Six months down the line I'm still with Amazon, but Alibris has come and gone. I'm currently trying out Biblio.com, and Biblion.co.uk, its smaller UK-based cousin.

I continue to sell about a book a week with Amazon, although I'm down from my peak of 300 books listed to about 100, mainly by eliminating the low priced ones. Now that I'm putting all the books onto a database to keep track of them it's taking a lot longer, so I'm just keeping the more valuable ones on sale. Having said that, it's only £4 and below I'm not bothering with. But quite a few have been going to charity, to the College library, and back to the auction. I suppose it helps keep books circulating.

I was with Alibris for 3 months and sold 2 books. They work via a courier service for their overseas books (I can't just specify to sell in the UK as I can with Amazon) and that's just not very convenient for an occasional bookseller working full-time. I had nearly 200 listed. I didn't find the setup particularly user-friendly, though everything worked ok and customer support were good.

Having a database makes it easier to change listers, though. I've only sold one book with Biblio, and none yet with Biblion, but I've just started, so I'll give it three months. I think both Alibris and Biblio are very US/Canada oriented, and the UK listings are a it of a sideline. For very desirable, rare books it might be worth it - the shipping costs wouldn't seem so high, for a book that's high priced anyway.

AbeBooks, the other alternative, insist on a monthly payment, rather than a 'pay-per-sale' arangement, so for someone with sales as low as mine, that's just not worthwhile.

Profits? Well, on paper I have profits, if you count my stock. In practice I'm slightly ahead, but I'm still ploughing it all back into stock. I'm still buying at auction, so it's very much up to chance what I get. In the main it seems that from each batch I sell enough in the following month to break even, and then the remainder of that batch take much longer to sell, like a comet with a long thin tail. If I keep adding in more blobs of books then all those tail-end long-time-to-sell books should start adding together. Possibly.