Learnings From AbeBooks As An Early Marketplace For Used Books

6 Mar 2023 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:31

Max Brun discusses AbeBooks' early days as an online used book marketplace. The biggest challenge was getting booksellers to digitize their inventories, which were scattered across ad-hoc lists and spreadsheets. Unique supply became the key differentiator that set AbeBooks apart from competitors.

Chapters

You know, I guess to go back to AbeBooks though, so that was an early, you know, marketplace. So could you kind of walk us through, you know, your experience with AbeBooks and, you know, maybe some of the kind of like the key learnings or insights within, you know, marketplaces that you've now taken with you to investing in them?
Yeah, I mean, I have to preface that it was a very different period, right? And, you know, one of the challenges we had in the beginning was really getting supply onto the marketplace because all of these booksellers, they didn't really have a digital inventory, right? Sometimes perhaps had a Word document with some of their most valuable books, right? But it wasn't structured in a database or often they didn't have anything at all, right? And so one of the biggest challenges in the beginning was to really get inventory online, getting supply online, which involved for us also even creating a little computer program to kind of help inventory your books, right? So it was a very different challenge at the time. And supply in general was less liquid than it is today. So getting unique supply onto the marketplace was incredibly important and really the differentiator for us. Supply is still where the marketplace starts today, right? But today I think everybody who is participating in marketplace is much more sophisticated, has kind of very quickly will discover different options. So supply is much more liquid than it ever was before. So.