 Alibris, <https://www.alibris.com/>.
10 Antiqbook, <https://www.antiqbook.com/>.
11 Booklooker, <https://www.booklooker.de/>.
12 Bokbörsen, <https://www.bokborsen.se/>.
13 Buchfreund, <https://www.buchfreund.de/de/>.
14 Antiquariat, <https://www.antiquariat.de/>.
15 LRB-Livre rare book, <https://www.livre-rare-book.com/>.
16 Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association, <https://www.pbfa.org/>.
17 Nederlandsche Vereeniging van Antiquaren, <https://nvva.nl/>.
18 Antikvariat, <https://www.antikvariat.net/sv/?currency=SEK>.
19 Books and Collectibles, <https://booksandcollectibles.com.au>.
20 Bookzangle <https://bookzangle.com/>.
21 ChrisLandsSearch, <https://www.chrislandssearch.com/>.
22 Private email sent to me by Jim Hinck on 02.17.2022.




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As of today, Vialibri estimates that it contains between 250 and 300 million
books, including items that have already been sold. A precise figure is
impossible to cite as many large sites like Amazon, Abebooks or ZVAB do
not want to share information on the number of books they have on display
in their platforms. Most of those books are, though, inexpensive, second-
hand books that will never show up in searches conducted by Vialibri’s
users who are more interested in older books. According to Hinck, it has
been roughly calculated that 9% of the books that appear in Vialibri’s search
results are over 100 years old, but that could be more a reflection of the
tastes and interests of Vialibri’s users rather than the actual percentage of
all the books available for sale anywhere online.
The implications for booksellers, librarians, scholars and even the
specialized law enforcement units of this gigantic storage of information on
books and works on paper can be hardly underestimated. In fact, as for the
sold items, Vialibri keeps records, including descriptions, of all the books
that appear in the search results, with the plan of saving that data
indefinitely. Unfortunately, now, the data is not accessible to users, but
according to Jim Hinck it will be in the future.
    Let’s move now to describe the most significant players in the online
antiquarian book trade. They are of two kinds. First are the databases that
list and make searchable the books of all the individual professional
booksellers (and in some cases also private sellers) who want to have their
books displayed on them and are willing to pay a monthly fee and a
commission on each sale to be allowed to participate. The most important
of these are AbeBooks, Amazon, Biblio, eBay, ABAA, ZVAB, Maremagnum,
Alibris, Antiqbook, and for the French-speaking world Livre-rare-book and
Bibliorare.23 These are the databases metasearch sites like Vialibri draw
their records from.
    The other kind of online commercial databases are the auction house sale
result platforms, basically metasearch websites that keep records of most of
the sales from most of the major auction houses from all over Western
Europe and North America and are constantly updated. Unlike the players
in the previous category, to access the results of these second type of
databases a subscription fee is required, and therefore their data is not
openly available to everyone. Unfortunately, only very few of these sites
have replied to my questions and were willing to share their data. Therefore
in most cases I have had to rely on the scarce information available online
(some free statistics are available at the end).
    Luckily, one of the most important of these sites, Abebooks, is one of the
very few which decided to share some data. Founded in British Columbia,
Canada by the owners of a used bookshop to help customers find a book or
specific edition of a book they needed,


