AbeBooks is removing ebooks from their marketplace

January 5, 2018 By Michael Kozlowski 4 Comments

AbeBooks has announced that starting in February they will no longer carry ebooks or other digital content in their online marketplace. They will solely focus on physical books, art, and collectibles going forward. Merchants who have ebooks, recipes and other digital goods have to remove them from their inventory by February 6th.

The elimination of ebooks and PDF files will go a long way to making the AbeBooks search engine more robust. Customers who were looking for rare books often found themselves inundated with cheaply made digital files and found it challenging to find what they wanted.

Michael Kozlowski

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about audiobooks and e-readers for the past ten years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the CNET, Engadget, Huffington Post and Verge.

Share18

Vote

18 Shares

Heidi Steindel
I never heard of this company but I think the move is stupid. Ebooks is the future not physical books
Lfb001
Abebooks is owned by Amazon
GMUPatriots
I’ve been using Abebooks since I was in college in the mid-1990s. Abebooks is IMO the best source of used books on the Internet. The site itself doesn’t maintain an inventory like Amazon, you buy used books from sellers like the Amazon marketplace. Instead of reaching a very limited number of people using their own website, Abebooks IMO allows used bookstores to reach people who have never heard of the store because they don’t live in the area.
I’m not surprised this happened because Amazon has all but put people who sell stuff using Seller Central out of business in the past six months or so. They’ve restricted a ton of categories, including “new” and popular physical books, DVDs, CDs, video games, etc. To sell in these categories a seller has to prove they’re an authorized reseller of a corporation’s products. In the past few weeks I’ve tried to sell a used video game (completely legit, I think I even bought it from Amazon lol) and a laptop only to find out I’m “not approved” to sell in those categories despite the fact I’ve sold multiple items in both categories before. Apparently, over the last year an increasing number of corporations have pressured Amazon to stop the “wild west” selling of products.
In this case, I think it’s probably a good move. Every time I saw a digital file on sale on Abebooks it was really sketchy as to whether it was legit or if it was some sort of bootlegged copy.
toysandme
In my area of historical research, every single pdf I saw was from India, available for $9.95, but they all came from archive dot org, google books, or some national library somewhere, where they were available for free.