WHAT'S NEW?

SITE OF THE WEEK

When push comes to shove, books are still the best gifts. With apologies to Sara Lee cakes, nobody doesn’t like a good book. You can’t get the wrong size or color. They don’t need batteries. And even after you devour a book, you can resell it online.

VISIT Alibris web site

Why any company wants to take on the likes of Amazon.com is hard to fathom, since the Internet giant has reduced its profit margin on books to miniscule levels. And yet the new Overstock.com is advertising rates below Amazon. I checked. Sure enough, Exeter, New Hampshire author Dan Brown’s bestseller The DaVinci Code (hardcover retail $24.95) is going for $14.97 on Amazon. Overstock.com has it for an astonishing $11.22, fully 26 percent lower than both Amazon and its top competitor BarnesandNoble.com.

If the American Booksellers Association is right, there will be even more blood in the snow as the battle continues. The ABA quotes an "U.S. eCommerce Overview" prediction that online book sales will double in the next five years. The report, issued by a Cambridge, Massachusetts firm, says online book sales will jump from $2.8 billion in 2003 to $5.5 billion in 2008. By that time Internet sales will account for 10 percent of all retail sales in the nation.

That explains, in part, why competing book sale sites are still appearing. Heck, even the federal government has one. Check out bookstore.gpo.gov. Your tax dollars at work.

THE WEB SITE MAKERS

I’m not compelled to read the hottest new books. A good novel is just as good a year later when the paperback hits the racks and the hardcover version is available online for a song. I thought I’d exhausted the topic of used book web sites in this column until a friend this week recommended Alibris.com. Wow!

Alibris describes itself as "the world's most comprehensive source of used, new, and hard-to-find books, music and movies." That’s a pretty hefty claim nowadays, one I simply had to test.

All I want for Christmas is an obscure volume by Portsmouth-born author Benjamin Penhallow Shillaber (1814-1890). A century and a half ago BP Shillaber, was among the most famous writers in America. Shillaber inspired and encourage the comic work of Mark Twain. His fictional character Mrs. Ruth Partington (fashioned, reportedly, after his own New Hampshire Aunt) Was a dotty country-bumpkin famous for her Malapropisms. Asked, for example, how she liked the bustle of Boston, Mrs. Partington once replied that they were hard to wear and kept slipping out of place.

Copies of Shillaber’s five books are as rare as hen’s teeth these days. I searched the top online sites for his most famous book entitled, The Life and sayings of Mrs. Partington and others of the family. Overstock.com, of course, had none, nor did Powells.com, another popular book site. Half.com, a used book site owned by eBay.com, surprisingly, came up empty too. Barnes and Noble had two copies for sale -- pretty impressive. Amazon.com had six copies of the 1854 bestseller.

Yet Alibris won the competition hands down with eleven copies ranging in price from $14.95 to $281.20, depending on the quality of the book. What’s more, Alibris wins points too for its ease of use. The price is large and highly visible. The condition of the book and other features are clearly indicated on a graphical rating system. Generally the page design is appealing, warm and not filled with distracting ads and irrelevant features. I was instantly convinced to check Alibris from now on when searching for a used or rare book. According to the site homepage, Alibris buyers can currently select from 35 million volumes.

THE UP SHOT

But the big gorilla on the block is still Amazon.com. Last year at this time, astute readers will recall, I ordered a bunch of used books through Amazon, only to discover I had actually ordered them from a neighbor in Portsmouth. Through a system called Marketplace, tens of thousands of third-party booksellers can enter tens of thousands of books each into the Amazon database that acts as a clearinghouse. Alibris works the same way, but Amazon simply has more vendors. The books I ordered cost as much as $24 new on Amazon. I got them for 89 cents each, by clicking the "Used" button.

This year Amazon has added an equally stupendous new piece of software. Instead of searching only titles and book summaries, readers can now search through the ENTIRE text of over 120,000 digitized volumes. The results are mind boggling. By searching for "Mrs. Partington", for example, I can locate every book that even mentions her name once. There were quite a few, proving that BP Shillaber’s famous character is still quoted even today.

The new Amazon tool is called "Search Inside the Book" and has stunning potential for researchers. Now instead of leafing through hundreds of books for a tiny reference, just click to Amazon. What was a shopping site, is now an electronic reference library too. In fact the ability to read what is inside a book without buying it has some critics questioning the ethics of the new technology. A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor asks whether "Search Inside the Book" isn’t actually a form of stealing. I admit, I’ve stolen a few quotes already, but I have also bought a couple of books I would never have purchased without this nifty search engine.

And in another publishing shocker, last week the British Library turned over much of its bibliographical records to the English version of Amazon.com. According to the British technology press (news.zdnet.co.uk) this prestigious institution made 1.7 million of its 2.55 million records available for use on the Internet.

Here’s why that matters: In order for a private bookseller to list a book for sale on Amazon, the book must already be listed in the company’s database. So if, for example, Amazon did not have BP Shillaber in its records, no one with a copy of a Shillaber book could offer it for sale. With nearly the entire contents of the British Library database, many of the books rare indeed, Amazon now can expand the trafficking of antiquarian books in the United Kingdom. Since a lot of our classical literature Is British literature, Americans win too, especially those of us who prefer reading above all other earthly pleasures.