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The demise of the second-hand bookshop

thecritic.co.uk

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Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#71

Post by ghaff »

xtiansimon wrote: post #70
WalterBright wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I can get any book I want, including long out-of-print books. I remember years looking for a copy of Clarke's "The Deep Range". Now getting a copy is as trivial as pushing a button. And I have indulged myself, acquiring a small mountain of books :-) I also browse the books at thrift stores. It's how I've obtained a ton of strange books I never would have discovered otherwise. For example, I found a…

I too get any book I want and don’t have to store it in my house, And it’s all free—just saying. :)

If it's obscure, it's certainly not readily available on torrents (or in local libraries) if that's what you're suggesting.

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#72

Post by ghaff »

fsckboy wrote: post #63
Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #54

Nope. There are several reasons why individual secondhand bookshops are on the way out, but Oxfam is not a particularly significant one. I am honestly puzzled by the author citing the Oxfam shop on St Giles as an exemplar, because it's a poor shop full of tat and tired old guidebooks to Greece in the 1960s. Even the Oxfam bookshop 15 miles up the road in little Chipping Norton has more interesting stock. But it's int…

fwiw, Abebooks has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008

I find it somewhat interesting that Amazon has kept Abebooks separate. The latter certainly seems to me to be a better source for relatively obscure titles.

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#73

Post by peferron »

xtiansimon wrote: post #70
WalterBright wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, I can get any book I want, including long out-of-print books. I remember years looking for a copy of Clarke's "The Deep Range". Now getting a copy is as trivial as pushing a button. And I have indulged myself, acquiring a small mountain of books :-) I also browse the books at thrift stores. It's how I've obtained a ton of strange books I never would have discovered otherwise. For example, I found a…

I too get any book I want and don’t have to store it in my house, And it’s all free—just saying. :)

If you're talking about piracy, do you only read books from dead authors? Or do you pay them via alternate channels? Or are you just fine with enjoying their content without paying them back a cent?

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#74

Post by chmaynard »

Many used bookshops are managed by people who could never run a successful business. They love what they do but are not particularly good at it. These shops probably deserve to fade away. I purchase used books frequently. I almost always find what I want on Amazon, usually from multiple booksellers, and I have the book within a week. It's hard to compete with that level of service.

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#75

Post by beowulfey »

WalterBright wrote: post #58
mistrial9 wrote: post #21

Used bookstores are a lot like gardens -- they must be tended daily and grown in 100 ways, year after year. The city I grew up in was legendary for used bookstores, and they sit all but empty now, decades later. The 'modern' people chiming in about how to "search faster" are missing an aspect of the experience that is literal and measureable, as well as partially undefineable simply because the portion of the mind an…

On the other hand, I can get any book I want, including long out-of-print books. I remember years looking for a copy of Clarke's "The Deep Range". Now getting a copy is as trivial as pushing a button. And I have indulged myself, acquiring a small mountain of books :-) I also browse the books at thrift stores. It's how I've obtained a ton of strange books I never would have discovered otherwise. For example, I found a…

Getting a book like that is possible, but for me a huge chunk of the value of my collection is the journey to getting it. Finding it randomly in a tiny bookshop while on a trip is way more memorable than buying it on amazon. It’s the same with buying records for me. Sure I could buy most of the long out of print records I’d want to own... but the search is most of the fun.

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#76

Post by pm215 »

m4rtink wrote: post #40

Yet the japanese second hand book/game/CD/DVD/hadware company Book Off is as successfull as ever, with stores pretty much everywhere in Japan and starting to expand overseas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off Its really an amazing rxperience there - clean orderly stores with bright illumination jam packed by books at lidiculously low prices & you can find total gems there if you look for a while - like the fir…

I would be interested to know how much the Book Off model depends on the fact that manga is a huge market in Japan. Every time I've been into a Book Off, there's always been a huge manga section and it's always packed with people because (a) manga is really popular and (b) they don't shrinkwrap the manga to prevent people reading them in the shop the way a lot of places do. In a market like the UK or US where (comics being more niche than manga) there isn't that huge part of the store that's driving footfall and turnover, would the same model but working primarily with books do as well ?

