ABE - Badly Managed & Greedy?

Booksellers have long been unhappy with the fact that ABE started off
charging just a fixed rate 'shelf' fee before deciding to extract blood
proper by initiating a commission-system and credit-card handling
charges when they realised they had a virtual monopoly. Loyal
booksellers are being bled dry to pay for ABE's higher salaries, huge
operating profit and large investment in new book sales. Collectors
meanwhile are being infuriated by ABE's greedy inclusion of fake
booksellers who list print-on-demand books and photocopying services:
try searching for any desired book these days and you don't just get
the handful of actual, real copies, you get swamped with hundreds of
multiple listings from POD sellers, many of whom breach copyright.

Now for the second time this year, the whole ABE system has ground to a
halt. No new books have been listed for several weeks, no wants matches
have been sent out, hundreds of thousands of book listings have been
wiped from the database. Back in the early days, before ABE got greedy
and overstretched themselves, this sort of cock-up rarely happened.

Does anyone else think that the ABE service is steadily getting worse?

A former ABE bookseller

I am not an ABE bookseller altho I am contempating becoming one, and
so have downloaded the software, agreement, and so on. Therefore my
experiences with ABE to date have been as a buyer, not a seller.

I see nothing wrong with charging commission. Commission makes the
world go 'round.

I did note the exorbitant credit card fees. I took this as an
indication that ABE wants out of the credit card processing business.
As you point out (and as I also did in a recent post) with 'dealers'
selling all kinds of over-graded and sham stuff, ABE was probably
dealing with mammoth amounts of chargebacks that were not adequately
built into their cost structure. They have now decided they need to be
compensated for this.

The obvious answer is to process your own credit cards. THere are many
ways to do this and since you are selling boring books and not plasma
TVs you should be able to process CCs for under 2%.

Funny, while I buy a book or two or three a week I have never been
bombarded with photocopies or reprints (if only we could get rid of
those damn paperbacks tho, lol). But I buy almost exclusively modern
literary fiction. Maybe it's different in more specialized fields.

Denton



On 12 Aug 2005 09:24:49 -0700, "Shelf Space"
<hauntedriver RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:

>Booksellers have long been unhappy with the fact that ABE started off
>charging just a fixed rate 'shelf' fee before deciding to extract blood
>proper by initiating a commission-system and credit-card handling
>charges when they realised they had a virtual monopoly. Loyal
>booksellers are being bled dry to pay for ABE's higher salaries, huge
>operating profit and large investment in new book sales. Collectors
>meanwhile are being infuriated by ABE's greedy inclusion of fake
>booksellers who list print-on-demand books and photocopying services:
>try searching for any desired book these days and you don't just get
>the handful of actual, real copies, you get swamped with hundreds of
>multiple listings from POD sellers, many of whom breach copyright.
>
>Now for the second time this year, the whole ABE system has ground to a
>halt. No new books have been listed for several weeks, no wants matches
>have been sent out, hundreds of thousands of book listings have been
>wiped from the database. Back in the early days, before ABE got greedy
>and overstretched themselves, this sort of cock-up rarely happened.
>
>Does anyone else think that the ABE service is steadily getting worse?
>
>A former ABE bookseller