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Today we published the 2014 Bookfinder.com Report which features the 100 most sought after out-of-print books in America.  The big surprise this year annual report was that after years on the throne the Queen of Pop (Madonna)’s photographic escapade "Sex" was finally knocked off the top of the list, and the book(s) that took its place may surprise you.  There were in fact two, and you can read about them here.  What I wanted to talk about on the blog, however, are some of the usual suspects there were some interesting additions and subtractions to this year’s list.

Back In-Print:

2014 edition

Avid readers will notice that A.C.H Smith’s Labyrinth novelization is noticeably missing from the top end of the report; the book has been a part of the BookFinder report since 2010 and was finally re-published in April as Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and contains updated cover art.  I’m not sure the books target age group would have any idea who David Bowie is anyway.  According to reviews the books both stay quite close to the movie’s plot line however the novel replaces Bowie’s musical interludes with additional dialogue; and Smith also draws out the dialogue in a number of scenes.

Another graduation was In A Dark Place: The Story of a True Haunting by Ray Garton who’s book has been on the BookFinder.com Report since 2008.  The fact that it was republished December 31^st 2014 left me on the fence as to whether I should remove it from this year’s list, but considering precious few of you would have gotten to read an in-print copy in 2014 I decided to leave it on this year.  In 2009 the book became the basis for the hit film The Haunting in Connecticut (starring Virginia Madsen).

New to the BookFinder.com Report

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion by Dorothea Lange this book was featured heavily in the photographer’s episode of PBS’s American Masters series (snippet below) which aired late August 2014.  The full episode covered Lange’s five decades photographic work which documented Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II Japanese internment camps and more.  You can find a wide array of Dorothea Lange’s other work on BookFinder.com.

Another new, and timely, entry to the list was Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman.  The books author, who has been singled out by Forbes as one of the most successful hedge fund managers of recent years, was quoted numerous times this year after his 2013 year end investor letter was leaked online.  In the letter he preaches caution and warns of today’s stock markets being too bubbly, and that today's investors should take warning.  The fact that his track record for posting huge growth has remained in tact all these years has lead to his 1991 out-of-print value investing opus to fetch four figures, when you can find it.

Every year I find stories about these books buried within the list, and every year I also miss some amazing stories.  Read the full list and let us know any of your interesting stories about the books within.

Every year around this time the BookFinder.com team puts our heads together, crunches the numbers and cranks out the BookFinder.com Report; a snapshot of the nation's search trends for out-of-print books.  After 10 years of researching the most sought after out-of-print books in America, we’ve learned a few things:

• Sex still sells: 20 years after it was first published, Madonna’s Sex has been the most sought after out-of-print book on BookFinder.com for the past ten years.
• Nora Roberts has very little influence on her fans: Despite Nora Roberts pleading with her fans to avoid Promise Me Tomorrow (a book she herself has described as mediocre), the book remains painfully expensive and highly sought after. 
• Stephen King knows this pain all too well, he decided to take his novel Rage, which is about a school shooting, out-of-print some time ago and he just can't seem to shake the demand.
• Publishers should re-print more Alice Starmore books: Starmore is a rock-star of the knitting world; known for creating some of the world’s most intricate patterns and having written a number of books.  Her book Aran Knitting appeared on every BookFinder.com Report from 2003-2010 until it was re-printed in 2011, only to be replaced by Tudor Roses (#60 in 2011 and #13 in 2012).  Starmore also has several other out-of-print books including In The Hebrides (1995) and Stillwater (1996).

Many of the books we see on the BookFinder.com report persist on the list for years.  Sometimes they were simply limited-run books that remain popular and demand always outstripped supply. Sometimes a popular author decides they want a certain chapter of their writing career to stay firmly in their rearview mirror (see Roberts, Nora).  However, even after 10 years, there are still out-of-print books coming back out of the woodwork.  Here are a couple of this year’s surprises:

• Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo has featured on several past reports. However, this year the author appeared on the 2012 Report three times: Mandingo, DRUM, and The Black Sun; more than any other author.
• Big League Sales-closing Techniques by Les Dane is considered by many to be a salesman’s bible, even though it’s been out-of-print since 1971.  Word-of-mouth recommendations on internet bulletin boards and review sites have pushed the price of this out-of-print guide through the roof.

