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jean86 's review for:
The Diary of a Bookseller
by Shaun Bythell
I enjoyed reading this bookseller's diary. I ran a small online bookstore (now only pintables) and this book confirmed a lot of my suspicions of the book trade:
-Amazon is making the secondhand book trade near impossible
-To make it as a brick-and-mortar store you have to sell books online as well.
-Hardly anyone orders books through a bookstore anymore
-When in retail you become a type of therapist for costumers.
- One of, if not the best part, is the thrill of the hunt and handling those amazing once in a lifetime finds, the ones you only come across because you're in the book business.
-Most people think old books = money. Not true.
-Most people think First editions= money. But this is only true of things printed before 1960s.
- Amazon controls the publishing and writing. Amazon has driven prices down, publishers aren't making as much money so they are less likely to take chances on books.
- People use online reviews to pressure sellers for full refunds. Even if it's not the seller's fault.
-Ghost listings exist to bring down the price of some books. I've always wondered about the crazy low pricing of some books or the crazy high pricing. These are ghost listings - a fake listing of a book. Usually these listings have a low price and will trick a matching price software to bring down the price of the other listed books automatically. Then the buyer will buy the real book at a steal and delete their own ghost listing. Or I imagine it can also enable them to list their real book listing at a higher price. (I also suspect some money laundering scheme is involved in these ridiculously high-priced books.)
-If you want secondhand bookstores to survive, buy a book from them! Even if it's cheaper to buy online. The other month I found a local secondhand bookstore. I asked about a few books, bought a book off the shelf. later I found them on facebook and followed them. Excited to be able to support a dying breed. Two weeks later they announce they were closing. I haven't found another bookstore in my area.
-People don't read listings online and they will ask for full returns over things that were mentioned in the listings.
-Books are heavy, hard to move, hard to keep organized making bookselling a rather physical endeavor. More than you might first imagine. I sympathized with all the online book orders he could not send out because they were missing. (This happened to me several times when selling books.)
The author of the book I thought was overly critical of his costumers, considering they are his bread and butter, but several times he seemed repentant of this fault. I think my father, who used to run a furniture store, could relate; the public is strange and retail is unforgiving. The book was repetitive (it is a diary after all) and had a dry sort of humor to it that at times came off as pretentious. But overall, an interesting book on a strange, morphing market. I plan to read the sequels.
-Amazon is making the secondhand book trade near impossible
-To make it as a brick-and-mortar store you have to sell books online as well.
-Hardly anyone orders books through a bookstore anymore
-When in retail you become a type of therapist for costumers.
- One of, if not the best part, is the thrill of the hunt and handling those amazing once in a lifetime finds, the ones you only come across because you're in the book business.
-Most people think old books = money. Not true.
-Most people think First editions= money. But this is only true of things printed before 1960s.
- Amazon controls the publishing and writing. Amazon has driven prices down, publishers aren't making as much money so they are less likely to take chances on books.
- People use online reviews to pressure sellers for full refunds. Even if it's not the seller's fault.
-Ghost listings exist to bring down the price of some books. I've always wondered about the crazy low pricing of some books or the crazy high pricing. These are ghost listings - a fake listing of a book. Usually these listings have a low price and will trick a matching price software to bring down the price of the other listed books automatically. Then the buyer will buy the real book at a steal and delete their own ghost listing. Or I imagine it can also enable them to list their real book listing at a higher price. (I also suspect some money laundering scheme is involved in these ridiculously high-priced books.)
-If you want secondhand bookstores to survive, buy a book from them! Even if it's cheaper to buy online. The other month I found a local secondhand bookstore. I asked about a few books, bought a book off the shelf. later I found them on facebook and followed them. Excited to be able to support a dying breed. Two weeks later they announce they were closing. I haven't found another bookstore in my area.
-People don't read listings online and they will ask for full returns over things that were mentioned in the listings.
-Books are heavy, hard to move, hard to keep organized making bookselling a rather physical endeavor. More than you might first imagine. I sympathized with all the online book orders he could not send out because they were missing. (This happened to me several times when selling books.)
The author of the book I thought was overly critical of his costumers, considering they are his bread and butter, but several times he seemed repentant of this fault. I think my father, who used to run a furniture store, could relate; the public is strange and retail is unforgiving. The book was repetitive (it is a diary after all) and had a dry sort of humor to it that at times came off as pretentious. But overall, an interesting book on a strange, morphing market. I plan to read the sequels.