Rare Book Hub, né Americana Exchange twenty-five years ago, was intended to build a bridge to the future of collecting. Whatever that meant, I didn’t really know. But now I have a clearer idea born of building the Rare Book Transaction History database, that has become something that is greater than the sum of its parts. What does that mean?

We have long had enough information to credibly calculate rarity and value for hundreds of thousands of items and those valuations are useful to the field worldwide. 

Now we’re adding an easier way to capture an instant impression of how a printed item would fit into the world of collectibles.

To do this we’ve been running a thought experiment about how we can support libraries worldwide that receive hundreds of thousands of books every day because no one wants to throw them away. Are they valuable, are they rare, or very simply is there any market for them? Tens of thousands of library staff and volunteers handle close to a million donated items a day to identify appealing material that might financially support their institutions.

To do this, we’ve developed software that anyone who has a phone, can point and shoot at a book’s title page and its backside, it’s called the verso. With that we can instantly match our records with these images to provide an estimate of value within 5 seconds.

Older material will often (but not always) have a bit more value. So that’s a good place to start. When team members browse the donations to find interesting possibilities, we’ll immediately report yea or nay and then suggest values and options.

By our calculus and Gemini’s logic, a million gifted books (in many forms) received every day at libraries in the United States by themselves. Using this software, libraries could convert 2% of this material directly into cash in an efficient way.

To test this process, we’re providing free trials to institutions. We’ll give them 200 scans per institution to see if our snaps can be turned into cashflow. 

This software will find a place throughout the collectible paper world. For libraries, we have built this for them.

If you would like to become an early adapter, send us an email to bmckinney@rarebookhub.com.