23   Bibliorare, <https://www.bibliorare.com/>.


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     AbeBooks.com went live in the summer of 1996 with books from three local
     sellers. Used and rare booksellers were recruited via visits to book fairs in the
     US and Canada. Essentially, the website helped customers find books that had
     become hard to find such as out-of-print titles, first editions or signed copies,
     books about specialist subjects, or antiquarian books dating back to the early
     days of printing or earlier. For sellers, AbeBooks provided orders from
     customers around the world with their books listed for sale 24 hours a day
     every day. In short, AbeBooks connected buyers with sellers. It still does
     today. The company expanded through organic growth and acquisition. In
     2001, AbeBooks acquired Germany’s JustBooks – another online book
     marketplace. This allowed AbeBooks to launch websites in Germany, France
     and the UK. In 2004, AbeBooks acquired the Spanish marketplace IberLibro,
     which became its Spanish website. A website for Italy was built and launched
     in 2008. In 2011, ZVAB.com was acquired to give AbeBooks a second website
     in Germany. AbeBooks expanded its selection by adding sellers who offered
     new books and university textbooks. You will also find art such as prints,
     maps, photographs, ephemera and other paper-based collectibles.
         In 2008, AbeBooks was acquired by Amazon and it now operates as an
     independent subsidiary. We have customers in almost every country of the
     world and sellers in more than 50 countries. AbeBooks’ revenue comes from
     a monthly subscription fee for sellers and commission charged on sales.
         Today, AbeBooks’ purpose remains the same as in 1996 - we want to help
     people find and buy the books they love. We are still a pure online
     marketplace, which means we hold no inventory ourselves but rely entirely
     on books provided by third-party sellers. These sellers cover a wide spectrum
     including traditional used bookshops, high-end antiquarian dealers, high
     volume used sellers operating from warehouses, and home-based sellers.
         Booksellers from multiple antiquarian bookselling associations use
     AbeBooks including the Italian organization, Associazione Librai Antiquari
     d’Italia24 [whose members are affiliates of ILAB, the International League of
     Antiquarian Booksellers25].
         We do not disclose exactly how many books are listed on for sale on our
     site. The number changes constantly. In terms of antiquarian books, we have
     hundreds of thousands of items published before 1900 with new listings being
     added every day. The oldest book listed for sale today26 on AbeBooks may be
     an 11th-century manuscript.27
         The search function on AbeBooks is important. The advanced search
     includes options such as data range and publisher field, which allows
     customers to search for specific books. If a customer wishes to see 12th century
     manuscripts or books from a 19th-century publisher, they can. Customers can
     also set Search Preferences, which means they can search for only certain
     product types, or just used items, or perhaps books from sellers from a
     particular region.
         We regularly publish pages listing most expensive sales. In 2021, our most
     expensive sale was a rare illustrated book about Montana, which sold for US$




24 <https://www.abebooks.com/books/rarebooks/seller-associations>.
25 ILAB- International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, <ilab.org>.
26 01.25.2022.
27 <www.abebooks.com/Liturgical-Rites-Prayers-used-Bishop-Latin/31003183771/bd>.




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     37,500.28 AbeBooks’ most expensive sale of all time 29 was an illustrated book
     about birds published in Venice in 1765, which sold for UD$ 191,000.30

It has been estimated that roughly 50%-60% of the dealers appearing on one
large site like Abebooks also appear on at least one other platform, making
it even more difficult to calculate the exact number of antiquarian books
actually offered online. So, the total number of books that are still available
and have been available online over the last 20 years cannot be calculated
by simply summing up the number of records of every single database,
were these numbers even readily made known.
    One of the very few other databases willing to share information was
Maremagnum, by far the most important Italian commercial book database.
The very ambitious purpose of its founder, the antiquarian bookseller
Sergio Malavasi, was to make available online all books published from any
time and any country. According to Malavasi, he was moved by the same
ideal that more than 300 years before had pushed the bibliophile Francesco
Marucelli (1625-1703) to create the Mare Magnum Omnium Materiarum, a
universal bibliography, arranged by subject in 111 volumes in folio, that in
the end was never published.
    Unlike Marucelli’s project, Maremagnum.com went online in 1995 and
in the following years only continued to grow in importance. Unlike some
of its competitors, Maremagnum only accepts catalogs of professional
bookshops associated with the international and Italian league of
antiquarian bookdealers, as they provide a guarantee of quality and
professionalism. In 2004 Malavasi launched Marelibrorum.com, the
historical archive of bibliographic records that over the years have been
displayed on the Maremagnum website (Marelibrorum today counts
almost 60 million books), and in 2007 he created the metasearch engine
Marelibri.com.
    Today Maremagnum lists the books of more than 600 antiquarian
bookshops and 100 publishers, offering a total of about 13 million titles
(books, prints, postcards, periodicals, photographs, autographs, posters,
etc.). The website attracts 10,000 daily visitors and the newsletter reaches
about 75,000 subscribers, with an average of 300 orders per day.31
    As for the second kind of online commercial databases, those of the
auction houses, they can be divided between those which draw their
records from a specific linguistic area and those which try to be as
international as possible. In this second group, the main platforms that

28 <https://www.abebooks.com/books/most-expensive-sales-2021>.
29 <https://www.abebooks.com/books/most-expensive-sales/ever.shtml>.
30 Private email sent to me by Richard Davies, Abebooks public relations manager, on

01.25.2022.
31 All the information on Maremagnum was given to me by Sergio Malavasi via email on

03.08.2022.



