Where Have All the Booksellers Gone?

[iwiw60]

I found this article quite interesting...I hope you do, too...enjoy!
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Where Have All the Booksellers Gone?
by Craig Stark
April 5, 2010

I went to an estate sale this morning. The ad had mentioned an entire library/room of old books. Nice, huh? Five or ten years ago, a sale like this would have attracted numerous booksellers, and I would've had to work fast grabbing enough books to make it pay off. Today? Today I was the only bookseller there - the only one - and I had the room to myself for almost two hours. And, after a half dozen trips to my vehicle to load everything I found, my back is feeling it.

Last week I did something I almost never do anymore: I went to a used bookstore, mostly because I had some time to kill before another sale. I hadn't been to this one for several years - I'd stopped going, in fact, because I wasn't finding anything anymore, probably because so many other booksellers were grabbing stuff ahead of me? (By the way, this is the only used bookstore of any size left in the million-plus metro area I live in. Ten years ago there were dozens of them.) Anyway, when I got there, I was pleased to discover that I still had a few hundred dollars in store credit for essentially worthless books I'd turned in years back. About an hour later I left with many hundreds of dollars worth of viable inventory, having spent fortysomething bucks. To repeat - this is a used bookstore. The year is 2010.

Several weeks ago I was at another estate sale that featured not only a library of books inside the house but a "book nook" in the back yard, only absolutely nothing there was worth a darn. This time there was another book dealer there, one who has been in the business for many years and had once owned one of those dozens of used bookstores I mentioned above. Funny thing - he was buying lots of books, filling up several boxes more or less frantically, you know, almost as though he was actually finding some hot stuff. Several times I glanced over to see what he was grabbing, and for the life of me I didn't get it. What I could see of it were stinkers one and all. Several days later - this is how puzzled I was - I got on to Abebooks to check out what he'd found. (You can do this if you run a newly-listed books search.) There they were, many of the titles I'd seen at this sale, but guess what? Not a single book was listed for more than $8, and most of them were in the $4 to $6 range.

What's poignant to me - maybe especially to me because I've gotten so much communication from people getting into bookselling over the years - is recalling the enthusiasm so many new booksellers had, some who became good friends, some who for the first time in their lives could actually say that they loved what they were doing, and some who were very grateful to have found a source of income that allowed them to stay home with children, supplement their retirement, and so on. And where are they now? A lot of them have reduced their bookselling activity dramatically or gotten out altogether. I could tell you a hundred stories, and no two would be alike. I don't have any hard numbers, but the rate of attrition seems pretty darn high.

For six months last year my own sales dropped sharply, so much so that I cut back on other things I'd been doing to devote more time to bookselling. By August I had recovered nicely, and the month just ended was the best March I've ever had as a bookseller, the past eight months the best bookselling period I've ever had. I could come up with several reasons for this, but one of the more important ones is that I've been able to find better things to sell both online (mostly on eBay) and at sales. Why? Again, there are likely several reasons, not the least of which I get better at scouting each year, but one very conspicuous reason is that my competition has fallen off dramatically.

Perhaps a similar drop-off hasn't occurred in your area yet, but if not, I'd be surprised if it didn't soon. Referring back to my short account of the longtime bookseller who was grabbing the low-dollar books at that estate sale, my gosh, he's been in the business longer than I have and hasn't figured this out yet? Now I'm wondering how much longer he will last! Oh, and those many booksellers who have left - it's quite likely that most of them were selling low-dollar books too.

For remaining booksellers, this is good news, I think. Looking ahead, I see opportunities for that weren't in play even a year or two ago. If you've survived this recession to this point and have persisted in learning the trade, I do like your chances.

[sewmuchtosee]

Interesting read. I know that here in Oz on many auction sites booksellers are leaving in droves because of the high cost of postage added to the book price. Myself and a friend who do a couple of markets (one which does allow second hand items have sorted out a few of the good books we have in stock and will be taking them to sell along with our handcrafted items to supplement our income.

[osceolabul]

Being on this site since 1999 & have over twelve hundred books listed, with maybe 50 sales over this time frame, don't beleive one can place one's future in book sales. It seems like a waste of time but gives me something to do & maybe one day, before this vail of tears ends, someone might develop an intrest in reading once more. So will keep listing & hope for the best.

Thanks for your time & patience.
Richard

[meebo1]

My books get listed because I can't bear trashing them. I have either read them myself or have inherited them. Every so often I make a sale, but alas not frequently enough. And the postage increase is not helping

[leapingcat]

I think that some parts of the book market are still doing well. Specialist non-fiction books such as those on local history sell fairly easily, and although I know little about antiquarian books, the market for them seems to be quite strong. The collapse in sales (in the UK at any rate) has been in the popular (mass-market) paperbacks by best-selling authors. Bookshops and supermarkets all sell new copies at low prices, and people want the latest book by an author. The new book market is still healthy (about 200 million copies a year) in spite of the recession, so there are just too many secondhand paperbacks coming on the market. Copies in less than excellent condition are unsaleable unless rare, so they might as well go in the recycling bin, because that's where they'll end up even if you donate them to a charity shop, even they can only sell the best.

Specialise and go for quality and you do at least give yourself a fair chance, even in today's conditions.