  Virtual Ink A Highly Opinionated Guide I N D E X A Book Lovers' Portmanteau Ginsberg's Web The Critics Weigh In Indices & Ephemera The Thing Itself Just for Mystery Readers A Lexicomaniac's Short Shelf Bookstores In Cyberspace From Print To Web Web Search |
Virtual Ink : A Reader's Web Guide : Bookstores A Selection Of Online Booksellers' Sites UPDATE: The UK-based Internet Bookshop has been trading on the net for nearly a decade and, until a couple of years ago, claimed it was "the largest online bookshop in the world." Although it may no longer be the biggest (Amazon and B&N have seen to that), it remains one of the three biggest online European booksellers (alongside Amazon.co.uk and BOL Europe). In 1998 it was bought-up by the UK High Street entertainment retailer WHSmith. The Internet Bookshop's database of 1.5 million books is fully searchable, features books by categories and tastes, and invites you to subscribe to an e-mail update service in the areas of interest you select. The web home of Zardoz ("Europe's Largest Out-of-Print and Collectible Fiction Book Dealer") is a bit of a mess and can be slow to load, but we've added it just because we like its funky look and feel -- which might be described as retro tabloid trash with a noir twist. Featured are paperbacks, pulps and comics with an emphasis on British gangsters and appealingly garish cover art. Zardoz is a member of the International Book Collector's Association, which is itself definitely worth a visit. After first surfing several categories of offerings at Booksmith, we signed up immediately for this unusually rich online shop's mailing list. We couldn't help it; we had to have more of this creative bookseller's infectious enthusiasm for the printed word. Booksmith's terraspace manifestation, where writers with readerships great and small regularly read and sign, is on Haight Street in San Francisco -- which provides yet another fine excuse to visit The City (at least it will, when California gets over its health cop fixation and again lets folks decide whether they wish to patronize or work in nasty, smoky bars and other unwholesome venues dear to our hearts). Booksmith stocks some 50,000 eclectic but well-chosen titles, including newly published and backlist books and many sale books, signed books and collectable books. All are nicely reviewed by Booksmith staff and the site is both thoughtfully organized and searchable. Bookmark this treasure at once! Surfer Grrrls, Cyber Chicks, Wired Women and Girl Geek Wannabes unite! The power of the World Wide Web has fallen into the hands of feminists and all (even boys) are invited to the party at Sisterhood Bookstore. Physically anchored in L.A., this cybershop emphasizes gender and racial equality in its inventory of some 12,000 titles. The shop's database is searchable as well as browsable by area of interest; they'll even gift wrap a present-by-mail for a significant other if you want them to. Above all, Sisterhood Bookstore displays a splendid attitude. Whether you've got the Stone Butch Blues, are seeking A Taste of Power, or find yourself in need of a Book of Blessings, this bookstore's for you. The Midnight Special Bookstore site is searchable, of course, and there are many useful signposts to areas of special interest. And we are darn near ecstatic to report that Midnight Special hosts book-related events at the meatspace store nearly every night of the week and all day on weekends! (Woody Allen, take note: there's more cultural life in L.A. -- or at least in Santa Monica -- than meets the New Yorker's jaded eye.) If you're not in the neighborhood but are desperately seeking literary thrills, the bookstore records many of its events and offers the results on video or audio tape at bargain prices. Midnight Special brings new meaning to the too-often empty tag "full service." Sign up online for one of their mailing lists and you'll be as hip as any bibliomaniac in your neighborhood. A&A Farmar is a new publisher and online bookseller based in Dublin. Its young list is brief, as one might expect in these early days, but it contains some gems. Chief among them is a sampling of pieces from Brendan Behan's Dubbalin Man, a collection of the late writer's Irish Press columns. We partiularly like the annotated piece titled "Overheard In A Bookshop." You also can pick up a recipe or two, get the low-down on what to do if you find yourself in Belfast, or brush up your knowledge of the socio-historical significance of a number of Irish pubs. And, of course, you can order online. Remember when we used to call them bookstores? The moniker seems rather quaint these days, doesn't it? Open Book Systems, to single out one prime example of the metamorphosis, purveys much more than books. In fact, it is more about what proprietor Laura Fillmore, a formidable webspace entrepreneur and cybercommerce evangelist, calls kinetic publishing than it is about traditional bookselling. Worth a look, if for no other reason than its pioneer credentials. Bibliocity is retro to the max in attitude but up to the minute in technology, and therefore perfectly in tune with its wired customers. This addition to the ranks of rare-and-collectible bookshops consolidates the lists of several international booksellers under its banner and displays the amalgamated goods by way of a sophisticated and easy-to-use search engine. Full details on the edition and