Lybrary.com was founded in 2000 by Chris Wasshuber with the idea to make hard to get magic books available in electronic form. Lybrary.com later expanded to include gambling books, books on games and many other subject areas. Despite the fact that we retail ebooks in pretty much all subject areas, we do put a lot of focus and emphasis on Magic, Gambling and Games. We think they fit well together because they touch and partly overlap. Magic, Gambling and Games often use the same objects like cards, coins or dice. Chess and Magic are linked at least by two classic magic tricks, the knight tour and the chess playing machine or the Turk. Magicians and advantage players often use the same moves and techniques, the magician to achieve a magic effect, the cardshark to achieve an advantage at the card table. Further, there have been gamblers who later became magicians and vice versa. Notable authors like John Scarne, David Malek or Steve Forte are expert magicians as well as experts in gambling. And somebody who is a good chess player is also often quite good in poker or other games of skill. If all these connections are not enough, we also have chess masters who are magic masters such as Nick Conticello.
We frequently publish digital versions of old books not because we think we will realise a big profit, but because we know there are treasures and gems hidden in them and because we want to preserve this arcane knowledge in digital form for many generations to come. If you are in the possession of a unique or rare manuscript, pamphlet, booklet or book or other ephemera, please contact us. We would love to digitize it to preserve it for posterity.
How You Can Help Us
Lybrary.com would not exist without the help of many loyal customers and friends. I don't primarily mean the support through purchasing of products which certainly helps us, but rather the support and help we receive on many other levels. If you think Lybrary.com is providing a unique service or if you enjoy our ebooks and other products, then please consider supporting us in the following ways.
Word-of-mouth: The best advertisment we can hope to get is your personal endorsement in the form of personal recommendations to your friends and colleagues, or online on the various forums. Like us on Facebook or tweet about our business or a particular product you just bought.
Links: If you have your own website or if you have friends who maintain a website consider placing a link either to Lybrary.com in general or to any of our category pages, author pages or product pages. (If you need help with the appropriate link and HTML, please contact us and we will assist you.)
Email Signatures: Some even go so far as to add a link to Lybrary.com in their email signature.
Browser Homepage: If you regularly visit the Lybrary.com homepage or if you regularly check out one of our categories you might consider making this particular page your homepage. (If you need help to setup your browser accordingly let us know.) In combination with making us your default browser homepage you could also install the Alexa toolbar which would help Lybrary.com rank higher in the Alexa traffic ranking.
Product Recommendations: There are many cases where a successful product was initiated or recommended by one of our customers. For example the line of Leo Boudreau ebooks was such a success story, or the long out of print but excellent memory system book by Dominic O'Brien. If you know of excellent but hard to get or out of print books, or interesting but largely forgotten authors, then please drop us an email. We spend a good amount of our time tracking down rights owners and clearing copyrights. Even better would be if you are the rights owner of some forgotten contents, be it in written form, audio or video. Or perhaps you have seen an ebook at a different website which you think should be part of our catalog. Let us know about these ebooks and products you stumble upon. Our goal is to be both deep and wide in the content we can provide.
Write a Review: Our online system supports customer reviews. Please do consider writing a review of an ebook if you have been pleased or disappointed. We do moderate these reviews but not to screen out negative reviews. You will find a number of very negative reviews on our system. But we do screen out spam or really short reviews. Only writing "That's great!" is not a review even though we are happy that you liked this particular product. On the other hand you do not need to write a dissertation either. It should merely be something of interest, a point or comment, or a description of the product which complements or contrasts the product description we put up.
Give Us Feedback: We constantly strive to improve our products, website and service. Even alerting us to a little spelling error on our website means a lot to us, because we are striving for perfection. Anything goes here, praise or blame. Is there anything that doesn't work for you or could be designed better? Anything we handle wrong or inefficiently? Anything you in particular like or dislike? Anything other websites do better? For example, shifting our focus from HTML ebooks to PDF ebooks was customer driven, or the fact that we are making larger and larger ebooks available for download was customer driven change. Also the fact that we provide permanent storage and unlimited download for your ebooks was a customer suggestion. We listen to you. Please speak to us.