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I'm wondering if there's an equivalent to Discogs for old books? They have pretty much every record ever recorded, in every release, in every country. If you h

I'm wondering if there's an equivalent to Discogs for old books? They have pretty much every record ever recorded, in every release, in every country. If you have a release you think is rare, the buyer might ask you about the "dead wax", the writing on the space near the label after the last track. You can accept bids on it. They know all about shipping costs. I found it all to be a very pleasant experience. But it would be nice if the used book market stayed old-fashioned.

lazlee 4y ago
I've never used discog but abebooks.com might be like what you are describing.
- jfk13 4y ago
  I felt better about Abebooks before Amazon got their hands on it. Now, I'll only turn to it as a last resort.
  - lazlee 4y ago
    Oh, I didn't know amazon had bought them out. The whole project was first developed by a local second hand bookstore here on Vancouver island.
    - UIUC_06 4y ago
      I didn't, either. From what I can tell, they have a fairly light touch with their acquired companies (Zappos, Goodreads, IMDb). At least at first.
      - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
        It varies, the one called bookpages.co.uk became amazon.co.uk almost immediately, mobipocket sort of disappeared into Kindle services, bookdepository (a later UK purchase) continues to operate in its own fashion, shipping books for free in padded envelopes one at a time.
akiselev 4y ago
The old and rare book market is still completely old fashioned. Most of the best books on the field are out of print and themselves hard to find (we collectors horde them). See my other reply to you about bibliographies. There isn’t a central repository because we’re talking about millennia worth of very messy data [1]. Instead we have to first find a bibliography (usually itself an old or rare book from the same decade or century), make sure its not full of shit, then use that to identify the books we’re actually interested in. Edit: should have added a disclaimer that I collect books that were published before the ISBN was a thing. There’s definitely an ISBN database [1] collecting pre-Gutenberg manuscripts is insanely fun, hard, and eye wateringly expensive

lazlee 4y ago

I've never used discog but abebooks.com might be like what you are describing.

jfk13 4y ago
I felt better about Abebooks before Amazon got their hands on it. Now, I'll only turn to it as a last resort.
- lazlee 4y ago
  Oh, I didn't know amazon had bought them out. The whole project was first developed by a local second hand bookstore here on Vancouver island.
  - UIUC_06 4y ago
    I didn't, either. From what I can tell, they have a fairly light touch with their acquired companies (Zappos, Goodreads, IMDb). At least at first.
    - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
      It varies, the one called bookpages.co.uk became amazon.co.uk almost immediately, mobipocket sort of disappeared into Kindle services, bookdepository (a later UK purchase) continues to operate in its own fashion, shipping books for free in padded envelopes one at a time.

akiselev 4y ago

The old and rare book market is still completely old fashioned. Most of the best books on the field are out of print and themselves hard to find (we collectors horde them). See my other reply to you about bibliographies. There isn’t a central repository because we’re talking about millennia worth of very messy data [1]. Instead we have to first find a bibliography (usually itself an old or rare book from the same decade or century), make sure its not full of shit, then use that to identify the books we’re actually interested in. Edit: should have added a disclaimer that I collect books that were published before the ISBN was a thing. There’s definitely an ISBN database [1] collecting pre-Gutenberg manuscripts is insanely fun, hard, and eye wateringly expensive