Many booksellers thought that the Biblio train had all but puttered out in 2006. This year, however, there seems to be a growing number of booksellers on various discussion boards and in emails to myself cheering the increasing number of sales at the site.
I’ve always been a strong proponent of the site. I have written numerous times (most recently here) on the myriad aspects to its service that make it the most seller-friendly site on the net.
I took a gander at the site recently a did some consumer lens testing. For me, the most obvious issue is a somewhat clunky layout. The main landing page does a great job focusing your attention on the search box, but everything else on that page is more or less difficult to discern. The pervasive use of bullets on the page does nothing to help clarify the layout and really just look tacky. There is not a lot of symmetry among the 3 columns and the different boxes located within in each.
I really like the search results page and the myriad ways to sort and refine searches on the page. I would like to see the search engine get a little smarter, especially with names. For example, I searched for “Jim Cramer” books and only got 3 results. Why? Well, it seems he pens his books with the less colloquial “James J. Cramer.” Even more frustrating to me was that Jim Cramer IS in some of his book’s citations, just in the title and not the author field (which I used to search).
I love Biblio, don’t get me wrong. I think it provides a ton of value to the independent seller. I am less convinced as to whether or not it provides a strong enough value proposition for consumers. If Biblio does succeed in taking market share, many have asked who it will be taking it from. Most likely, it would be taking customers primarily from Abebooks and Alibris. Even with its impressive inventory growth (now 40 million books), it simply cannot compete with any of the big 3 in terms of newer titles, which really isolates Amazon from any Biblio surge.
