Bibliofind

» see bibliofind.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Twenty million books, none of them new. Bibliofind was a search box over the stock of about four thousand independent dealers, most of it out-of-print or secondhand, and when you found the thing you wanted you ordered it from the bookseller rather than from the site. It went up in 1996, which made it one of the first places on the web where the used-book trade was searchable at all.

Exchange.com bought it in January 1999. Amazon bought Exchange.com a few months after that and then did something unusual for Amazon, which was nothing. Bibliofind kept its own name and its own dealer relationships for two more years while its owner was busy learning how to sell everything else.

What ended it was a break-in. On 5 March 2001 the company said that somebody had been inside its servers since October and had taken around 98,000 credit card numbers on the way through. Two months later the site was gone.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the break-in ~

The intruder had access from October 2000 to February 2001. Four months inside a book database, and nobody noticed. Bibliofind called the FBI and the card companies, then pulled the purchasing side of the site down over a weekend and put the rest back on the Monday with the checkout gone. Card numbers and phone numbers came off the servers entirely, on the reasoning that data you are not holding cannot be taken.

Ninety-eight thousand cards is not a large breach by the standards of anything after about 2005. In the first months of 2001 it was one of the bigger ones anybody had admitted to out loud, and it had happened at a company Amazon owned.

~ the handover ~

Amazon said it would take over Bibliofind's operations by 7 May 2001. The last working homepage in the archive is dated 3 May. A week after that the address stopped serving a site and started serving a page on amazon.com headed Rare and Used Books, Presented by Bibliofind and Amazon.com, which is the headline you write when you are absorbing something rather than closing it.

The page carried instructions for the dealers. Sign up to sell through Amazon and get a free Pro Merchant subscription through September. The Bibliofind dealer maintenance pages would stay reachable until 1 June, and after that the inventory of four thousand booksellers either moved into Amazon's marketplace or stopped being on the internet.

~ the address that still resolves ~

Turkey had this trade too, and still does. The sahaf shops sell what Bibliofind indexed, out-of-print and secondhand, priced by whoever is behind the counter, and in 2001 none of it was online. I was still at school then, on a modem, and the search box was never the obstacle anyway. The obstacle was a credit card I did not have and the shipping cost of a used paperback traveling from Oregon.

Type bibliofind.com today and you land on Amazon's advanced book search. The redirect has now been running for five times as long as the site it replaced.

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