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My experience is that if one collects books they want as many stores as possible as close together as possible. NYC in the 1990’s used to have a few neighborhoods full of bookstores. My favorite was just around 16th street in between 6th and Broadway.
My experience is that if one collects books they want as many stores as possible as close together as possible. NYC in the 1990’s used to have a few neighborhoods full of bookstores. My favorite was just around 16th street in between 6th and Broadway.
There's a neighborhood in Tokyo called Jinbōchō, which built an entire town out of different specialist second-hand book shops. If you ever need a specific book on a specific thing, you bet you can find it there. It's pretty sweet.
Jimbocho has limited English text.
Now Hong Kong, Quarry Bay Street has a few but they're all on south island I see and accessible via the metro.
Anecdotal but I haven't seen a 2nd-hand bookshop in years however those little "tiny libraries" where people just donate their books are in abundance. What I've seen other used-item shops are doing these days is checking online what things are worth and selling them for very slightly less and it seems like this has to be a death-knell for secondhand stores in general. And I know they have to do this, everything donat…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can of course vary considerably by store, and I’ll happily spend time in both but, generally: Second hand bookshops are curated actively - like, they’ll only stock desirable books. They’re owned and run, usually, by people who love books. The staff tend to be knowledgeable. Charity book shops are much less curated - to the extent that some just stock whatever is donated (which, of course, is largely made up of boo…
I wonder if #1 comes over and culls through #2
If you want a fun fictional take on this, John Dunning's Booked to Die is a biblio-mystery about a Denver detective / book-lover investigating the murder of a book scout within the 1980's Denver used bookstore scene.
What's the fundamental difference? They're stores with old books; someone makes a few cents. I honestly don't understand the question.
Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today? Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing. Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough? No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness g…
Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.
> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.
Ugh.
Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today? Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing. Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough? No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness g…
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc. > the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing. I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furnitur…
Here's what I've seen: Amazon.com came online as a bookseller, chiefly, and began to eat the lunch of every brick-and-mortar. Then in turn, independent sellers began shopping in those stores in order to snap up inventory and sell it in their cottage-industry online shops. My cousin noted, back around 2010, that many antique, thrifts, and secondhand stores were clogged not with consumers, but shoppers and arbitrators and pickers, just scavenging for anything they could sell.
Between 2016-2019 I was in ministry with a small "lending library" at church. We had two bookshelves full of books that parishioners might enjoy reading. We had just lost our entire inventory when I started, and so it was up to me to sift through donations, especially estates of the deceased, to build up the collection again. I destroyed a lot of bad titles in those days. I noticed that there wasn't a lot of demand to borrow, nor theft, except for the non-book media such as DVDs. There was someone interested in messing up all my organizational work, though. I began to realize there was no good way to recycle or donate the unwanted titles, and eventually I was sort of forced out when a deluge of Spanish-language books came in, and I couldn't keep up with the evaluations and the shelves were full anyway.
I've also hung out in libraries for a long time. Now if you have visited libraries over the last 5 decades, you've noticed dwindling shelf-space for physical books, as computer labs and other tech takes over. It's plain to see in action: nobody really wants to check out books on such a scale as in the 1980s. eBooks are hot properties, along with CDs, DVDs and video games, oh man the shelf space given over to electronic media now! Ask any librarian and they will tell you about the proportionate need for space in this regard.
Furthermore, there's this quiet revolution in "libraries" known as "Little Free Library". My municipality and many others sponsor and encourage them. They're essentially little residential kiosks where any passerby can take a book or leave a book. Essentially many become dumping grounds for unwanted titles and real junk, I suppose, but perhaps have some utility for bookworm types who stroll through neighborhoods, walking dogs, jogging, and hob-nobbing with suburban neighbors. Many cafés also have such library shelves for customer sharing. Books are often useful for very small children to have and pass down.
