Rare Book Monthly
Articles - August - 2005 Issue
Abebooks to Add Descriptions and Cover Photos to Listings
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Another presumed positive is this will sell more books. I cannot vouch for this, nor is it likely Abe can until it is rolled out. One imagines that the folks at Abe looked into this matter before making the change, and that the other sites which provide this additional information do so because it has proven to help sell books. If it does, this should make everyone, Abe and booksellers alike, happy.
The downside, as I see it, is that it may make booksellers lazy, or reward the lazy by providing homogenous, undifferentiated listings. Much of what distinguishes one dealer from another, and the knowledgeable from the pretender, is the quality of their descriptions. What incentive is there for a dealer to do his or her homework if someone else can provide what at least appears to be comparable information without doing a thing? And once we diminish the value of the bookseller's work product, do we need him/her at all? Information is the dealer's added value. Now any ignorant fool can add information. It may not be as good, and certainly not original, but if it provides comparable sales as doing your own work, how long is it before no one performs their own research? Will this added information have the ironic effect of ultimately reducing information available to the buyer?
Perhaps much of this is academic already. The book listing sites may have already irretrievably done what the large discount stores and online sites have done to expert sellers in retail fields such as electronics. We've all seen how buyers go to a small electronics store for advice on what to purchase, and then armed with that knowledge, go to the cheaper discount store to make their purchases. The result is that expert advice has become hard to come by. Amateur sellers may already be camping out on the detailed research and explanations provided by the professional booksellers. They may not be directly copying the professionals' descriptions, but the reality is that when you search for a title, everyone's listings come up together. You can read the description from the bookseller whose price may reflect the effort he put in to research the book and explain its importance, and then buy it from the seller who did nothing but post it for sale. Perhaps Abe's decision simply reflects reality today more than it changes it. We inexorably trade expertise for price.
