Serious Books, Serious Bookshops

My initial forays into serious bookshops happened my first year at college, 1982. The Union bookstore at the University of Kansas, while filled with the usual textbooks and t-shirts, also had excellent, scholarly books on a host of topics, from various publishers. Military History, medieval, Greek and Roman Loeb classics, and even a book on a Russian Viking that I still own to this day.

Later that year I discovered J. Hood, down at the bottom of the Hill on Mass Street. It was my first real venture into a real used and rare shop, and their stock represented exactly what you'd think a university town used and rare shop would have.

Do these kind of places have a future?



Recently in the Guardian online newspaper out the the UK (Do make their book section a stop on your regular web browsing - you won't be disappointed) discussed this very point. Titled You Can't Be Serious, Andy Beckett discusses the decline in publishing serious non fiction across the board, and especially in regards to shops. It touched on a number of important issues in books and bookselling I'd like to bring out further, along with some other issues I feel are related.

Serious books have always been harder sells, as the article points out, and they are not getting easier. There are recent examples of serious books having great success. However, the majority of the more serious, challenging, and scholarly titles have small audiences, sell more slowly, and require more from the reader. Not a formula for a beach read. Demand from libraries is declining as books budgets are trimmed to cover online resources costs, while bigger book chains go for titles with wider appeal and most small bookshops pull back or fall away. Both big and small shops face declines in sales as well.

Serious publishers themselves are facing more direct challenges in addition to declining sales. University presses are undergoing what amounts to an economic culling as states cut back support and universities re-prioritize their expenses. University presses are vulnerable because many do not make money or make little. Many universities want to put them on a profit basis, but unfortunately that was never the rationale for their existence in the first place. The schools seem to value expensive sports teams over academic endeavor. Smaller independent publishers in the US, without subsidies available in some other countries, suffer from a shrinking market as much as any other publisher and any grants or collaborations they have sought in the past are gone or harder to achieve.

The book industry is undergoing perhaps the most profound changes since the mechanization of printing nearly 200 years ago. A changing and struggling economy, internet challenges such as digitization and Amazon, and the ever increasing variety of media to occupy our free time are major factors in that change. The article points out that such a decline in serious books has happened before, and other works, such as Reluctant Capitalists by Laura Miller (mentioned by me before) confirm this. But this time change is occurring across the breadth and depth of the industry, and that has even more serious implications for the future. We are facing a new world.

The good news is that in this new world serious books will not go away. The old world has useful lessons for serious booksellers and book publishers if one takes both a broad and deep view. Like species, certain types of books thrive in specific environments. Whether selling new books or used, success in scholarly bookselling is about the books, about the people, and about the location.

For the books, it's not just what is new or rare or expensive. It is knowing which are the better books, who publishes them, and how they fit (or don't) with other books in the field. Sometimes the best books are out of print, or are just being published, often by a small publisher. It can be a challenge to find them, learn about a new publisher, to keep up with any given field and to learn its history and the printed milestones. But knowing those milestones provides a map of sorts, a tool to help shape stock, and make it better. I personally think that specialization is very important and that selectivity is key. These are even more important if one does not specialize and/or is selling new books.

People are not just buyers, but sometimes sellers and sometimes advisors. Bookselling, to me, is an industry where you are rewarded for what you know, punished for what you don't, and presented with opportunities to learn every single day. Readers offer to teach a bookseller every day by what they buy, by personal conversation in a bookshop or by email, through their online discussion groups, and more. Taking that information and continually shaping services and stock to a chosen clientele is perhaps the most important thing booksellers of serious books can do, both as a service to a community and as a sound financial effort.

The old saying is still true: location, location, location. For serious books and serious bookshops, I still think a storefront in important. The contact with the community, the opportunities for both selling and buying, and the discipline of running an open shop are important advantages, not to be overlooked. However, location now means more than just the physical premises, but where the business fits in the new and changing geography of bookselling. Amazon is not going away. The recession may dribble to an end, but job recovery will still be slow. Price pressures are greater than ever and not all of your market resides in one community. The internet, with all its mixed blessings, is important terrain to map and navigate for a bookshop. It is not only selling, but presenting the shop and its stock to specific communities to get on their maps. Finding both online sources - forums, listservs, websites - and actual live events - association meetings, shows, fairs, festivals - provides superb opportunities to interact with a select community. In short, walk in traffic is not just off the street, but off the internet as well.

It is not easy. These are challenging times. Small changes in the market can have major adverse effects for even a well-run small, focused bookshop. Selling serious and important books is perhaps one of the hardest and most challenging tasks for booksellers currently. But as Tom Hanks said, it's the hard that makes it great. Otherwise everyone would do it.

