Actually, our first online experience was with our ISP. When we signed up for dial-up access in 1994 with GateWay they let us have a website subsidiary to them. Didn't sell any books there, though.

         We joined INTERLOC in November 1995. We put all our books on the software they provided called Record Manager. They later got bought out by ALIBRIS. This probably happened in 1998 because this is the date they say we joined them. Through ALIBRIS our books can be seen on BARNES & NOBLE. Starting in about 2000 ALIBRIS' business model (meaning how they present books to the customer) has become increasingly weird. Consequently we shifted our emphasis to ABE.

         We have been with eBay since August 1, 1998. This is where we find a lot of books to buy. It is like the world's greatest garage sale. But it is a lot of work to find things. Unfortunately there isn't a table labeled "Things Grove Antiquarian Wants to Buy". You have to search and search. But you can sometimes find things you didn't even know existed. We sell the odd book sometimes on eBay. Sales on eBay are at wholesale prices - but the book is gone.

         We concentrated on selling on ABE immediately after joining them on 11/13/98. We moved our web page to their site and were quite satisfied with them for a long time. But, in the last several years ABE has developed severe quality problems and its listings have become clogged up with penny listers and print-on-demand sellers. Because of this our sales there have sunk to a level that no longer covers our fees. On 02/10/06 they sent all their booksellers an eMail entitled "Boobseller Bulletin". That's when we knew what they really thought of us. Consequently, we have begun shifting over to BIBLIO.   I thought of making a list of ABE problems.   1. The stuttering date problem.   2. The BACK button doesn't work right on searches.   3. If you click to look at a bookseller's website ABE opens a special kind of window that excludes the top toolbar so you can't save the site to favorites. And then if you move to other pages in the site you can't use the BACK button.   4. If you edit your listings online you can't save without filling in their ugly condition fields.   5. On 4/23/08 where photos used to be differentiated between bookseller supplied and stock photos - they are now all labeled stock photos.   6. On 7/21/08 the SCROLL problem appeared. Search result pages (and others) no longer fit on the screen. You have to horizontal scroll to see all the text.    7. In August 2008 our rating dropped from 5 to 4 stars. Despite the fact that we have NEVER not supplied a book. The reason is that our sales are low here.  

         In 2003 the problems at ABE suggested we should move our website and we were up and running with an independent WWW.GROVEBOOK.COM in October.

         Looking for another way to sell books we joined AMAZON as an Individual Account in October 2005. Our inventory there is small, but growing, and we have been very successful there with it. AMAZON, after all, is the largest site. It is several orders of magnitude larger than ABE or the other listing sites. Also, for a while we tried HALF.COM. It didn't produce much results and we dropped it after a couple of years.