Alibris
| Alibris Inc. <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;"> | |
| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1998 Emeryville, California |
| Headquarters | Emeryville, California <tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Key people</th><td>Marty Manley, CEO |
</td></tr>Alibris is an on-line store that sells used books, out-of-print books, rare books, and other media articles through an on-line network of thousands of independent bookstores. Booksellers in many countries list their inventories on Alibris which in turn offers the books on its website, as well as other channels such as Barnes and Noble and Borders Books. In return, it receives a monthly fee and a percentage commission on sales. The business premise is that Alibris can save a small bookseller time and money by listing once with Alibris and then have Alibris list to other, well-known book retailers. These new-book retailers get access to older books that might be out of print or hard to find without having to integrate with each small seller individually. The consumer, in turn, only has to go to a few sources to get access to many booksellers. The company claims to offer more than 60 million books from a network of over 10,000 book sellers.
Unlike other companies which aggregate numerous used book sellers, Alibris also maintains its own stock of used books, which are offered to buyers alongside the rest. Alibris has a policy of keeping for itself books returned by customers that had been priced under $100, instead of having them shipped back to the original seller. Alibris, in its early years, bought out the entire stock of many storefront used booksellers. These are probably the 2 largest sources for the Alibris-owned stock, which is warehoused in Sparks, Nevada.
Certain sales made through Alibris are sent by the bookseller to the Sparks location, where they are inspected and repackaged for shipping overseas, or are combined with items from other sellers and shipped to library buyers, for their convenience.
While one of the older and larger companies who combine the listings of many sellers, Alibris has larger and smaller competitors such as Abebooks, Amazon.com and Biblio.com. In addition, sites that search many bookseller sites (i.e., metasearch sites), such as AddALL and BookFinder.com also compete as services which allow buyers to find a new or used book and compare offerings among many booksellers.
Alibris also has a similar network for music (albums, cassette tapes, and CDs) and movies (VHS or DVD) although they appear to mostly focus on the used book market.
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Categories
Bookstores | Online music stores | Online retail companies of the United States | 1998 establishments | Book websites