Going to college in 2017-2023, I noticed a lot of classes where students carried no books, no notebook, and not even a backpack! They'd bring in their phone to class! The eBook could easily be accessed online from an app, so why carry those hella-heavy books around? Many students in I.T., coding, and other tech subjects would have negative use for dead-trees and we regarded them as pure anathema, because it was all about the online access to edu materials. Books and the bookstore did exist, and there were mandatory titles in many disciplines, but always had eBook counterparts. (And yes, I saw The Half-Blood Prince and I understand the value of a well-loved secondhand text!)
Lastly I managed to divest my home of every single book I own, save for a few personal titles and a Bible or two. I found that I never sit down and read a book except in power-outages or trying to drift-off to sleep. Books are too heavy to carry on the bus, and impractical to store on a shelf when I'm not home. Every resource is vastly more useful when loaded into cloud storage for me. I've been unsuccessful in eliminating paper, and I still use a printer, and I still receive paper email in the USPS, but as for books, they're history.
So all this above stuff makes me shake my head at this OP. When I hung out in the libraries I read some classic fiction and got some good learning, but the library situation itself is pointing to a book-free future IMHO. I've known some great bookshops in my day, and cats to go with them, and they were anchors in the community for people to just chill and sit around, but I still regard them as Apatosaurs in this digital age.
The reasoning it follows and suggested is quite dubious.
A bookshop is a business. Any business naturally has a loss function in the form of constraints, after which point it necessarily must go out of business and close. That loss function also determines how many people can be served by that bookstore insofar as the revenue earned goes to capital reserves and operations.
The second-hand bookstores have remained almost constant over decades, while population growth and the number of people being served has grown dramatically.
The charity bookshops involved have special tax status, they receive free stock, they get to choose which stock they receive goes to the paper mill or gets resold, and they can continue as long as their charity can continue.
While they must keep accounting records, those records need not be public, and may involve donations that may further subsidize destructive behaviors without the public's knowledge. They need not make a profit, whereas all other non-charity bookstores must make sufficient profit.
No business that has natural constraints can compete with an unconstrained entity in the same market. The money printer without constraint will always win, suborn, and drive out other businesses that do not have the same constraints.
It is just a matter of time and economic circumstance, and by the time anyone notices its too late.
There is also the possibility that many of the secondhand shops may also be propped up through loans, despite the ever tightening dynamic of ponzi that must be paid back (as it works for all debt in general).
There is great harm that state propped apparatus can do to business and the market in general, as well as to society. Rather than being open about it, these things have been happening in the shadows and that's something that needs to be revisited. If there is not a comparable loss constraint, the accounting records should be public to safeguard cultural history, and hold to account malefactors.
When the state wants objectionable material out of the general population's hands it just silently removes it from a pipeline they created, having learned from history, more specifically Hitler that burning books in public isn't a good thing.
Goodwill follows this practice of removing objectionable material from its pipeline in the US, and library budgets in many places are dictated by how often the book is circulated. Low circulated classics that are objectionable according to some undisclosed person, may just disappear once the library donates the low circulation books to the charity, that then removes that content without fanfare before it ever hits a shelf.
Ever wonder why many books from the 80s or earlier are often quite uncommon? Yes they are old, but the circulation was massive for a lot of these, and what's available now doesn't account for the natural difference of time, especially considering many of the books received from libraries were rebound to library bindings.
Food for thought.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties. Do you guys not have pawn shops, smoke shops, and check cashing shops over there?
Wait, why do you need a shop to cash a cheque? Isnt that one of the last few things you go to a bank for? Also, how do you cash a cheque without validating signature (from whichever bank)? Here in India atleast, cheques are cashed only at banks, and often are a/c payee only (no cash disbursed, only account transfer). They get truncated at the bank (basically scanned), and cleared overnight as a part of the CTS (a NPC…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties. For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vaca…
>It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties. Do you guys not have pawn shops, smoke shops, and check cashing shops over there?