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focus on international sales are Rare Book Hub,32 American Book Prices
Current,33 Invaluable,34 and LiveAuctioneers.35 In the first category you
have JAP-Online36 (Jahrbuchs der Auktionspreise für Bücher,
Handschriften und Autographen) for Germany, and Drouot37 and
Interencheres38 for France. A further distinction can be drawn between the
sites that are specialized only in books and works on paper like Rare Book
Hub, American Book Prices Current and JAP-Online, and those, like
Invaluable, LiveAuctioneers, Drouot and Interencheres, which include
books and related material as one of the many collectible categories they
have on offer.
   Rare Book Hub Transaction History searches a database of 11,455,654
records pertaining to books and related material. The vast majority are
priced records from auction houses, though some classic bookseller
catalogues are included. New records are added almost daily. American
Book Prices Currant is a record of books, manuscripts, autographs, maps,
and broadsides sold at auction.
   The reference metasearch engine for the German speaking auction
houses is JAP. Its database collects sale results from all major auction houses
in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland dating
back to 1990, and contains more than 910,000 auctioned books.
   Interencheres, Drouot, Invaluable and LiveAuctioneers are more
generalist platforms which also include books and works on paper but are
essentially marketplaces for fine art, antiques and collectibles in general.
   One important feature of auction house sale databases is that by
reporting “real” results, i.e. prices actually fetched by items sold at auction,
and not prices “asked” by dealers, they provide a standard reference tool
for dealers, appraisers, scholars, and tax authorities.
   A few remarks can be made in conclusion. The situation has dramatically
changed compared to 20 years ago when the first surveys and studies of the
internet’s impact on the antiquarian book trade started to appear, while
many of the same drawbacks and advantages persist today.
   There has certainly been an enormous increase in the online availability
of both books and services compared to the beginning of the century. Some
websites that were pioneers in the field don’t exist anymore or have merged
with other websites to form new platforms. Others, like Bookfinder,39 a
leading platform in the late 1990s, have subsequently turned their attention
more towards text- and second-hand books.

32 Rare Book Hub, <https://rarebookhub.com/>.
33 American Book Prices Current, <https://bookpricescurrent.com/>.
34 Invaluable, <https://www.invaluable.com/>.
35 LiveAuctioneers, <https://www.liveauctioneers.com/>.
36 JAP-Online, <https://bookauctionrecords.org/>.
37 Drouot, <https://drouot.com/>.
38 Interencheres, <https://www.interencheres.com/>.
39 Bookfinder, <https://www.bookfinder.com/>.




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For booksellers the benefits of having their books displayed online, today
just as 20 years ago, still outweigh the drawbacks, as the internet allows for
the possibility of reaching an almost infinite audience, and services aimed
at improving efficiency are continuously being improved. But the costs
(both financial and professional) have also significantly risen. If in the pre-
internet era one of the major expenditures for an antiquarian book dealer
was the printing and shipping of a catalogue (something that today has
become a far less regular occurrence, reserved, say, for the promotion of a
large collection whose content is considered worth publishing; only a
handful of booksellers continue to publish substantial catalogues on a
regular basis), now it is the fixed fees and commission percentages of online
sales that mostly influence the pricing policies of dealers. Further, the
possibility of instantly comparing prices across the internet has meant that
prices overall have gone down, significantly reducing the value of the
dealers’ inventories.
   Yet the most striking negative development over the last 20 years, in
terms of the online marketing of antiquarian books, concerns the
progressive loss of independence and freedom of booksellers, to the
advantage of online platforms. With the constant threat of receiving
negative feedback and being downgraded by the system, dealers are
obliged to offer services or promise high levels of efficiency that can often
be too difficult to maintain for small businesses generally made up of one
or two persons, like answering a client’s question or shipping a sold item
within a few days. Moreover, because descriptions and prices are so easily
accessible and remain available online, potentially forever, to be used and
compared by anyone, dealers have lost the intellectual property of their
descriptions and bibliographical research; what was once the exclusive
domain of specialists, who were the sole repositories of certain information,
has now apparently become common knowledge available to all, though
not always easy to interpret without a specific preparation and therefore
often misleading. Nevertheless, the benefits of the online market for the
antiquarian book trade can hardly be underestimated.
   In contrast to the clientele for physical bookstores, which has suffered a
setback due to the pandemic, the online book market has continued to grow
in the last two years and there is evidence that it will continue to do so as
an increasing number of customers grow more confident at buying even
very expensive books from these online platforms, showing an increasing
level of trust in their reliability, a trust that is less evident for the websites
of individual booksellers. This is probably due to the major sense of
protection that customers perceive on the big platforms both in terms of
payment safety and restitution policy. Even though this is certainly an
advantage for many dealers, many of them regret about not being able to
deal directly with the final customer, although a few platforms do allow for
this.