More after the jump...

Collectibles, Collections, and Accumulations - or Amazon Finds the Wrong Path

One phrase that floats around the used and rare book trade is the term "collectible' Amazon recently has moved to begin tightening what they have in their "collectibles" category (see their stipulations for items and sellers here). Leaving the "who can list collectible books" issue aside for this entry, they make 2 assumptions that show a great deal of naiveté.

Kind of shame, considering they could have listened more to both collectors and booksellers.

The two assumptions of Amazon are:

# All books listed in "Collectible" condition must be signed, limited first editions, or have other desirable qualities that could reasonably be assumed to increase the book's value to a collector.

# All products must be authentic. We do not allow any counterfeit, replica or knock-off products.

I am not a fan of the word "collectible". Not only is it overused to the point of meaninglessness, it is, like obscenity, way too hard to define. In regards to printed books, anything can be collectible, depending on what the collector wants.

So, for me, a true understanding of what is collectible must begin by defining a collection. I make a distinction between a collection and an accumulation. Simply put, a collection is the basis of a story that the collector tells with the individual items in the group. An accumulation is simply a group of things that someone has because they like it, want to have it or just wound up with it.

A collection is a thoughtful process. It may start out as an accumulation, but at some point the person gathering the material has begun to shape it, by themselves or with the help of a bibliography or bookseller. That shaping creates a story, which is just the tale of a particular author's work, or perhaps an answer to a question that the collector wanted to know. It can be a great story of interest to many people, worthy of donating to a great library and kept intact. It may just as likely be a personal story, one of interest only to the collector, but shaped with just as great a passion as any other collection. The monetary or scholarly value of the collection does not matter, the size does not matter and even the condition of the material may not matter. What matters is the purposeful shaping of the story. Why did that collector want only reprints of Nancy Drew, instead of originals? What does that tell us about the impact of those stories on girls? A frequent regret is that many a fine small collection's story was lost when the owner passed. I urge collectors to write the story of their collections, whether in a blog, a book, or just as an ongoing record to refer to and alter over time.

An accumulation is what most of us have. Most of my books on history and graphic arts are just books that I like. Together they do not tell much of a story or have any greater theme than my personal, varying interests. Nor should they. Good accumulations of books are fun and varied and damned interesting. They can tell as much about a reading person as a finely focused collection, perhaps more.

What Amazon is missing is a deeper understanding of what can make up a collection. As I said, it is anything, so trying to put a fence around collectible is simply a modern search for the Seven Cities of Cibola, apologies to Señor Coronado. "Qualities that could reasonably be assumed to increase the book's value" is not related to collectibility, or even desirability in every case. It is related to monetary value and perhaps scarcity, but that is all. If I am collecting every edition of Faulkner, many of those editions may not be pricey at all, or uncommon. If one collects books on American Teddy Bears in the 20th century, then the issues are the same. An edition of a reprint publisher may not be rare or expensive or indeed have anything different than the first edition of the original publisher, but it shows that the book still has interest. Bibliographically, it may tell us something about the publisher, trade book making, or even printing processes at different times. There are even collections of damaged books, used by teachers, book repair folk or libraries to show the fragility or ill-use of books.

Their rule stating "We do not allow.... replica or knock-off products" is just weak thinking. Facsimiles are replicas. The First Editions Library makes lovely replica first editions of important American literature in slipcases and nice dust jackets. These are quite collectible, though modestly priced. The important thing is that they are described as such, and not misdescribed by incompetence or ill intent. You can also require folks use pictures, but pictures can mislead as much as words.

I understand that Amazon wants some way to move the better books away from the mass of common books. But the best way to do that is demand better description and cataloging, and then the give the searcher better tools to define what they want to see. How about a way to exclude all ex-library books, or all ebooks? How about doing away with or correcting all records stating "unknown binding"? These are actually far more substantial improvements for buyers and collectors than a "collectibility" initiative.

More after the jump...

Books Away! Dilemmas with Book Shipping Fees

There are two common scenarios for disappointment with shipping. Both start the same way. You're looking on one of the book or auction sites for a title you really want. You find it at a good price, but then you look again - shipping is $7+ for media shipping. That's scenario #1. The second scenario kicks in when you actually get the book. Let's say you paid $4 for shipping. But when you get the book, it is packaged loose in a padded envelope, which does little or nothing to protect book book. You may or may not see the actual shipping cost, but either way it's a poor result.