• Pure, White and Deadly; the Problem of Sugar by John Yudkin was first published in 1972 and outlines research showing that refined sweeteners are closely associated with heart disease and type-two diabetes.  The book was all but forgotten, despite being highly topical, until it was featured in Robert Lustig’s lecture “Sugar: The Bigger Truth” which attained YouTube viral success.   Because of this, Yudkin’s book was re-printed in the UK but remains out-of-print for Americans.

See the 2012 BookFinder.com Report, the hot 100 out-of-print books of the past 12 months.

If you are at all familiar with BookFinder.com you probably know all about our annual BookFinder.com Report which tracks the demand of the 100 most sought-after titles which are no longer in print in the United States.  The list differs from year to year as trends change and books get republished (Indie publishers take note, there may be a hidden gem in the list for you.)  This list is no different as number of titles from last year’s report have been republished in the past twelve months including The Sixteenth Round: from Number 1 Contender to #45472 by Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Old Southern Apples by Creighton Lee Calhoun and Aran Knitting by Alice Starmore, leaving room for some new additions.  

In fact Alice Starmore, a superstar in the knitting world, took her own spot on the list. Aran Knitting lived on the BookFinder.com report for years before getting re-published in 2010 and now another one of her works, Tudor Roses, has jumped onto the list to take its place.  Tudor Roses is interesting because it includes a number of sweater designs inspired by the Tudor royals (eg. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I) and their over-the-top gold embroidery, velvet, jewels and lace.

Current events also have an impact on the list.  In A Payroll to Meet, David Whitford discusses the incidents surrounding Southern Methodist University's (SMU) receiving the "death penalty" from the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA); which involves banning the school from competing in a sport for a year or more (two in SMU's case).  This book has been out-of-print since 1989 but scandal in college football has never been more in vogue.  The recent rash of cheating, bribing and recruitment scandals to hit Ohio State, Southern Cal, Auburn, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, LSU, and the Hurricanes in Miami have renewed the interest in the grandfather of college football scandal.  I somehow doubt this book will see reprint but it’s always interesting to well researched books jump back into the spotlight because of current events.

View all 100 books in the 2011 BookFinder.com Report

BookFinder.com está ahora disponible en español. Para ver la traducción al español, simplemente haga clic en "Ver BookFinder.com en: Español" en nuestro sitio web, tal como se muestra en la imagen siguiente.

We are very happy to announce that we have now launched a complete Spanish translation of our website.  We have long search the Spanish catalogues of various booksellers but until now users had to navigate our website in Dutch, English, French, or German.

If you are most comfortable with Spanish, just to “View BookFinder.com in: Español” on our homepage below the search box (seen below)

BookFinder.com está ahora disponible en español. Para ver la traducción al español, simplemente haga clic en "Ver BookFinder.com en: Español" en nuestro sitio web, tal como se muestra en la imagen siguiente.

We are very happy to announce that we have now launched a complete Spanish translation of our website.  We have long search the Spanish catalogues of various booksellers but until now users had to navigate our website in Dutch, English, French, or German.

If you are most comfortable with Spanish, just to “View BookFinder.com in: Español” on our homepage below the search box (seen below)

I just wanted say thank you to everyone who completed the BookFinder.com survey.  I'll be closing it up in a couple minutes and then going over all the input and suggestions that you gave us, and at a first glance it looks like we have some really good feedback.

Your input is extremely helpful when considering new ideas, and as such we really appreciate everyone who took a couple minutes out of their day to offer their opinions.  So thank you.

In other news, I think we finally tracked down the problem that was causing some users to randomly receive 403/404 errors that were blocking access to our search.  With the help of a couple VERY helpful BookFinder.com users we were able to finally replicate the problem ourselves and last week we worked out a fix.  Since then we have been monitoring the results and it seems as if we have fixed it. 

This was very frustrating for us since we knew users were having problems but we could never replicate the issue on our side, which made finding the root cause quite difficult.  So again I would like to say thank you to all the BookFinder.com users who contacted us and provided valuable information that helped us find this problem and solve it.

If you are still having problems, or ever have problems please do send us an email to let us know about any bugs on our site.

[Now Reading: Foundation and Empire by Issac Asimov]

I just wanted say thank you to everyone who completed the BookFinder.com survey.  I'll be closing it up in a couple minutes and then going over all the input and suggestions that you gave us, and at a first glance it looks like we have some really good feedback.

Your input is extremely helpful when considering new ideas, and as such we really appreciate everyone who took a couple minutes out of their day to offer their opinions.  So thank you.

In other news, I think we finally tracked down the problem that was causing some users to randomly receive 403/404 errors that were blocking access to our search.  With the help of a couple VERY helpful BookFinder.com users we were able to finally replicate the problem ourselves and last week we worked out a fix.  Since then we have been monitoring the results and it seems as if we have fixed it. 

This was very frustrating for us since we knew users were having problems but we could never replicate the issue on our side, which made finding the root cause quite difficult.  So again I would like to say thank you to all the BookFinder.com users who contacted us and provided valuable information that helped us find this problem and solve it.

If you are still having problems, or ever have problems please do send us an email to let us know about any bugs on our site.

[Now Reading: Foundation and Empire by Issac Asimov]

A few of you have mentioned to us that you have been experiencing problems with connecting to BookFinder.com in the past week.  Some people have experienced 404 Errors and 403 Errors when viewing different BookFinder.com pages. 

Thank you for pointing out these issues, because of your messages we are aware of what is happening and are working on a solution to fix the problem completely.

In most cases the errors are intermittent, and if you do happen to experience a 404 or 403 error on a BookFinder.com page, please try refreshing the page (ctrl + F5).  In many cases a simple refresh will bring up the correct page.  There are cases, however, where the error persists.

If you continue to have issues connecting to the site we apologize and ask for your continued patience as we fix this issue.

Sincerely

The BookFinder.com Team

As a BookFinder.com user you probably didn’t even notice but last week we just picked up and moved servers.  For several years we were running our servers from around BookFinder.com’s birthplace of Berkley, CA but last week we packed up our bytes and moved our digital home.   Now we are happy to announce that we are up and running on the Elastic Compute Cloud, which is a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon.  Charlie and Bryan (our dynamic programming duo) are very excited about this change, since not only is cloud computing a cutting edge technology but it should also provide BookFinder.com with a flexibility and scalability that we have never previously had.

So if you are like me the question you are probably asking yourself right now is, “so what does this mean for me?” and the non-technical short answer is “very little.”  Our search functions will remain the same, and while we may run a little faster now the look and feel of BookFinder.com will stay the same.  The real benefit of this change is behind the scenes here.  Kind of selfish I know but, I think we deserve it =).

Hopefully now we can get back to trying to add new bookstores and additional services that will help you book buyers find the books that you need and love!

[Now Reading: Prelude to Foundation by Issac Asimov]

As a BookFinder.com user you probably didn’t even notice but last week we just picked up and moved servers.  For several years we were running our servers from around BookFinder.com’s birthplace of Berkley, CA but last week we packed up our bytes and moved our digital home.   Now we are happy to announce that we are up and running on the Elastic Compute Cloud, which is a cloud computing platform developed by Amazon.  Charlie and Bryan (our dynamic programming duo) are very excited about this change, since not only is cloud computing a cutting edge technology but it should also provide BookFinder.com with a flexibility and scalability that we have never previously had.

So if you are like me the question you are probably asking yourself right now is, “so what does this mean for me?” and the non-technical short answer is “very little.”  Our search functions will remain the same, and while we may run a little faster now the look and feel of BookFinder.com will stay the same.  The real benefit of this change is behind the scenes here.  Kind of selfish I know but, I think we deserve it =).

Hopefully now we can get back to trying to add new bookstores and additional services that will help you book buyers find the books that you need and love!

[Now Reading: Prelude to Foundation by Issac Asimov]

I just wanted to post a short apology to anyone who was trying to access BookFinder.com this afternoon.  We had a small server problem and as such some of you may have had your searches go to error earlier today. 

The problem is fixed now and everything is once again running smoothly, so if you did have issues this afternoon you can now perform the search anytime.

Thanks for your patience.

I just wanted to post a short apology to anyone who was trying to access BookFinder.com this afternoon.  We had a small server problem and as such some of you may have had your searches go to error earlier today. 

The problem is fixed now and everything is once again running smoothly, so if you did have issues this afternoon you can now perform the search anytime.

Thanks for your patience.

It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers.  Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.

If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information.  So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.

The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books.  So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.

So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag. 

So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement.  Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.

It may not always be obvious from the outside but we are constantly improving BookFinder.com to make it a better service for students, bibliophiles, collectors, and booksellers.  Over the past several weeks one of our programmers, Bryan, has been working on a project trying to see if he could improve the speed of our book search.

If you know a little about databases, and little is a word I would use to describe my knowledge of database searching, one of the more classic search problems is that as the amount of data you are looking at gets larger it takes proportionately longer to search though all the information.  So as you can guess this makes a quick search of millions upon millions of books from dozens of different websites all over the world a bit of a problem.

The fast solution would be to just limit our search time but we also know that you, our loyal users, come to BookFinder.com for our price comparisons of new and used books as well as for searching far and wide looking for rare, out-of-print, and downright hard to find books.  So we obviously we could never sacrifice breadth of search for speed or you might not find that 18th century periodical on gardening practices in West Suffolk which you were looking for.

So when Bryan announced at our weekly meeting that, after some intensive investigation followed by a couple weeks of hacking away at our search algorithms, he had managed to shave several seconds off our average search time I felt it was worth a bit of a brag. 

So enjoy our latest BookFinder.com improvement.  Same great BookFinder.com search, now 60% faster.

We have released the 2009 edition of the BookFinder.com Report.

The Report tracks the most sought-after out-of-print books in America, breaking down demand for popular out-of-print titles in ten different genre categories.

As usual this edition features a number of books with very interesting stories:

• Cop Without a Badge by Charles Kipps, had a sudden spike in demand after a run in with The Real Housewives of New Jersey
• The Recently Deflowered Girl by Edward Gorey, got a second wind on the back of an internet meme
• Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins, a conspiracy theory propped up by the economic collapse

There are many more so go ahead and read the whole 2009 BookFinder.com Report

Also if any of you are interested I will be on CBC Radio One tomorrow (September 17th) on the All Points West program between 3:30-4:00pm PST.  I will be talking to Jo-Ann Roberts about the BookFinder.com Report.  If you like you can listen online here.

If you ever wanted to add a BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin the option is now available.

If you are about to ask "What's OpenSearch" it's that small search box to the right the URL display on your browser.  Here you can automatically search on your favorite website (obviously BookFinder.com, right?) without having to first enter their URL. If you want to add BookFinder.com as one of your search options It's very easy to do. 

In Firefox simply go to the BookFinder.com homepage and then click on the small downward facing arrow like so:

From here just click the "Add "BookFinder.com" button and viola, instant BookFinder.com searches from anywhere on the internet.

In Internet Explorer the procedure is the same and the screen should look like this: 

Now whenever you want to compare prices with BookFinder.com you can immediately do a keyword search from wherever you happen to be on the web without having to load our homepage.

If you ever wanted to add a BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin the option is now available.

If you are about to ask "What's OpenSearch" it's that small search box to the right the URL display on your browser.  Here you can automatically search on your favorite website (obviously BookFinder.com, right?) without having to first enter their URL. If you want to add BookFinder.com as one of your search options It's very easy to do. 

In Firefox simply go to the BookFinder.com homepage and then click on the small downward facing arrow like so:

From here just click the "Add "BookFinder.com" button and viola, instant BookFinder.com searches from anywhere on the internet.

In Internet Explorer the procedure is the same and the screen should look like this: 

Now whenever you want to compare prices with BookFinder.com you can immediately do a keyword search from wherever you happen to be on the web without having to load our homepage.