The world of new books online has been dominated by Amazon for so long that is hard to remember a time when you couldn't over-indulge your bookcase with one-click ordering. However there are many reasons why it is not a good idea to have the market place dominated by one player (see Jane's post on the POD saga for example), but there are alternatives. You can obviously support your high street independent bookshop on the use-it-or loose-it principle (if for no other reason) but if you must buy new books online, or your budget demands deep discounts then a new site hopped onto the new books scene last month.
Book Rabbit is a combined social networking and book buying site. Before the anti-networking site feelings raise their heads, please keep watching, as this site is really rather different. Firstly you needn't network at all if you don't want to. You can just buy books with free postage (no minimum order) and a guarantee that they'll beat Amazon's price on the top selling 100,000 titles. Not bad for starters. But if you want to network, it is not about posting your parents' address online so their house gets trashed, oh no, what you do is you network your bookcases. Honestly. You have to have an account as yourself, so there is no hiding under pseudonyms, and on your profile, if you want to join in, you can post pictures of your bookshelves. There is some kind of intelligent tagging mechanism so that you can separate and tag parts of the picture to identify which book is which. You can also claim books as your own just by searching and clicking add to my books. You can then become "friends" with people whose bookcases suggest similar interests.
From a blogger's point of view you can also link your blog to your profile and the rss feed appears there. Very useful for increasing traffic. I was pointed to Book Rabbit by a post Juliet at Musings from a Muddy Island, and bless her she has become my first friend on there. Within five minutes I had also bumped into the author Sarah Bower amongst the bookshelves too. There is also a Book Rabbit blog, and discussion boards. As Juliet says, I think Book Rabbit might be rather fun. Sadly, fun for UK buyers only at the moment.
2 comments:
Thanks for the mention. I should point out that one of the original stated aims of BookRabbit was that there would be links to local independent booksellers so you could check whether a certain book was in stock in your area as an alternative to ordering online. I haven't discovered this function on the site yet, but they are adding new features all the time, so maybe it will appear soon.
Great blog, btw - have added to my bookish blogroll and will be back.
Thanks Juliet!
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