The Company

Internet Book Exchange, Inc., a Delaware corporation, was formed in 2002.  The privately-held company owns and maintains the iBookX Knowledge Base and the iBookX.com Web site.

iBookX - The Internet Book Exchange acts as an intermediary between the book buyer and the book seller or bookstore.  We do not sell books on this site; we help buyers locate the books they seek—new, rare, out-of-print, and used books—then we assist the buyer in establishing contact with the seller.  Once the buyer and seller have been made aware of each other, it is left to them to agree to terms and to complete the transaction.

The iBookX.com Web site was originally launched in March 2003.

Our Founder

iBookX - The Internet Book Exchange was conceived and founded by our President, Patrick Jamieson.  Patrick brings a unique combination of bookselling experience and computer programming expertise to the company.  He has been a bookseller for over twenty-five years and a software architect and development manager for nearly twenty years.

While a student at UCLA in 1969, Patrick started collecting books.  (For a reading assignment, he bought a first edition of John Steinbeck's East of Eden for $15 rather than a $2 paperback reprint.)  His early collecting focused on Mysteries and Modern First Editions, and in 1978 he opened a small book store in Venice, California called Sandpiper Books.

In 1983, Patrick got his first personal computer and started to develop his own homegrown book inventory management program with dBaseII.  A friend—who was a small publisher—was impressed with that effort and suggested that Patrick develop a back office accounting software package for book publishers.  No such application was available on personal computers at that time.  Patrick was intrigued by the suggestion and the business opportunity.  He took evening classes in programming and accounting, and began to design and develop the MS-DOS program Deliverance that was eventually completed and released in 1985.

From the beginning, Patrick looked upon computer technology as nothing more than a means to accurately and efficiently handle mundane and recurring business tasks, and to thereby contribute to the improvement of a business's profitability.  He believes that identifying and employing the right technology is the key to developing a valuable and usable—and thus successful—application.  He has never been interested in technology for technology's sake—nor in the computer industry's "religious wars"—and he attributes that attitude to not having been a Computer Science major in school.

Deliverance, Patrick's accounting software package for book publishers, handled order entry and tracked accounts receivable, inventory, backorders, consignments, royalties, commissions and mailing lists while providing extensive sales and promotion analysis reporting.  By 1986, Patrick had closed his book store and was issuing catalogues and selling books by mail.  His primary occupation was running his new software company.

After re-writing Deliverance to run under Microsoft Windows in 1994, Patrick was contracted to head a similar migration of the then widely used personal accounting application Kiplinger's Simply Money.  The successful completion of that project led to his being hired as a Technology Director and Software Development Manager for a subsidiary of Computer Associates.

Patrick stopped issuing printed book catalogues in the mid-1990's when he began listing his inventory on the Internet—first on Bibliofind, then on ABE.  By then, his personal buying and selling interests were focused on Caribbean History and Literature, and he had changed the name of his book company to West Indies Books to indicate that specialization.  In 1997, Patrick began to compile notes on capabilities that he would like to see and exercise as a regular buyer and seller on Internet book exchanges.  He was disappointed that the established sites did little to improve upon their rudimentary searching, sorting and organizing capabilities.  But he understood that advanced capabilities are easier to wish for than they are to implement.

In early 2002—following several years of managing the design and development of large e-commerce web sites at XUMA (a San Francisco company that became a victim of the "dot com bust") Patrick decided that he was ready to employ his bookselling and programming expertise to build the world's best and most capable Internet Book Exchange.  He was determined to improve both the book buyers' and the booksellers' Web experience by offering more capabilities and services than any other site.  The commonly proffered "That's impossible" did not deter him.

It was possible.  This site—iBookX - The Internet Book Exchange—the result of Patrick's vision and persistence, proves it.

Technology

We firmly believe that what an application does, and how well it does it, is the only criteria that should be used to determine if that application is "good".  How it's built and what's happening under the covers is (or should be) of no interest to real, everyday users.  We also understand that some people feel they just have to know what technologies have been employed.  For those who have to know, we offer the following:

iBookX - The Internet Book Exchange is hosted on mulit-processor Microsoft Windows 2000 Web Servers running IIS5.  The iBookX Knowledge Base "lives" on mulit-processor Windows 2000 Servers running Microsoft SQL Server 2000.

The Web site was developed with Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, utilizing Microsoft's .NET Framework.  The primary language used to develop the ASP.NET pages was C#.  Architecturally, the application is broken down into Presentation, Business Logic, Data Access, and Database layers.  XML is used extensively throughout.

Our Promises

• We will not rest on our laurels.  As technology allows, we will employ it to offer enhanced functionality and capabilities to book buyers and sellers.

• We will never charge our seller members both monthly fees and sales commissions.

• We seek to dominate only the English-reading world.  While we are happy to list literary items in any language, our emphasis will remain on books in English.

Contact Info

We provide information and customer support by email and by phone.  We can be reached by phone Monday thru Friday (except holidays) from 9:00am to 6:00pm Pacific Time.