Becoming a Bookseller

September 8, 2007

In an effort to begin saving money for a new video camera, and in the hopes of drawing down our book inventory, we have begun listing used books on Amazon.com marketplace. With every book I list I am curious to learn its market worth.. and I run into plenty of surprises! The best thing to have is a nice hardback edition of a book that was not a bestseller but which turned out to be a classic book in its field. Academic books (if they are important) keep their value. Bestsellers of almost any kind are hardly worth the paper they are printed on. If there are a lot of copies of a book floating around out there, they will have a solid presence on Amazon.com and its price will be quite low. As for common paperbacks.. they can be treated basically like the newspaper. If you don't want them throw them away (or prepare to do a lot of work to make 1 or 2 dollars). A few widely assigned paperbacks buck this trend.. such as my Norton Critical Edition Ibsen's Selected Plays. The price holds up because it is a common textbook.

In the process of listing all these books I thought back to how fun it once was to browse a good used bookstore. There were always surprises and possibilities. I would have titles running around in my head.. and sometimes I bumped into what I was looking for. My experience these days in a used bookstore is much less exciting. I rarely buy anything. The titles I most want are easy enough to find on the Internet. Even if I were to stumble upon something interesting at a used bookstore, I would just make a mental note and search later for the title online (where it would probably be less expensive). It is a loss.. but I don't much enjoy used bookstores anymore.

A system like Amazon.com Marketplace must be devastating to booksellers since lots of people, in effect, become small time booksellers. But since it is not their livelihood, these small-timers have no compunction with respect to lowering their prices to the rock bottom. These are people who in the past would just drop off books at the library or give them away at a garage sale. But now they enter the public market with the desire for a small profit. The professional bookseller has to sell books at a high enough price to pay mortgage and put food on the table for a family.. but now they are competing with people who just want to make a buck. Another problem for booksellers has got to be the dissemination of price knowledge that comes with a large online market. In the past the bookseller needed an eye for what books would sell.. and for which books were important. It took a quick eye to spot a valuable book. Now that expert eye is hardly needed as the online market prices almost anything.. or at least puts you in the ballpark.