In honor of Halloween I wanted to pass along Abebooks’ list of the top 10 most expensive Steven King books ever sold at the site.  Also Amazon’s Listmania’s scariest books list.

I was browsing Abebooks this morning and a thin banner across the top of the page caught my attention: “Free shipping: Millions of books. No minimum purchase.” Now that’s something that can reign in weary online buyers, especially students. The cost of shipping, mostly thanks to eBay gimmicks and sites that caluclate shipping after you spend 5 minutes putting your information in, is one of the main hesitations for potential online consumers. Abe scores in two regards here: one for placing the banner and two for offering sellers the ability to set their own shipping prices.

Looking for book sales?  Find the frequent visits to check for new sales annoying?  Us too.  In our latest roll out of features at Book Sale Scout, we’ve added RSS feeds (what are feeds?) for any search you can make.  Therefore, whether you are using city name, keyword, state, zip code, etc. you can now add these search results to your favorite news reader.  As you know, with each update/addition your reader will alert you instantly of the change.  This complements are preexisting “instant” sale alerts.
We’ve successfully added a built-in star ranking system for each sale as well as flagging options, similar to Craigslist.  You can flag sales with “bad information,” “best of,” or “spam” flags.

We are currently testing a live system for book sale organizers to “claim” a sale, modify their sales, and even edit their sales.

We are still working out the kinks in the search function of ’sales within “x” days.’  Also, while we’d like to not remove past sales (for ranking and commenting purposes) we’d like to make the past sales not part of the search results table, but linked somewhere else on the page.

These changes set Book Sale Scout apart when it comes to book sale directories.  I’ve spent my entire time on expanding the book sale database and improving features, as opposed to selling ads.  This has paid off for our users and the nonprofits using our site to market their sale.  I hope it shows that our number one commitment is creating a functional site that benefits booksellers, book collectors, book lovers, and book sale organizers alike.