Need website recommendation - independent bookstores

[GoStanford]

I recently spent some delicious time browsing at Commonwealth Books in Boston, MA. I understand from another customer that the Abebooks website has now been bought by Amazon.

Are there other websites you can recommend that collate searches across multiple independent bookstores? I know there are some large individual independent bookstore websites, such as Powell's.

[binje]

Are you familiar with IndieBound? They don't do quite what you want, but it does make it easy to find stores. I'm a huge fan of Powell's and I order books as part of my job, so I'm interested in responses to this question as well. If it's not at Powell's or a small press, I'm invariably ordering from the behemoth.

[GoStanford]

Are you familiar with IndieBound?

Thank you for the tip - I will explore that site. I know that our local independent bookstores (and I am lucky to have several) will order books to hold for specific customer requests, but sometimes (as when books are mentioned at conferences) I like to have a quick search-and-order option. I suppose I could also look at the websites for the large warehouses from which many of the Abebooks orders are fulfilled.

One of the recent New Yorkers has a very eye-opening article on Amazon and how books are just the tip of the iceberg as far as revealing customer spending habits. Now, I've gotten some interesting tips from the "You may also like" recommendations of big companies like Netflix and Amazon, but I find behavior prediction creepy and don't like how pervasive it is. The driving force of $, I suppose.

[GoStanford]

I'm placing an order from Powell's Books to see how it goes. I have had friends pick up books when they are in Oregon. Does anybody know how pricing works? In addition to the price listed for the trade paperbacks I wanted, there are other prices listed for Used/New/Paperback.

[JohnDel]

AddALL (addall.com) is a compilation website that can search across multiple other websites for books, ebooks magazines, etc. There are separate search functions for new books and for used and out of print books. The searches can be configured to search only designated websites.

The books are not ordered from AddALL, but directly from the bookstore or dealer offering the book by clicking through the listing in the AddALL search. This allows making decisions about who to support.

I don't work for AddALL but use them a few times a year to track down obscure out of print books.