Antiqbook: antiquarian books rare books out of print books maps prints searchable database

The Internet resource for the Antiquarian Book World
Twelve million books, maps and prints available online

ANTIQBOOK's database services & participation fees

General

Antiqbook offers its services to professional booksellers. Our policy is to have better books at fair prices in a clear and truthful presentation. In our attempts to promote your books we strive for an international orientation in our presentation and promotion.
Some minimum requirements for professionalism are to be found in the way you handle your books and in your approach of your customers. To be explicit:

your books are properly described: your descriptions are bibliographically correct and offer the necessary information on which a customer can base a decision.
your descriptions are concrete and factual, and do not contain anything that does not belong to a book's description: no links to websites, no html code, no promotional texts ('We are better booksellers than other booksellers'), no exaggerations and no streetmarket-like shouting. If you describe books in terms like 'binding unknown', 'book may or may not have ....' Antiqbook is not the right sales channel for your books.
any book you have in our database is either your property, or at least at hand, and is available for sale at the price mentioned. You do not post books that you have to order first before you can deliver. This also excludes POD's (books to be printed on demand) and photocopies.
we welcome non-book matters that are commonly part of the stock of antiquarian booksellers, like prints, maps, posters, drawings and ephemera.
if you post an image of a book, it is an image of the actual copy that it accompanies.
your pricing policy does not have excesses. You don't price at a penny and overcharge on postage. You also do not price at grossly exaggerated levels hoping to deceive some innocent customer.
Our slogan is fine books, fair prices and we tell the customers there are no hidden costs or mark-ups. Therefore we require that your prices on Antiqbook are not higher than your prices elsewhere on the Internet.
you answer orders and inquiries promptly, i.e. within one working day, even when a book has been previously sold.
you remove sold books from the database
your terms of sale are at least in accordance with your national laws. For book dealers in the European Union there are national laws based upon the regulation on distance selling by the European Committee. Information for UK dealers can be found at the Department of Trade and Industry pages.
You have a return policy that allows customers to return a book within reasonable time and on reasonable terms, and you cover the costs if you have made a mistake.
your national tax authorities know you as a business. Where applicable this means you are a member of a Chamber of Commerce, or you have a proper business license.

We offer a general database for books, with several search programs, including one that searches only the book dealer's data. An interface for your own website is available for free.
We can handle a wide range of upload formats such as RecordManager, Homebase, Booktrakker, etc., or any tab-delimited export file from other database programs. If you are using a format which is not compatible with our format, Piet Wesselman usually can write a conversion program which makes your data suitable for inclusion in the Antiqbook database. Once we have established an "agreed upload format", you are kindly requested not to change that format without prior notice.

To guarantee the integrity of our database, we reserve the right to refuse or alter data which contain fields with links to external URL's, or fields that contain text not related to the description of a book. However we do offer you the opportunity to publish links on your Antiqbook home page, and not book description related text in your conditions of sale.

Uploading
There are three methods of uploading your inventory to us:

Via an FTP session. It works via a direct FTP connection. You need an FTP program (e.g. WS_FTP for Windows or Fetch for Macintosh, The Firefox browser has an FTP module included). This does not work through your Netscape or MSIE browser programs!
With your browser via our service page.
As an email attachment if methods 1 & 2 fail.

Updating your data
Single items sold can be removed any time via a secured page. Multiple items can be removed through your regular updates, if your database programs allows that method. If not just send us a list of the book numbers, arranged in one column. To add titles, just send us the new titles in the agreed format. Alternatively you can send your entire revised inventory. If you have to rely on 'purge-and reload' as your method of database maintenance, please restrict this to maximally once a week and use our online delete facility.
Our database
Currently our database receives over 250,000 search inquiries daily, thus it is an outstanding Internet medium to sell your books. The URL of the database is:

http://www.antiqbook.com/books/
Payment model:

15% commission on each sale (to be billed in two-month installments):

Based on an 'honours' system, so it requires a certain amount of honesty from the bookseller
A minimum fee of € 1.00 per book sold, and a maximum of € 50.00
A commission fee is due for any sale in which Antiqbook is instrumental. This includes sales that start as an inquiry, sales that start on Antiqbook but are completed by direct email or orders to your own website, and orders that are directed to you but mention that the book was found at Antiqbook.
Commissions are charged over two-months periods.
No fee when a book is sold to another Antiqbook book dealer
but we will include serious inquiries (as in "Is this available? How much is postage?")
There is an opportunity for you to mark orders as 'not executed'. We expect that you will be able to fullfill at least 80% of your serious orders.

Included in our fees are a homepage at the Antiqbook server, inclusions in the various Antiqbook pages such as the index of specialization, and a free subscription to our mailing list Antiqbook.
For EU members, the European VAT/TVA rules will be applied. Please note that the above mentioned prices are valid for individual booksellers only. Price for collective sites on demand.

All prices are exluding V.A.T.

Please continue with: how to join the database

for further inquiries please