These two events happen all the time, and the blame is shared most everyone selling books.


In the first case, the seller is clearly overcharging for shipping. Rare books, oversized or heavy books, or even expensive book can cost that much regularly (or more) if packaged well and insured. But when buying though any site where a seller sets the price for shipping, Anything above $5 is too much for an average octavo sized book, if not insured, heavy, rare or expensive. For us, media shipping is around $2.25, .35 cents for the box, and perhaps 75 cents (at the most, it can be cheaper). $3.50 generally is the most shipping will actually cost us for media mail in the US.

The second scenario is far more common on sites where shipping fees are capped, or when the book itself is quite cheap. The quiet policy of sites like Amazon, Alibris, and recently ABE is to take a chunk of the shipping fee for their own use. For Alibris and Amazon, that fee is approx. $1.34-1.35 per fee. Amazon compounds this by not allowing discounts with the same seller (feel free to let me know in the comments if I am mistaken here, but I don't think so). There fore, sellers do not get the $4 a buyer pays for shipping. They receive about $2.65 or so. Many seller respond by shipping the cheapest way possible, and that means the lightest possible packaging in least expensive package. Indeed, some sellers make more money on the shipping, than they do the book itself, if the book is very cheap. And, given the math I shared with you above, that means we at Motte & Bailey lose money on shipping. We often do. Pretty much anyone who wants to ship a book properly does.

In both cases the buyer is not getting the service for which they paid, partly out of greed by the bookseller and partly out of greed by the bookselling sites. Business models are business models. They can be whatever is not illegal. But, like most folks, if I pay $4 for shipping, I want to see $4 in shipping. For sellers, I can understand the cost of materials in shipping fees, and insurance if need be. But everything else should be in the price of the book.

Likewise, the bookselling sites are taking part of the buyer's cost of shipping and simply pocketing it. For what? The best argument they have is that they are charged a fee when processing the credit card fee for that Amount. I understand that, but no credit card company charges 33% on a four dollar charge. None. It is simply a money grab, and the result is shoddy shipping practices are reinforced across the board. It is my greatest irritant in dealing with Amazon and Alibris.

There is nothing illegal about trying to generate income from shipping, but it has always smacked of sharp practice to me. Shipping should be a covered cost, not an income generating service, unless you are UPS or FedEx or the Post office. It costs sales, goodwill, and often the book itself, damaged or destroyed when the cheap packaging gives up its already tenuous ghost.

So look for shipping costs. Go to various websites. Buy direct as much as possible. For us, we offer free media shipping when people buy directly from our site, as it saves us money from a host of fees and delays that accompany any sales at the big book sites.

More after the jump...

To Break or Not to Break - Always the Question

One of the issues any used & rare bookseller faces is what to do with books that have great illustrations, esp. older ones. Many such books are worth more in parts than as a whole. Each bookseller has to address this issue for themselves at one point or another. All kinds of issues can come into play, from financial to moral. For a reflective seller, it is not easy.

So here's one bookseller's approach.


Many, if not most beautifully framed images in museums, libraries, historical associations, antique shops, homes, and used & rare bookshops come from books, magazines and atlases. Some of the sources were actually made to be broken up by their owners and made into framed art, whereas others were intended as collections of images to fully present a subject. But beauty often carries danger, and magnificent illustrated works were often broken up for sale or display. In the case of some works, complete copies are far more rare than any individual print taken from them or incomplete copies.

In a few cases regarding older works, these fragments are all we have left, and it is good that at least something survived. Fire, poor storage, censorship, and weather often decimated copies of early illustrated books, which were not printed in large numbers. The breaking up of the books at least insured that we would know a bit about them, their authors, and their publishers.

These days the greatest danger to such beautifully illustrated works is financial gain. As a notorious example, a book sold by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the Nurnbergische Hesperides was sold for $50,000. Its new owner sent it to Europe where the 248 black and white plates were hand colored (also common with maps) and then put out to be sold around the world for between $500 and $1500 each. The 2 volume book, created in the early 1700s, was one of only 8 known copies in collections around the world and considered a landmark in 18th century botanical wrk. This is often repeated, daily, for works of much lesser importance.

For our shop, we practice a simple motte: do no harm. If the book is complete, we do our best not to break it up. That is, if we can sell it as is, we do so. If it is worth rebinding, we do that. In some cases I imagine the buyer broke a book up that we sold, but we just don't do that ourselves. If the book has lasted this long with its content intact, then we won't be the shop that destroys it as a complete entity.

