Seattle, Wash.--There might be places with more books on vehicle repair than Books4Cars.com but it's doubtful. Moreover, those places might not benefit from having a man in charge whose background includes a stint as an engineer working on the Corvette.
     Alex Voss said he started what is now an internationally known repository of about 40,000 automotive books, CDs, and other learning devices about 10 years ago with his wife, Ruthie. What had began as an avocation became a major source of income, he said.
     Customers today not only include students and teachers at technical schools, but also libraries and even attorneys who are researching automobiles for litigation.
     "We sell as many manuals for Daewoo as there are for Corvettes," Voss said. "We also sell manuals for cars that are not imported into the United States--such as the Russian Lada.  We sell all over the world, every day.
     "We sell a lot of manuals for older American cars to Northern Europe, because '50s and '60s American cars are very popular in Scandinavia. Sometimes we get orders from islands in the South Pacific, and we have to find them on a map."
Voss said the workday starts very early for him and his employees, which vary in number according to the demands of the season.
     "If people have a question about a particular purchase, phone coverage starts early in the morning--due to different time zones--and continues until late at night," he said.
     Books4Cars ships by three or four different carriers a day, including U.S. Postal Service, United Parcel Service, FedEx and, Voss said, occasionally DHL and BAX.
     "Most of the manuals are in English, but we have manuals in other languages," he said.  "We have a lot of requests for Spanish-language manuals, since more repair technicians speak that as their first language.  A couple of guys who work here speak Russian; I need help with the Cyrillic alphabet. We even have dictionaries for automotive technical terms that convert those terms into Hungarian, Greek, or Polish."
     Voss' business is housed in a nondescript building in the historic Columbia City district of Seattle. He said he has been using 1,600 square feet and is expanding the usable space by another 900 square feet.
     "Our business model is to have everything in stock. But it's a challenge to achieve that," he said. "A lot of times you have an item with a certain sales rate. Then someone at an auto club chat room on the Internet mentions a particular item, or sends someone an e-mail about it to someone else, and all of a sudden a whole group of people know about it, and we may get five orders in on the same day."
     Most books are arranged by manufacturer, with one section not specific to any particular manufacturer. Shelving is always a work in progress, Voss said, because of the multiple ways information is distributed in books.
     "Some makes have body repair in their shop manuals; some don't. Some have separate manuals for collision repair since a (service) technician isn't usually dealing with replacing structural members," Voss said. "Some 'manuals' are larger, with multiple books. For example, the Chevrolet Silverado has four volumes. Different manufacturers also have different ways to separate out the information: BMW is the only one that has a separate book for torque specifications."
     Voss said he graduated from Kettering University in Flint, Mich., with a BA in mechanical engineering in 1989. That came after studying engineering at the University of Washington and auto mechanics at Green River Community College, he said.
He said he ended up as part of a GM design group, working on the Chevrolet Corvette. For a person whose own cars have included a 1987 Citroen and a 1966 Lancia Zagato, it was what he described as "heaven."
     Voss, who also owned a Peugeot, said he began to collect and sell Peugeot parts as a home-based hobby. When a Detroit auto dealership, which had been selling Peugeots, decided to drop that make, it gave Voss all its repair and parts manuals for Peugeot.
     "I ended up selling more manuals than parts," he said. "I realized that there was a market for them."
The hobby became a business known as Voss Motors Inc. in 1997, Voss said. When the family moved to Seattle in 2000, the name changed to Books4Cars.com.
     "One of our concerns, moving here from Michigan, was how it would impact us," Voss said. "But it's worked out all right. We had a customer come in to buy a book, and he said the only other place he'd heard about that did what we do was Voss Motors. He'd been already buying from us and didn't know it. That happens.
     "Shipping from the United States is pretty inexpensive, to Europe especially, and we have that advantage. We have efficient carriers of merchandise. We can ship for next-day delivery if the customers pay for the extra service. "We generally don't do cash on delivery anymore--although we did that 10 years ago, when we were starting out. We sent some things on trust. People paid when they got the books. In our industry, we're very lucky that way. We provide quotes in U.S. dollars. Most people are familiar with that and have a sense of what it will cost in their currency." 
Books are acquired from a variety of sources, Voss said.
     "There are scouts out there who know what we're looking for and come in with their latest finds," he said. "Parts manuals are harder to find than shop manuals. We also purchase from our customers who trade in books when they change cars. We purchase for cash or we can offer a trade value, which is what a lot of our (regular) customers use."
     External realities affect the market for auto books in ways similar to vehicle repair or sales, Voss said.
     "When the price of gas went up, people wanted manuals for their old diesel cars from the 1980s," he said. "We got calls for repair manuals for Ford Tempo and Mazda 626 diesels. There are people out there restoring '82 Chevrolet Cavaliers."
The needs of independent service professionals tend to vary from those of do-it-yourselfers, Voss said.
     "We sell flat-rate manuals that tell shops what a typical repair takes, in terms of time," he said. "It helps in terms of giving a quote. A parts manual allows you to see how complicated something is and gives a view as to what's inside and how many pieces there are. We also have parts interchange manuals for GM, Ford, and Chrysler, which allow you to see what parts are shared by different models.
     "Frame manuals only have dimensions to be used by frame shops (for cars with ladder frames)."
Auto restorations-- by a shop or an individual--also lead to unique needs and consequent purchases, Voss said.
"Books verifying authenticity is something we get asked for--casting numbers and whether or not a particular nut was chrome- or zinc-plated," he said. "We can also supply paint chips to people who want to know what colors were available or what colors were correct.
     "Rust repair is something not covered in a shop manual. A restoration manual is something (an individual) has to have if they're contemplating a restoration."
     In addition to service manuals, Voss said he offers CDs with accompanying information. And for collectors of automotive books, there are treasures such as the hardbound copies of Automobile Quarterly, setting on a shelf by the front entrance.
"Sometimes, people inherit an old car and they don't know what they have. So we sell them a marque history," he said. "Or they have parts to sell on eBay and they want to know what they apply to; or they have an engine in a boat and they want to know where it came from."
     There are also service manuals for motorcycles, as well as books on Hot Wheels and other auto-related collectibles, even garages of notable car collectors. Nonetheless, Voss said he sees niches to be filled.
     "The early Japanese cars are a market just starting to blossom--early Nissan pickups and clubs for Toyota Corollas," he said. "While we have a racing-related section, with biographies of drivers and histories of certain races, racing is an area we'd like to expand."

Captions for photos taken at Books4Cars.com:

Photos 1, 2 and 3:

Photo 4: Alex Voss helps customer Chris Jude find a repair manual for a Mercedes-Benz diesel-powered car. Jude already had a repair CD but needed more information.
Photos 5,6, 7 and 8: Alex and Ruthie Voss founded Books4Cars.com with a collection of Peugeot repair manuals, bought from a Peugeot dealer in Detroit. They have expanded to cover every almost every make imaginable.
 
Photos 9,10, 11 and 12: