www.abebooks.com

Abebooks is located in Canada, but that is immaterial. Thousands of independent booksellers, including Gould's Book Arcade, list their books on Abebooks. This is your best chance for hard-to-find books. (Amazon is best for new books, Abebooks is best for second hand, though both claim to cover the other market as well.) Over 300 Australian booksellers list on Abebooks. There are over 100 million books on Abebooks.

If the book you want is very rare, there may be only one or two or a dozen copies for sale in the world. But often there will be 50 or 100 or more copies for sale. You can narrow your search to Australian booksellers by using the Seller Location menu above the first book listing.

Some of the American booksellers with very low prices only post books within the USA.

Perhaps half the Australian booksellers might have a bricks and mortar shop, and can arrange for you to pick up the book if you live or work close by. The others might operate out of their houses, and can do mail order only.

Another web site to try is:

www.booksandcollectibles.com.au

This web site is located in Australia, and many Australian booksellers list on it, including Gould's Book Arcade. If the book you seek was ONLY PUBLISHED IN AUSTRALIA, you may have a better chance of finding it on the B&C web site, as they offer a commission only fee structure, which can be particularly attractive to very small booksellers, for whom a fixed monthly fee would be too onerous. You might be seeking a history of a small town published by a local historical society or council. They might have printed only 500 copies 20 years ago. There might be only one copy for sale in Australia, at a small local bookshop, with just one or two thousand books, for whom a monthly internet listing fee would be out of the question. They can, however, list on B&C, under the commission only arrangement.

Some people see Abebooks and B&C as being a bit like old fashioned co-operatives. They provide the web sites, with all the search facilities, which would be beyond the capacity of many small independent booksellers. Customers benefit by getting us all on the same web site, with comparative pricing. Abebooks introduced BOOKSELLER FULFILLMENT RATINGS a few years ago. Gould's Book Arcade has the top rating of 5 stars. If a bookseller has only two stars, it means they can only find the book 60% - 69% of the time. They often set very low prices, but if customers order from them, they risk getting an email several days later saying, sorry, we can't find the book. Start again!

At Gould's Book Arcade, our internet listed books are kept in a non-public area of the shop. That is partly why we have the very high fulfillment rating. Many small booksellers do not keep their internet listed books separate, so each time a customer walks into their shop and buys a book, they need to remember to withdraw that book from the database. That is partly why some booksellers have very low fulfillment ratings.