If the book, magazine, or atlas is incomplete OR (sometimes) extremely common when we receive it, we will break it. Sometimes we break it for digitized art, to scan it. We sometimes sell the prints, ads, maps, or covers in the case of magazines. We don't often sell the articles within, though I know of booksellers who do have some success with this depending on the magazine or journal. In these cases the alternative is recycling, which we do with the leftover bits. We have not done this with any work older than 1880, and the earlier the work the less likely I feel we would break it up, as older books, even incomplete, are still hand made, and the printing, binding, and paper are still important to preserve in situ, and often show unique variations.

As I noted above, each bookseller has to set their own rules in this area. But a good bookseller will keep a longer view of the life of a book. Items that are common today maybe not be so common in future. A discerning eye for art or design is important as well. I see a lot of illustrations and pages removed from books or magazines which really aren't that attractive or interesting. Perhaps some folks just see an old magazine and get to cutting.

Not us, and not you I hope.

More after the jump...

ABE, Now With 100% More E-Book

On the website ABE books, a user can create want lists which ABE matches every now and again, primarily when a bookseller adds more books. Those books are matched against all of the wants in ABE's system and notifications go right out.

But what happens when those listings are e-books, and all of a sudden several booksellers seem to have durn near every book in electronic form?

Sounds like Operation Mayhem to me.



That is just what recently happened. All of a sudden today (yes, I am a day behind dear readers) many of us who have such want lists with ABE get these e-book notifications. I have no interest in e-books. The closest I have ever come to buying one was back in the cd-rom days, when Voyager was putting out those awesome multimedia books. I still have them, and they still hold up. No, when go to ABE, my want lists are for books made out of atoms, not bytes. I am not going to go into the merits or problems with e-books in this post, but boy, it’s coming.

ABE seeks to promote itself as a professional used and rare bookselling site. But increasingly I have been seeing Kessinger and University of Michigan Print on Demand titles. Now, an e-book swarm. This is not good, and the main reason it is not good is a very old one, something I learned early in my bookshop days:

Bad books drive out good ones.

If you have a lot of beat up common books on your shop that are always there and never change, then that says something about your shop to your customers. The bad books not only take up space for better books, they hide the good ones, or give the impression that there aren't that many in the shop.

If you are trying to be a used and rare and "collectible" site, then I do not se how those e-books further that aim. All those easily made e-books aren't used, rare, or collectible. The plethora of records that may very well sprout up would overwhelm records for actual books, so that users look through the first 20 or so listings and just give up.

Worse, most of the online sites are what I call "sites that can't say no" - they don't let you limit searches by removing records with certain words. eBay does this, and true, listers there are always trying to find some cute way to get around the search parameters to show you things you won't buy. But they help. So, if there is at least an attempt allow users to easily limit want matches or searches to printed books (and while you're at it, a way to remove ex-library copies as well) then that can be a win win. It won't be perfect, but it can sure help.

IF ABE does not do this, I predict lot of complaints, and a number of buyers moving their want lists elsewhere. Inaction and a lot of false hits are not exactly customer service, and a bit of a dangerous gambit to play in these times of tightening belts.

More after the jump...

Books Sold - The Best Pricing Tool

As I stated in another post, my guestimate is up to 90% of the books online are common. The pricing of these books is pretty straightforward - look at what other copies are selling for and then determine where you want to set your price on that spectrum. This most often done by looking at one of the other major used & rare bookselling sites or one of the two big multi-site search engines.

But the best information you can have is the latest actual selling price for a book. There are not many ways to get it, but it will be an essential tool in improving book sales and bettering the industry.


There are two downsides of using for-sale pricing information to set book prices. The first is that such a comparison leads to a rush to the lowest price. Now, the lowest possible price - a penny, a dollar - is not necessarily the price at which a book will sell steadily. Perhaps that price is 5 dollars, maybe less, maybe more. You need to see the data to determine that. The second is that for books with fewer listings, prices can be set too high. Sure, maybe there are only 3 copies of the book for sale. But if the last 4 sold for half of the current prices, that might tell you something. And if they sold over the space of a couple of years, that would tell you more.

Such sale data is hard to come by - and full tabulated data that will let you do good analysis is harder still to get. Currently only eBay and Alibris allow users to see what books have sold for - and both have a limited window of data, either by account, date or quantity or all three. However, the variety of books they cover makes that information far better than nothing. The best sales data is for more uncommon books, and that is auction records. The best site for such data is, IMHO, Americana Exchange (we'll talk more about them in a later post). You can also get access to cd-rom or paper editions to these records at larger libraries. Auction records have a great history, and one can often track a single copy of a book through over a century of sales. Again, a great variety of books are listed, but most are pretty pricey, and not ones you come across every day and a general bookseller.

