Essential Need Competitors

ThriftBooks is the world’s largest online, independent seller of used books, having sold more than 160 million used and new books since its inception. Founded in Seattle in 2003 and backed by KCB Management, ThriftBooks operates multiple processing centers throughout the US that purchase, grade, and distribute used and rare/collectible books. ThriftBooks utilizes proprietary software to identify and list books, as well as a sophisticated pricing model that dynamically prices books across a variety of online platforms, including ThriftBooks.com, Amazon, eBay, and others. Customers who shop at ThriftBooks.com can earn free books through the company’s loyalty program, ReadingRewards.

“Be fair to customers and our employees, promote literacy, be kind to the environment and remain financially viable so we may continue.” — Our Mission Statement in the words of HPB Co-Founder Pat Anderson It was 1972. Corporate dropout Ken Gjemre and fellow bibliophile Pat Anderson opened a used-book shop in an old laundromat in Dallas, Texas. They ran ads in the local paper, declaring “We Buy Books,” and soon found themselves with a few thousand books and hordes of customers. “You could stir them with a stick,” Ken said. And now? With more than 120 stores across the country, plus a website with customers and sellers around the globe, we’ve become America’s largest family-owned retailer for new and used books. Our founders coined the phrase, “We buy and sell everything ever printed or recorded (except yesterday’s newspaper).” And if you’ve been to one of our stores, you know that’s true. Ken and Pat weren’t just talking about our enormous selection, but about our refusal to censor products. As Ken said, “We don’t let others, or ourselves, determine what our customers should read.” To this day, we’ll shelve and sell just about anything, from The Diary of Anne Frank to The History of Farting. We might chuckle at the titles, but we won’t censor them. Half Price Books is committed to the community. We've been supporting literacy and environmental groups for more than 40 years and will continue working together to carry on the mission and causes of our founders. Each day when we go to work, we hope to do two things: share our favorite things with our friends, and help make the world a little better. That includes recycling and donating more than a million of our overstock books each year to local nonprofits and organizations around the world. Learn more about how we give back. Our goal of helping to make the world a little better also touches each and every HPB employee. This employee-centric culture began at inception with the notion of sharing profits with the staff

AbeBooks, an Amazon company, is a remarkable place to work. Millions of new, used, rare and out-of-print books are offered for sale through the AbeBooks websites from thousands of sellers around the world. We helped to revolutionize the used book business. AbeBooks (a.k.a ABE) became a subsidiary of Amazon.com Inc. after being acquired in December 2008. Our mission is to help people find and buy any book from any bookseller and our business stretches around the world with six international sites - AbeBooks.com, AbeBooks.co.uk, AbeBooks.de, AbeBooks.fr, AbeBooks.it, and IberLibro.com, as well as ZVAB.com, which offers German books. To booklovers around the world, AbeBooks is a great place to buy books. However, we have always been a technology company that helps booksellers and book-buyers. Since 1996, our technology has been helping to revolutionize the book business and that quest goes on. Our technology workers are versatile, quick-thinking and thrive on deadlines. They plan and build systems that will yield long-term tangible benefits but also drop everything when required to solve critical issues where every minute counts. Anyone looking for a technology job at AbeBooks has to prove they are a flexible team player because there is no room for prima donnas. We do a lot with a relatively small number of people. We are devoted to Agile practices and methodologies in software engineering, and e-commerce is a business that never sleeps when it comes to site operations. Our QA engineers are analytical on a global scale. Scalability is the magic word for the database administrators while the product managers have vision and a get-it-done attitude. Our web developers insist on the highest standards when building dynamic pages and user interfaces. Do you have what it takes to join our team?