Where to Buy Books

While we’re on the subject of book buying….before I joined Ross to launch Xtracycle I was thinking of starting a dot-com like everyone else I knew. It would be like Amazon but instead of putting little bookstores out of business it would help keep them running, maybe even make them stronger. And it would have more titles than Amazon. And it would have the largest selection of used books on the planet, filling in the Re-Use portion of the reduce reuse recycle rethink rejigger retread rewind thinger. Here’s how: the virtual store would simply be a central catalog of the current used and new offerings of all the participating small booksellers in the country (world?). From your little laptop in Winnemucca you’d order a book from bigusedbookstore.com and the little shop in Tuskaloosa would send it out to you. No matter how big Amazon got it would never have all the used titles available that all these little guys put together would. Well, the reason I never went forward with the idea was because I quickly found out that someone else already had. They’re called abebooks.com (for Advanced Book Exchange), and it seems like they’re going stronger than ever (13,000 participating stores and 70 million books). A dope way to support a little business somewhere after you’ve tried your own local indy bookseller. Buy used!