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It is quite clear that the online trade is experiencing the same trend as that
experienced by the physical bookshop, with major chains and big stores
taking over and/or englobing smaller businesses as they are much more
visible and are perceived as more secure. This is having a major impact on
the way booksellers are cataloguing their material, focusing more on the
visual part of descriptions rather than on the bibliographic and research
aspects (which means more high-definition pictures and shorter
descriptions that can quickly capture the attention of an easily distracted
customer), but also on the way collectors decide what to buy. With stable
relationships between booksellers and collectors becoming rarer and rarer
and opportunities for booksellers to advise customers likewise dwindling,
online sales tend to appear more and more random, no longer guided by a
defined collecting plan. While this might be advantageous to certain
purchasers, it also has significant drawbacks for serious long-term
collectors, especially for those just embarking on their collecting journey, an
issue with clear consequences within the book world, which can be difficult
for newcomers to “enter” and navigate without the sort of guidance offered
by experienced and specialized dealers.
    Bookfairs remain a major forum for interactions between dealers and
collectors, be they private or institutional, but due to the pandemic these
have largely moved online as well, and travel restrictions have severely
affected the presence of an audience during the few in-person fairs that
have taken place over the last two years. This is presumably temporary, but
it is foreseeable that many fairs will decide to keep both options open, i.e.
by offering, at different prices, and for many years to come, the possibility
of exhibiting in-person or just virtually.
    Dealers and collectors will have to learn to adjust in a rapidly-changing
rare book world more and more influenced by technology. As physical
books will continue to be appreciated and collected in different forms for a
very long time, book collecting will simply take new paths that will surely
have an impact on what will be preserved and what will be dispersed, as it
has always been the case.




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Denomination         Website40                     Indexed     Global    Users in the CAt
                                                   pages       Rank41    last 30 days Rank42


JAP-Online           www.bookauctionrecords.org 8              --        --            --
American Book
Prices Current       www.bookpricescurrent.com 233             --        --            --

Rare Book Hub        www.rarebookhub.com           26000       523821    50800         2086

Bibliorare           www.bibliorare.com            39200       --        --            --

Vialibri             www.vialibri.net              119000      248324    140700        509

BookFinder           www.bookfinder.com            621000      48652     985100        34

Alibris              www.alibris.com               1200000     31639     1500000

Antiqbook            www.antiqbook.com             1320000     331467    128200        390

AbeBooks IT          www.abebooks.it               2070000     153770    323400        36

Maremagnum           www.maremagnum.com            2390000     78885     604600        14

Biblio               www.biblio.com                2770000     29374     2000000       511

LiveAuctioneers      www.liveauctioneers.com       3920000     9200      4600000       5

IberLibro            www.iberlibro.com             4740000     28332     1900000       14

Invaluable           www.invaluable.com            4820000     12904     4100000       10

ZVAB                 www.zvab.com                  5650000     35033     150000        39

AbeBooks COM         www.abebooks.com              6380000     4657      9900000       14

AbeBooks DE          abebooks.de                   2680000     81558     533900        78




40 These statistics were taken on March 16th, 2002.
41 Traffic rank of site, compared to all other sites in the world.
42 Traffic rank of the site compared to all other sites in its main category in the top country.




36