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#77

Post by aurizon »

mikepurvis wrote: post #3
aurizon wrote: post #2

At the heart of this is the indisputable fact:- People save books!!. This led to many millions of tiny isolated and undocumented collections of assorted books. People who wanted a particular book had one option - a Used Book Seller(UBS). These UBS's would open a retail spot and gather books from estates or the public or library disposals of un-demanded books etc. As time passed, they would create a viable business. T…

Rings true to me. I have a lovely used bookstore in my area which has a variety of extremely eclectic stuff, and even he lists his whole inventory online now, as well as maintaining the in-person shop: https://www.abebooks.com/old-goat-books-waterloo-on-canada/1...

Sounds like he has the blessing of owning his own store, so he has no rent burden - the real killer as gentification ruins many places via rent increases.

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#78

Post by frereubu »

I'm torn when I read articles like this. On the one hand, I've spent many happy hours browsing round second-hand bookshops (a particular favourite memory was discovering the unabridged Gulag Archipelago while on a trip to NYC). On the other, the democratising effect of publishing leads to things like this - https://www.theguardian.com/focus/2020/aug/16/literary-world... - which, while potentially problematic on the surface, means that a much larger number of people can be published, no matter what their social status or connections. I've recently been reading Bruno Schulz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schulz - and if it wasn't for the intercession of someone powerful in the Polish literary world we would never have read his work (and, thanks to the Nazis, unfortunately we had even less than we might have had). What gems by marginalised authors might we not have read without this "excess" of publishing? Personally, I think this abundance of new published writing (including really interesting examples of self-publishing like Your Name Here by Helen Dewitt) is part of what makes second-hand bookshops less attractive. There is simply so much great stuff being written now by people who would never previously have had an audience, as well as unjustly-neglected authors being rediscovered. I used to feel like I knew most fiction authors' names in second-hand bookshops, even if only by reputation, but I'm not sure that would be the case any more. On balance I think I'd rather have a broader set of voices than a limited selection of second-hand books. And when you also have access to older titles that you might be interested in on abebooks, you can follow your own literary path rather than be guided by someone else's opinions about what's "important".

Edit: Thinking about this more, maybe it's because I'm in my late 40s now, but I get a lot of good recommendations from friends who have been reading all their lives, so I don't feel the need for anyone else to recommend things. My "to read" pile is huge as it is! I guess one thing second-hand shops were good for was suggesting things to me that I might not have read otherwise. But personally I think the internet, particularly Wikipedia and niche blogs, gives me a really good route to the next thing I want to read. After reading Bruno Schulz I've started delving into Polish fiction, and it feels like I've struck yet another goldmine.

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#79

Post by dylz »

Doctor_Fegg wrote: post #55
simplesleeper wrote: post #11

In the UK, I've helped run some of the ninja bookshop crawls. There are usually guided routes that take you through independent bookshops - they are always interesting and great for discovering bookshops and the cities themselves. Independent and second hand shops have really benefitted from these events and they usually offer discounts and gift bags for crawlers https://www.ninjabookbox.com/london-bookshop-crawl

That's a wonderful initiative - I'm really intrigued by that, and might sign up for one of the subscriptions. Thank you for posting. (Could you have words with your site designer, though? I honestly haven't seen Safari struggle with a site like that for months, even including the worst excesses of UK local newspaper sites or the Independent.)

It's a SaaS WYSIWYG site builder, the page is 300 requests and 20MB with aggressive adblocking turned on, and over a thousand requests with adblock turned off.

Almost every element is hard-positioned with absolute onto the page, or misusing flexbox in weird, overlapping, z-indexed ways

Re: The demise of the second-hand bookshop

#80

Post by layoric »

alasdair_ wrote: post #45
bjo590 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming ~600 man hours (your numbers) to digitize an entire used book store, at $15/hr cost for labor it would cost ~$900 to digitize a bookstore. I think you're shy a factor of 3 or 4 on the amount of labor it would take to digitize a book store, given my experience with running inventory at retail shops. Maybe it could be worth it if there was an inventory management system that could automatically post the books…

> Assuming ~600 man hours (your numbers) to digitize an entire used book store, at $15/hr cost for labor it would cost ~$900 to digitize a bookstore. $9,000

And at $0.50 a book would take 18000 sales to just recoup assuming 100% profit. Starting to understand why they don’t.
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