condition of each book are offered and many can be seen in photographs. Prices are provided in the customer's currency of choice. You don't need to register to use the site, but if you do you will be notified by e-mail when a book on your wants list comes on the market. The interface is clean, the downloads fast, and the searches productive. What's not to like? Elegant. That's the word for the virtual real estate occupied by Blake's Books, an online dealer in used and antiquarian books for scholars and readers. The site, designed by bookstore partner Cindy Jaycox, is a study in black-and-white and muted planes of color. More to the point for book buyers, it is well organized, eminently readable, searchable, and a pleasure to browse. Blake's offers a number of e-mail catalogs and notification services to which readers and libraries can subscribe. Books are sold and bought in most subjects, but especially in art, philosophy, religion, math, science, history, literature and the humanities. Blake's Books lends a touch of class to the large and growing bookstore district of the global cybercity. Balogh Scientific Books sells books on botany, zoology, ecology and paleontology. Hiding behind those four portmanteau categories at this no-nonsense virtual bookstore is a wealth of nicely organized information: catalogs divided and subdivided for fruitful browsing, a listing of the many international publishers represented in the store's inventory, and informative introductions to selected publishers and research institutions. Boolean site searching makes finding volumes in a given area of interest efficient. Links to other Internet resources make searching beyond the site's bounds easier, too. Don't expect visual fluff from this store, just good solid content. San Diego Technical Books specializes in architecture and construction, computer engineering and the Internet, biotechnology and business books and multimedia. Its site, while searchable and informative, is largely an extension of its terraspace shop. Orders and queries are accepted online, but the shopping cart metaphor you may have come to expect of virtual emporia is not employed here; you have to jot down your wants and enter them into a form. But don't let that deter you, especially if you find yourself with a growing interest in the technology of computing or the network that brings stores like this one to your home computer. Our search for "world wide web" in the title field of SDTB's database turned up 49 books of interest, and our search on "internet" returned so many hits our browser ran out of memory and gave up. Beef up your browser's RAM allocation and go. In search of a good read au courant before your annual pilgrimage to Paris? Is your French a bit rusty and in need of a booster? Are you far from home and pining for the latest roman en français? For our francophone friends -- and the legions of francophiles everywhere -- we recommend Le Furet du Nord, a French chain with an admirable presence on the web. You can search a catalog of some 300,000 titles and order your choices online -- or just catch up on the hot topics in French publishing and spiff up your vocabulary while you're at it. You can even find Harry Crews' alarming La Foire aux Serpents in translation. We're adding that one to our shopping cart tout de suite. The London-centered Waterstone's bookstore chain brings its agreeable brand of hand-selling to the Web at this useful and entertaining site. The site is searchable by title, author, subject and publisher, of course, but it also offers a concise and readable magazine, a members-only club section, a diary of day-by-day literary trivia, useful recommendations from staff and authors, and a liberal sprinkling of sometimes obscure quotations. We like the spirit and energy on display at Amazon City, "the first city for women on the Internet." But they could use some help in the readability department. A casual visitor, for example, could easily miss the Amazon City Library, where books by and of particular interest to women are reviewed, and the Amazon City Bookstore, where those books may be ordered. Titles reviewed and offered for sale, ranging from The College Woman's Handbook to Tales From The Clit: A Female Experience of Pornography to Night Bites: Vampire Stories By Women, will be of interest to readers of any gender. (And just how many genders does one count these days? The more the merrier, we say.) BookZone appeared here early on, then disappeared mysteriously from our index. Now it's back (as you can see). It's a very personable bookstore, but what makes it unique is the partnerships its proprietors have forged with publishers of many persuasions. As a result, book buyers not only can browse, search and order from BookZone's own online catalog (which is particularly strong in audio books), they also can jump directly to a publisher's own page for information, samples and more ordering options. Also at the site you'll find short articles of interest to writers and publishers and the online edition of Romantic Times, as well as a searchable index of links to sites for book lovers. A very nice compendium of resources, we think. Virtual Ink is Clearinghouse approved. The Argus Clearinghouse is a selective collection of topical online guides.  Suggest A Site or Report A Dead Link   
A Not Entirely Disinterested Service of Bancroft & Associates: Digital Publishers. |