Move Over, Amazon!

By Patrick Totty Posted on History

In a move designed to offer a significant new value-added service to its user base of knowledgeable travelers and specialty tour operators, Cultural Travels is now publishing the online catalogue of Magellan Books.

Magellan, a New Hampshire-based Web bookstore, is a seven-year-old firm that specializes in presenting curious, inquisitive travelers with travel books that match their level of interest and sophistication. “We focus on the serious traveler, the person who wants to do some in-depth research into a place before visiting it,” says Bob Riessen, Magellan’s owner.

This means, says Riessen, that a savvy traveler using Magellan’s search feature for, say, Peru, will be provided with a list of books that are most likely to match the topics he is interested in – history, art, music, cuisine, literature and off-the-beaten-track destinations.

Magellan’s search results are the opposite of Amazon.com’s, which typically offer inquirers long lists of book titles, the vast majority of them useless to visitors, which are listed simply because they have a key word like “Peru” in them.

Started to Help Tour Operators

Magellan began in 1993 when Riessen began talking to a bookstore owner friend about a peculiar trend she’d been noticing. Travelers would approach her with lists of books that tour operators had recommended they read before taking their trips. “The problem was that either the information on the lists was incomplete – maybe just the title and publisher, but no price or summary,” recalls Riessen. “Often the books were out of print, or very expensive or needed to be special-ordered.”

Riessen says he realized that what was supposed to be a helpful gesture on the part of tour operators had become annoying to their clients. That’s when he sensed there might be a market among tour operators for a bookstore that could provide exactly the travel books they recommended. “We went to operators and proposed an annotated list of books that we would keep current and stock. Their clients could call our 800 number, knowing they could get any of the books on the operators’ recommended lists.”

In 1998, Magellan went online, continuing to offer the same service on the Web that it had offered over the phone. “When you call and ask us about a book,” says Riessen, “you are talking to somebody who has some real-life knowledge of the field. When you search for a book on our online catalog, the results are generated by knowledgeable people who understand the tastes and concerns of serious travelers. We always ask ourselves, ‘If I were going to such-and-such a country, what kind of books on that country would I be likely to want to learn about?’”

Magellan’s constantly updated travel book database lists about 5,000 titles. Riessen says the emphasis is on content, not quantity. “Part of our job is to be selective, not to list every title or inundate customers with choices.” In that respect, he says, many of Magellan’s loyal customers see the company as a welcome amenity rather than another distant, giant database to be slogged through.

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