System 13

I seem to go in cycles; I’ll go for a long period of time not really thinking about the internet and how it’s changed things, and then out of nowhere, I’ll get a slap of reality. My cheek is still stinging a bit from earlier this week.

I recently was hunting a particular book, Russisch ohne Mühe, or Russian without Toil. It’s one of the older courses made by a company called Assimil, and is supposed to be far superior to their modern, “updated” Russisch ohne Mühe heute (Russian without Toil Today). This particular book was first printed in 1971, and as far as I know, Assimil no longer publishes it; they’ve abandoned it entirely in favor of their updated course.

Furthermore, it wasn’t exactly at the top of the bestseller lists when it was new. Let’s face it, the consumer demand for a product which teaches Russian with a German base can’t be that great. However, it actually surprised me just how few copies are floating around. WorldCat, while certainly not exhaustive in regards to libraries, lists a mere three copies worldwide.³³

However, despite its relative rarity, as I type this post, the book is on its way to me. It’s coming from a small bookseller in Germany, who sells at a site called booklooker.de. I found her and booklooker.de via bookfinder.com. Finding the book was only the first step though, of course; she of course had to be paid, too! Being in Germany, she obviously wanted to be paid in Euros. I was able to do so by paying her via PayPal; they took care of the conversion stuff for me. Instantly, of course, with no charge added.

All of this sounds rather run of the mill for the internet, which, ultimately, I suppose it is – but when I stopped and thought about what I was able to do and how easy it was, it made me shake my head. Before the internet, how in the world would I have found a now out-of-print book in Germany? If I had been able to find it – which is unlikely to begin with – how long would it have taken? How long would it have taken from the beginning of my search to me actually getting the book? For my recent transaction, assuming the book doesn’t get lost and shows up in the approximate timeframe given, the entire process – from finding the book to it showing up in my mailbox – will amount to a couple of weeks. Two weeks to find a rare book and to have it delivered from over 4000 miles away isn’t too bad at all!

This whole experience has also brought to my mind a big question which I touched on above: before the internet, how did people find rare or out-of-print books? Were there services that would contact a range of used book sellers to find out if the book was available? Did you have to do this yourself? Did you just not get the book, period? In the case of this book, I think even if book-hunt services existed, it would have been difficult to get the book. There were two sellers at booklooker.de who had the book; the one I bought from, while she had 15,000 books listed, specifically stated that to stop by her place and see her books required an appointment, which leads me to believe that she just has a bunch of books in storage, rather than a physical shop. The other guy? He had 3 items listed; he wasn’t really a shopkeeper of any sort, just some guy who threw a few items online to try and sell them. In either case, I think they would have both been overlooked by a book-hunt service.3

1. Which are, oddly enough, in the Netherlands, where Dutch is the official language, not German.333

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