Post Redux: The Only Book Search Tool You’ll Ever Need

2011 at 11am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

This post originally ran in January, but since I’m in New York all week for Book Expo and will be telling you all about not-yet-published books I can’t wait to read, it only seems fitting to share a way for you to find out about them on your own whether you’re at Book Expo too or not. (And if you are, make sure you drop by booth 4479 to meet the good folks from Above the Treeline.)

**********

Ever thought about how awesome it would be if there were one centralized place where you could find out about all the new books coming out next week, next month, or next year, instead of visiting multiple websites for publishers, bookstores, and e-tailers and wading through their sometimes less-than-satisfying search tools?

Your wait is over! Edelweiss is a fantastic service that aggregates dozens of publishers’ catalogs and makes them easily searchable by title, subject, publication date, publisher, and more. And it’s free!  The totally bookrageous Joe Foster gave me a tutorial to help me get more out of my Edelweiss usage recently, and he’s here today to give you the primer.

Up until this last September, I was the buyer at Maria’s Bookshop in Durango, Colorado.  This was my mailbox, and this is what it looked like, pretty much every day.  Most of those are catalogs; many are duplicates.   The fun part was that every one of these catalogs was outdated before it was ever even placed in the mail.  Print runs changed, covers were altered, titles we cancelled or postponed, whatever.  Conversations with my sales reps were often spent listening to them correct the erroneous information on which I had based my buying decisions.  It’s no surprise to me, really, that more and more publishers are looking at using digital catalogs, and that people who use those catalogs are digging it.  I now work for the people who are trying to make this digital conversion of publisher catalogs as easy and usable for everyone as possible.

One of the foreseeable issues that will arise in the digital era is that some people will be better at it than others.  What this means for people who rely on publisher catalogs for their business is that if there were not a single usable format to use, then there would be as many formats and processes as there are publishers.  Some would be good and easy to use, while others would be, say, a pdf that does…well, nothing.  It sits there until you print it out yourself, transferring the cost of printing from the publisher to you.  Edelweiss sprang out of the need for there to be a single highly usable format, the best possible format, for people in the book business to learn.  With Edelweiss, you have one format that actually enhances publisher catalogs: Keeps them up to date, makes them searchable, filterable, taggable, sendable, POS uploadable, tweetable, facebookable… 

Here’s the thing, too.  Edelweiss is free for everyone (well, everyone except for publishers…) Bloggers, media, booksellers, readers, squirrel-hunters, infant prodigies, and especially axe jugglers.  You don’t even have to sign in, but it’s free to, and you get some more personalized functionability if you do.  Not every publisher is on Edelweiss, but we’re working on it, and the more users Edelweiss has, the more likely more publishers will come on board, hopefully making it so we have one place where we can all easily go to see upcoming titles.

So, some nitty gritty, after the jump. Read more