Valib

Valib at work

The internet cannot reliably price a single one of these four books.

Whether you're a seller trying to list a book, or a buyer looking for one, high quality metadata is essential.

The information needed to identify and value a used book is often missing, incomplete, or scattered across sources that disagree.

Liftercise, 1980 paperback front cover — A 1980 paperback, recent enough that this problem was supposed to be solved. Its only WorldCat entry is unfinished, with no image and no library reporting a physical copy.

Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 1903 Macdonald Prize morocco binding — Hazlitt's text is everywhere. This copy is a 1903 Ayr Academy Macdonald Prize binding: red morocco, with the school crest in gilt. That particular copy is pictured and described nowhere.

Works on Paper: Eliot Porter, MFAH 1983 cover — Eliot Porter at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1983. An incomplete WorldCat entry and one photograph on eBay provide two partial records that do not connect to each other.

The First One Hundred Years, 1879 Board of Health proclamation — A work central to the history of public health, frequently referenced and widely represented in digital archives—yet no physical copy can be readily located or purchased.

Three of these four books have some kind of online record. None has a record complete enough to describe the copy, compare it confidently, and bring the right buyer to it.

Querying more libraries does not solve the problem. The book itself has the missing information.

The origin

Built from inside the problem.

Charlie Becker grew up in his family's used and rare bookstore in Houston. When algorithmic resellers began buying poorly indexed, underpriced books from independent stores, he recognized what made the arbitrage possible: the person holding the book often had less usable information than the software shopping for it.

His explanation of the problem reached more than one million people.

Charlie partnered with computer-vision researcher Adam Nelson-Archer to build the tool independent booksellers were missing. Valib is already cataloging real books from working bookstore shelves.

The problem was never a lack of books. It was a lack of usable records.

Early access

Start using Valib.

Valib is onboarding booksellers first. Buyers and collectors can join now for early access to the marketplace.

Take some pictures, get a listing.

The internet cannot reliably price a single one of these four books.

Built from inside the problem.

Start using Valib.