The kind of sale data needed should have a number of facets. Date (month, year), of course, title, author, publisher, condition, and price. I'd like to included description as well, but as some online descriptions are like a fingerprint for who sold the book, I might live without that - anonymity of seller and buyer is important. I would also be interested to see the state (i.e. Arkansas, New York, etc.) of the seller and buyer. Again, I could live without it, but it could prove useful. I would like the data to run back as far as it could into the past of a particular site. As noted above, this is a service I would have no trouble paying extra for - but it would have to be as useful as auction records.

I am not entirely sure why sites do not so that now. Perhaps someone in the comments section will suggest something. But if it is just processing power or some other "too much work" related argument, I won't buy it. Site revenues will flatten. There are only so many books and so many people who want to list them and so many sites users are willing to engage. By adding a fee service with tools and depth, It could add an important revenue stream. Even if sellers do not list on a site they might pay for access to the data on that site.

Access to such data improves the entire bookselling industry. If a book would sell just as well at $5 as a penny, that is useful information. More accurate pricing AND more accurate pricing tools are more professional, and lead to more sales, less problems, and more knowledgeable booksellers. It would be an added revenue stream for book sites. And it would help limit (you can't prevent a fool) the confusing, all over the map pricing that seems to be getting worse. If the major bookselling sites don't do it, then the association sites should as a service to their members.

It seems to me deeply silly in a multi-hundreds of million dollar industry to NOT have access to such important data. So pressure your sites - bring it up at roundtables and advisory boards and forums. Accurate sales data is good for any industry, and lack of it seems amateurish and downright counter productive to a healthy market.

More after the jump...

What is Rare? What is Uncommon?

In viewing online listings, I see these two words quite a bit in descriptions of books. Usually, I see such words in the middle of 20+ others listings for the same book. What are they thinking?

There are actually more or less standard definitions of rare and uncommon in the book trade. ABC FOR BOOK COLLECTORS by John Carter & Nicolas Barker (now available in its 8th ed. as a downloadable file) lists several kinds of scarcity, and I encourage you to look them all over. They make a great deal of sense, but don't go as far as I feel we need to into other levels of scarcity.

However, for our purposes, there are 4 levels: Rare, Scarce, Uncommon, and common, and I am primarily referring to books post 1850.

Let's deal with the biggie first.


A lot of booksellers seem to call a book "rare" if they have not seen it before, or often. This is far too limited a view, esp. if the book is going to be listed online with other copies, or more knowledgeable viewers will be seeing the description. Rare should be an item no one sees very often, and ABC FOR BOOK COLLECTORS discusses why that might be better than I. But a book is not rare is there are several copies for sale at any given time - all the time. A rare book is one you see every couple or more years. It may hang around a bit if few are interested in it, it is obscure, or if the bookseller is asking too dear a price, but it still is rare.

Scarce books are those that show up in the marketplace regularly, but never in quantity, i.e. less than 5, across ALL the book venues. Once more than a handful are on the market, it seems to me that supply is starting to match or surpass demand - at least at the prices offered. I often do not call a book scarce unless I have a better understanding of its availability as well - like checking to see if the book is still in print, or how many have been sold in the last few years.

Uncommon books are those that can be easily found, but in small quantities, less than 10 total copies, rarely more than that. These are books that were probably not printed in any great quantity, but that have a soft enough market that copies are usually available. Sometimes they are cheap, sometimes expensive, but if you want one you can find it. I view uncommon books are those whose supply has best matched demand.

Common books are those that you can always get, generally for a lower price, and in decent condition. These can range in quantity from 15 to 300. They make up about 90% of the market. To give you an idea or proportion, if ABE has 110 million books, then 99 million of them are the more common sort.

Even though expensive, Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain in first edition, first state, is a scarce to uncommon book depending on binding and condition. I don't think think of it as rare. It is at auction regularly. I can think of a dozen other books, less well known, far cheaper, and far more rare. Most booksellers with time in the business and a decent memory could make their own list.

The best advice beyond the above is to look closer at the book. Don't get in a rush to call something rare or scarce just because you haven't seen it before. Do your homework. Look to see how many copies are online, and see if you can figure out how long they have been there. Look at the records of booksellers, and see if they are calling it rare, and why. When in doubt, don't call it rare unless you have a very good reason for doing so. If people are interested, they will find the book, and buy it, without adding vague or excited adjectives to its description.

More after the jump...