The World Book Market (WBM) was started in 2004 as a co-operative by a small group of booksellers in the UK, the USA, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

It was felt by those booksellers that the existing, larger bookselling sites lacked key ingredients of customer satisfaction guarantees and of quality-based book listings

Our idea was to create a pool of dedicated and quality-conscious booksellers, and to maintain those standards by way of screening all prospective new members to ensure they matched these initial standards we had set.

Since then, the co-operative has quietly grown every year, and now has nearly 70 members spread across most major bookselling countries in the world.

As well as providing a superior customer service, the group also works to create special and sophisticated software routines for its members to assist their book listing activities not only at our own site, but at all the other sites where our members upload and display their books.

Our Members consequently are offered a very powerful books-listing database; automated data and picture forwarding routines to all their other sites; capacity to send variable data to different sites from the same source data, and a veritable host of other software tools and benefits friendly to their bookselling businesses.

For a more detailed list of these benefits our Members currently enjoy, click here.

The World Book Market has built for itself in its short life-span a highly-respected position in the online bookselling world, and its reputation is high amongst our large body of dedicated customers, and the bookselling community in general.

Our primary target is to increase our membership until we have active Members in as many countries in the world as possible.

At present, our Members frequently help out other Members from other countries, in matters of advising local conditions and laws, packages allegedly going missing, and returns of books at local rather than international postage rates.

We are also continuously upgrading our kit of software tools and resources shared with and enjoyed by our bookseller Members, and improving the search and browse routines on this site to the greater comfort and enjoyment of our book-buying customers.

Specifically, we will shortly launch our user-definable direct email catalogue system, which will enable our Members to send regular and automated mini-catalogues (including pictures) to those customers who have ordered them.

For our booksellers we will also be providing a direct and fully-automated upload capacity for the mega-sites eBay and Amazon. Both are currently catered for, but with separate upload paths.

On-site video clips of our Members' rarer books, with voice-over from the bookseller, is another exciting new development on the drawing boards for both booksellers and our customers.

One thing is for certain: the WBM website (and our bookseller toolkits) will continue to experience constant and regular expansion, enhancement and growth.