11–20 of 157 posts
Independent and second hand shops have really benefitted from these events and they usually offer discounts and gift bags for crawlers
From personal experience, what has made me rarely go to second-hand bookshops (or bookshops of any kind) is they typically have a really bad selection. The amount of trash printed is insane, and not only do people tend to keep the gems, but they also tend to suck them out of second hand bookshops, so only really useless books are left.
I've found that it's hard to find specific books you know you want, unless they were really popular, but it's easy to find something interesting you've never heard of before.
A few weeks ago I picked up Umberto Eco's Misreadings in the second-hand section of our local bookshop. It's a collection of short stories from the mid twentieth century translated in English in the nineties. I grabbed it for a closer look because the author was known to me (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum), and because the back of the book introduced one of the stories therein as a pastiche of Nabokov's Lolita, wherein a certain Umberto Umberto (heh) pines for an elderly lady referred to as 'Granita' (incidentally, 'Nonita' in the Italian original).
That story was a delight to read and totally worth it.¹
I also would never have found, never mind purchased that book online. My biggest source of books is a yearly book-fair (in Deventer) where I will gladly spend hours trawling through banana boxes for cheap paperbacks and random chance finds. (Except this year due to bloody you-know-what.) So hurray for the serendipity of second-hand bookshops!
1: Anyone who has read and enjoyed Lolita ought to read this short Umberto Eco story: https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/08/24/granita/
The big second-hand bookseller in my town has a huge collection and several locations in multiple metro areas. Yet they have no way to search for a specific title! I was shocked. If you have no idea of your current inventory and sales history, how do you know how much to pay for people's books? Their books are about $0.50 a title -- I would gladly pay that price for a book I would otherwise get from the library if I…
Edit: Responding comment is quite right, original calculation mistaken. It's 4AM here. 40 × 6 × 30 = 7200 books × 15 seconds ÷ 60 ÷ 60 = 30 hours, so <4 days assuming 8 hour days. Or 1 day if you can speed up to 5 seconds per book.
The big second-hand bookseller in my town has a huge collection and several locations in multiple metro areas. Yet they have no way to search for a specific title! I was shocked. If you have no idea of your current inventory and sales history, how do you know how much to pay for people's books? Their books are about $0.50 a title -- I would gladly pay that price for a book I would otherwise get from the library if I…
There’s https://bookshop.org for injecting modernity into supporting independent bookstores. It doesn’t help specifically for used book stores however.
From a recent NYT article on the site:
"Orders are fulfilled through Ingram, a large book distributor, and mailed directly to customers, so stores don’t have to have the books in stock or process inventory. Bookstores get 30 percent of the list price — less than they would typically make from a direct sale — but don’t have to pay for inventory or shipping."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/books/bookshop-bookstores...
In the "bad old days" when new books were mostly sold at list price and there really wan't a whole lot of independent information about books out there, it often made a lot of sense to buy used books at half off based on serendipitous browsing of the shelves. But that's not really true any longer.
I used to go into Harvard Square on a Saturday afternoon every month or two in no small part to browse books and CDs at a variety of stores (many of which are long gone). I haven't done that in years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found that it's hard to find specific books you know you want, unless they were really popular, but it's easy to find something interesting you've never heard of before.
That, the chance to happen upon something you didn't know you wanted, is what adds to the charm of second-hand bookshops. A few weeks ago I picked up Umberto Eco's Misreadings in the second-hand section of our local bookshop. It's a collection of short stories from the mid twentieth century translated in English in the nineties. I grabbed it for a closer look because the author was known to me ( The Name of the Rose…
The big second-hand bookseller in my town has a huge collection and several locations in multiple metro areas. Yet they have no way to search for a specific title! I was shocked. If you have no idea of your current inventory and sales history, how do you know how much to pay for people's books? Their books are about $0.50 a title -- I would gladly pay that price for a book I would otherwise get from the library if I…
All books in the last ~50 years have a barcode already printed on them, and an ISBN printed inside. Any phone camera can read these. If you assume 15 seconds per book at pace, 40 books per shelf, 6 shelves per bookcase, and 30 bookcases in the average store, complete digitization of a collection should take only ... Edit: Responding comment is quite right, original calculation mistaken. It's 4AM here. 40 × 6 × 30 = 7…