College students flocking online
An article from The George Washington University notes that nearly 35% of students are now purchasing their textbooks online. If this number holds is up 40% from last year, a great sign.
Reviewing Yesterday’s Site Launch
Yesterday I launched Book Sale Scout, a new, searchable book sale directory for all the booksellers, book lovers, and book bargain hunters out there. The day definitely had its ups and downs, but I was altogether blown away by the amount of visitors to the site. Given the traffic on this blog and the additional promotion, I was expecting to see around 1,000 truly unique visitors for the day. So when I woke up this morning and got the final estimate, I was blown away that we nearly doubled that. I was also surprised at the outpouring of support, especially from library book sale organizers and online sellers. I originally launched the site with these two groups in mind.
While the site ran smoothly and handled the traffic well, we did encounter some bugs. The most significant was that our programmer failed to properly implement our “Search within X days” feature (pretty big deal that I’ll be working on today and tomorrow). Fortunately, I did make the search results table sortable by date, so this will help with searches in the interim. We had over 100 people sign up for Instant Sale Alerts yesterday, which, again, I could not believe. However, our programmer, ehem, for some reason thought that I wanted Sale Alert users to receive an email displaying our paid advertisers when they got approved. Therefore, when we approved our first paid advertisement last night, all subscribers got an email about this advertiser - this is a bug and not standard operating procedure. This was fixed once it was brought to my attention. Then of course, you always have the detractors. It’s business. I’m pretty confident in what we’ve created. It was high time for an improved book sale directory that can incorporate some new value-added features and catalog more book sales in one place than ever before.
New Book Sale Directory Service Launched
LRABooks launches the much anticipated Book Sale Scout website into a public, beta testing mode. The new, free, service will be the net’s first searchable book sale directory, featuring used book sales from libraries and other non-profit organizations.
(PRWEB) August 28, 2006 — Today, booksellers and book sale organizers cheered the launching of the Internet’s first searchable book sale directory, Book Sale Scout (http://www.booksalescout.com). The new site will offer a variety of features to improve access to book sales. Book sales are quickly becoming strong fundraising events for public libraries, friends of the library groups, and other nonprofit organizations. This growth has been fostered by the rapid development of the online bookseller community, whose members are constantly in need of inventory to place for sale on sites like Amazon.com, Half.com, Biblio.com, and Alibris.com.
Some of the features include: instant book sale alerts, integration into Google maps, customizable email reminders, user comments about each sale, and a commitment to consistently updated features.
“We’ve worked hard to build a book sale directory which offers significant value added for both book sale organizers and attendees. Moreover, we have in place a strategic growth plan that will include improvements and additions to our site. Our potential users deserve a professional looking site that incorporates new technologies and ideas,” stated Book Sale Scout developer Lucas R. Ames, owner of parent company LRABooks.
Ames also mentioned that his team was committed to building the number of book sales listed on the site. The company will continue reaching out to book sale organizers and has even developed a script to scrub the web for new information.
“Our goal is to have sale organizers submit their sale’s themselves. This will provide us with the most accurate information. In our initial database population, however, we’ve spent a lot of time collecting and confirming data, mostly from sources we did not know even existed. It’s been a tedious, but worthwhile process. We don’t want to offer the same old sales that everyone knows about anyway. We want to dig deeper.”
The site’s services are all free of charge. Users pay nothing for the myriad services offered and nonprofits can list their book sales for free (although paid advertisement options are available).
About LRABooks
LRABooks is an independent company focusing on providing services to the online bookselling industry. LRABooks also owns the Bookselling Online Blog, Wholesale Remainders, and Socrates Books. More information can be found at http://www.lrabooks.com.
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