We believe that the traditional focus of business needs to change. We think that businesses that view customers as assets to be exploited will ultimately be supplanted by businesses with other values. This won't happen quickly but, nevertheless, we believe new types of business organisations with different values will ultimately replace them.

This site is an attempt by us to explore how a viable business can be built that is based on growing a community. We believe that if we foster and enable a community to grow, then that community will reward us financially and defend us from attack. We are also trying to establish this community without having recourse to funding by VCs (we refer to these people as Vulture Capitalists rather than venture capitalists). Instead, we are hoping that this community and this website will grow organically through referrals, and, through having the right content to attract book collectors and book sellers.

Unlike other sites, we make no commission charge on the sale of books. We believe this will allow our bookselling members to offer a better deal to the buyer. We are also not charging 'rental' for listing books unlike some other Internet sites. Instead, booksellers can post as many of their books as they like without incurring extra charge. The only stipulation we make is that the books have a sales value greater than 12 or $20 US.

Our business model necessitates us improving the value of the site to the book collecting community. We have deliberately set the business model so that we make only a modest amount from each member. For us to be a viable business and increase our profitability, we must increase the membership of this site. Since we have eschewed the use of advertising then the only way we can grow the membership is to ensure we keep increasing the value of this site to its members.

We encourage our bookselling members to increase the lists of books for searching by making the listing free. Why do we do this? Well each book listed on this site is indexed by the search engines. The greater the number of books, the more the chances is that someone will visit our site and become fee paying members.

Ultimately, we are trying to make a profitable business out of providing these services. However, we have set the system up in such a way that we can only grow our profits through making the site more valuable to you, the rare book community.