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The Americana Exchange (or “AE”) is a website for the buying, selling and collecting of rare and antiquarian books. It was founded in 2002 in San Francisco by rare book collector Bruce McKinney with the aim of offering hard to find information about book collecting to the public. From a start of providing a subscription database of bibliographic records, the company now offers many related services, mostly at no charge. The company at first specialized in the Americana book field, but quickly expanded to all types of antiquarian and rare books. The company’s first product, the AE Database includes listings taken from book bibliography and book auction records. Rather than showing scanned pages from bibliographic books, such as used by sites like Google Book Search, records are entered into numerous independently searchable fields, such as author, title and date, to facilitate the search for data. Starting from 151,000 listings in 2002, the database now contains almost 2 million records. Book sales results from around 150 worldwide auction houses are added shortly after the auctions take place. As the company was already searching and compiling listings from book auctions for its database, in 2004 it launched an on site search engine for book auction listings. This metasearch engine compiles listings before the auction takes place, allowing users to search book listings from auctions all over the world in a second. Currently, the only other means of locating books at auction before the sale is to search each auction house’s listings separately. In 2006, the company added an online book listing service known as “Books For Sale.” Booksellers enter their books in the Books For Sale database, which can be searched on the site or through major search engines, including Google Product Search. Similar used book listings are available through websites such as Amazon.com, AbeBooks, and Alibris. However, differing from those sites, sales are not conducted on the Americana Exchange site. Buyers are sent directly to the listing bookseller via an email form. Listing booksellers pay a fee of from $240–$400 annually to list their books and gain access to other services such as the AE Database. Since the sales are completed by the bookseller rather than on the AE website, no commissions are charged.
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