Forget Elephantbooks.com for Books
Written: Sep 07 '01
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The Bottom Line
Elephantbooks.com lacks the one essential to make a bookstore, books.
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Are you looking for a rare, hard to find book? Although it shows some superficial promise, unfortunately http://www.elephantbooks.com isn’t quite the place to find it yet. Maybe it will be, someday, but right now the site is immature, and lacks some of the essentials necessary to earn it a place in my Bookmark file.
Elephantbooks is a local company, with a 408 area code and a Silicon Valley address. It has been a web page now, according to their boasts, since 1999. As a web page, it is well designed, with tasteful, muted colors and some of the beyond HTML bells and whistles that marks it as a professional webmaster‘s product. As a store, it claims to have, in stock, rare, out of print books. Any page can be a slick looking web page, but a web store has to be something else. It has to prove its use, in order to earn customers. I am a potential customer, in fact, I think I might buy more rare and out of print books online than anything else. Does elephant books live up to its boast, or is it just another pretty piece of coding?
Well, I'll put it to the test.…
First I search, for "Gearheart", a well known (in some circles) author of obscure, utopian sci fi. I type in the name, leaving off the first name, just in case they have books by one of her kin, as well as by her. But, no luck. On my second try I search for one of her books, Wanderground. Again, no luck. They give the options of signing up for a newsletter (oh joy, more spam) or searching again (as if).
I’m willing to try again. Maybe my inquiry was too obscure (although I’ve recently seen a copy of Wanderground at Bound Together Books, a local purveyor of used volumes. But I’m more than willing to have Elephantbooks succeed, so I'll try something more mainstream. How about Suzy Charnes? Again, no result, and another invitation to subscribe to a newsletter. Obviously, this isn't the place to search for utopian or non-mainstream sci fi. Next I try mainstream, but out of print sci fi. Another try, for Elizabeth Lynn, an author who has won awards for her Watchtower series. Nothing again.
It Failed the Availability Test, Now How About the Price Test?
So much for searching for specific books, I suppose. It’s possible that one might be looking for rare or out of print books, and not have a specific one in mind. How about a topic? I looked for "crochet" and came up with 21 rather unremarkable books, all of which were likely to turn up at thrift shops and "friends of the library" tables for two or three dollars. The average price for one of these unremarkable offerings at Elephantbooks.com was $15.00. I looked up one of them, the book that seemed most interesting, on bookfinder.com (a book shopping site which isn't listed on epinions) and found multiple copies of Linda Mariano's The Encyclopedia of Knitting and Crochet Stitch Patterns offered in prices ranging from 4.97 to 31.50, with the bulk of the offerings for around $6.00. The more expensive ones, starting at $14.00, were for first editions in excellent condition. The offering at elephantbooks.com is not a first edition (as the first edition was printed in 1976, not 1977) and was not described as being in excellent condition. I have to conclude it isn't the best available buy for this item online.
More Browsing, Just What Exactly Does Elephantbooks.com have?
Browsing for specific subcategories showed a nice outline of subcategories. The rare book category purports to have offerings in such a diverse group of subcategories as Aboriginal People, Africa, Agriculture/Livestock, Americana,
Animals, Antiques and Collectibles, Architecture, Art, Asia, Australia/New Zealand, Beverages, Biography, Books, Books on Tape, Business/Financing, Canadiana, Cartography, Children's Books, Clubs/Organizations,
Computer Books, Cook Books, Crafts and Hobbies, Crime & Law Enforcement, Decorating/Design, Earth Sciences, Education, Electronics, Entertaining, Ephemera, Erotica and Sexuality, Europe, Expositions, Fantasy/Horror, Fashion, Fiction, Film and Entertainment, Food, Gardening, Gay and Lesbian, Genealogy/Heraldry, Geography, and so on. A regular soup to nuts laundry list however, the ones that I clicked on lacked any titles. I don't think you can really say you have rare books on topics when all you have is a listing of topics. Maybe they hope to have books on all of these topics, I don't know. Currently, however, many of the topics are empty.
Of the topics that are not empty, one of interest, science fiction, had eight offerings. I picked the star of those offerings, a first edition book called The Haploids, signed by the author, and offered at $75.00, and tested the waters again at the rival site, BookFinder.com, finding multiple copies of the first edition of that book. The signed copies started at 33.50. Of course, in the listings on BookFinder.com, there were actually two signed copies listed that cost more than Elephantbook.com's. But for signed first edition copies, there were five offered that cost less, too. So, I wonder, what would be the advantage of purchasing the item at elephantbooks.com?
What Indeed?
They boast of a money back guarantee if you aren't satisfied with a book. In the small print, they explain that they will only refund the shipping charge if the book is not in the condition that they described on the web site. Considering they use very general terms to describe the condition of the book, I wonder if this wouldn't be an easy way to keep the shipping and handling charges? (I may think a "good" condition book is different than what they think a "good" condition book is, after all.)
Shipping charges seem to be extremely generous to the website. For next day air, the first book will cost you $25.00, a cost I would balk at if a seller on ebay, for instance, proposed it. Other shipping charges are similarly inflated with the very cheapest shipping being $5.00. In my work, I ship a great many booklike documents, and rarely see the actual cost being similar to those charged on this site. (Larger books are charged at a different, unspecified rate as well.)
It has the verisign seal as a secure site, and promises security in transactions, which is a good thing. But the other booksellers I've been dealing with online also have secure sites, so that is not a great advantage over the other booksellers. Of course, they do have an affiliate program administered by Commission Junction, which is a good thing.
My Purely Subjective Impression
It looks to me like the site is growing. It went online in 1999, but never really attracted my attention the way some book sites do. Not really there yet, but hoping to become the biggest and the best. Some of their methods are less than laudable. For instance, it looks like they plan to grow by using an "I-bar". Those of you who are familiar with free internet offerings will recognize the I-bar as the ad bar that it is. Locked to the bottom of your browser, it attempts to direct you back to the site, while actually interfereing with your session and slowing you down as it feeds you ads and other gibberish. If it’s like the ad bars offered by free internet sites, it also feeds them details about what you do online, although I am not sure how a bookstore would use this information as a bookstore. Now, if they are using data mining as a profitable sideline, that’s another thing entirely. I'm sorry to see them promoting this, but that simply adds to the overall impression I have gotten of this site, which is less than favorable.
It has a lot of competition, and the competition seems to do a better job. I’d say if you’re looking for rare or out of print books, you’d be better off looking at the competition. Elephantbooks.com gets a firm thumbs down from this reviewer.
Recommended:
No
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About the Author
Member: Donna Hall
Location: Humboldt County, California
Reviews written: 164
Trusted by: 100 members
About Me: When I'm not here, I'm birding. (Or working, or gardening, or playing with power tools.)
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