Three months later, Bezos announced that the number of Marketplace sellers had grown by another 50%, and that Marketplace orders in the first quarter of 2002 accounted for 23% of all U.S. orders and 12% of all U.S. units.
The majority of these 150,000 sellers probably do not perceive themselves as merchants, much less as booksellers. It is more appropriate to compare them to the brick-and-mortar used bookstores’ phenomenon of the customer who brings in books to sell or trade to the store for dimes to dollars, more or less. For decades these good folk have been the lifeblood of many used bookstores, schlepping in boxes with hidden treasures as well as their fair share of useless junk, graciously accepting short payment for their well-kept, once-read books, and thereby allowing the stores to offer intriguing inventory at inviting prices.
Things have changed. Thousands of these customers now realize that they have a choice. When they finish a book and decide not to keep it on their personal bookshelves, they can offer it for sale online with just a few clicks of the mouse. In all likelihood, it’s these reader-sellers and their efforts to stretch their book-buying dollars that comprise most of Bezos’ 100,000 sellers. (Apologies here to those sellers who are selling used videos, DVDs, CDs, games, Anna Kournikova photos, and other non-book items on Amazon. Much of what follows in this book may be useful to you, but it is my belief that your numbers would not greatly change the story line here, and it is my intention to leave specific references to your many fine wares out of the text if only to avoid unnecessary cluttering of sentence structure by a writer who already has a tendency to write sentences, like this one, longer than what my Microsoft Word Grammar Checker seems inclined to allow without a struggle).
How Many Online Booksellers Are There?
The question remains, how many of those Amazon “merchants” are actually serious booksellers who perceive themselves as such, whether they are working out of established bookstores, their basements or garages or dens, or local public libraries? It is clear that the number is growing daily, and may well exceed one-third of the overall total: perhaps 50,000 or more self-identified booksellers! Indeed, one of the most venerable booksellers’ databases, www.Bookfinder.com, introduces its book-searching function with this brief but remarkable description: “We work with a number of new and used book sellers and listings services, aggregating the holdings of over 40,000 different booksellers on one search engine.”
Whoa.
40,000 or 50,000 different online booksellers?
Believe it.
But don’t believe it tomorrow, because it will be yesterday’s count, and too conservative. We are talking about an ongoing explosion of numbers with a dramatic ongoing effect on our economy, on the book industry, and on the lives of tens of thousands of American families.
By comparison, a recent survey found that the number of “open store” used bookstores in the United States in 1999 was about 4,300, an increase from about 3,800 in 1996. Another 2,800 booksellers were found in the same survey to conduct business by appointment, mail order, or at book fairs. (The survey is part of a report titled The Quiet Revolution: The Expansion of the Used Book Market, published by Book Hunter Press and available online at www.bookhunterpress.com, which also publishes the regional Used Book Lover’s Guide books).
All of these numbers probably suffer from under-counting, but the number of online booksellers may be the most understated numbers. And if it isn’t understated as we go to press with this book in the spring of 2002, it will be in a year. After all, online bookselling scarcely existed in the early 1990s, and it was nothing more than a blip on the radar screen as late as 1996. The number of booksellers and the number of titles available can probably be expected to keep growing at least through the first decade of the 21st century, and perhaps beyond.
Books, after all, are ideal commodities for online selling. They have easily stated identifying qualities such as title, author, and binding, and they are relatively easy to describe as to their condition. They come for the most part in standard sizes and they are especially cheap to ship due to the existence of the United States Postal Service’s Media Mail classification, also known as Book Rate or Special Standard Rate.
Books are also the ideal commodities for a home-based, little-money-down, bootstrap business. With a little legwork, they are cheap and easy to acquire, and their compact and standard sizes and spine-out identifying information make them easy to keep in inventory in a relatively small space. And perhaps most importantly, their usefulness does not erode greatly with each reading.
The Changing Role of Booksellers’ Bogeyman
All this being said, it is nonetheless a stunning set of developments that has enabled a hundred thousand flowers to bloom, if you will, in the field of online bookselling. Throughout the 1980s and until the late 1990s, it appeared that inevitable economic forces within the bookselling industry were leading to greater and greater consolidation. When I opened a small independent community bookstore in an inner-city Boston neighborhood in 1986 it was correctly seen by some as a quixotic and basically selfless move that was doomed to fail financially because of competition from chain discounters and superstores, mall-sprawl, and the competing bookshelves at the local Super Stop and Shops. In the course of staying open for four years and losing what then seemed like vast sums of money, I had a lot of fun, did some good for the neighborhood, and became very active in the American Booksellers Association, where I found a great deal of sympathy for my somewhat self-interested and sectarian view that chains like Royal Discount Bookstores and Barnes and Nobles stores were out to ruin the world. Independent bookstores were dropping like flies, and it often seemed that they stood a good chance to thrive only in resort towns, college towns, and the toniest of neighborhood shopping districts. The other bogeyman for my bookstore and many of my colleagues’ was the specter of skyrocketing rents, and this factor was especially trying for used booksellers who might have the ability to control the cost of inventory but who could be forced to close as rents doubled, tripled, and quadrupled in the real estate boom of the 1980s.
It’s funny how things change. By the late 1990s, the chain booksellers had dropped significantly on independent booksellers’ lists of the top 10 bogeymen. The new villain on the block was the upstart internet bookseller Amazon, which was out there in cyberspace providing an impossibly diverse inventory with relentless customer service, prices that were often discounted at least enough to offset the customer’s cost of shipping and handling, and some groundbreaking efforts to personalize the customer’s cyber-shopping experience so as to begin to make up for the absence of the wonderful role a real live bookstore owner or employee can play in suggesting a book that’s just right for the customer who has just walked in the door. Founded in Jeff Bezos’ garage in 1994 and opened a year later, Amazon grew at warp speed.
Within a short time, while some publishers and booksellers worried that mass-printed books might soon be a thing of the past with the advent of e-books, print-on-demand, and other as yet unimagined manifestations of the information age, Amazon grew to be a significant force in bookselling and was joined online by Barnes & Noble, eBay, Half.com, and several efforts aimed at providing independent booksellers with a collective online marketplace and database for their used books (most notably aLibris and ABE) and new books. Even the American Booksellers Association began to look for ways to assist its members in creating an online presence to compete with Amazon and others in the online selling of new books.
Then Amazon really threw the bookselling world a curveball. Beginning very quietly in 1998, Bezos’ company began allowing people to share its website and become third-party sellers there by posting books for sale and linking them directly to Amazon’s listings. Although there were certainly glitches along the way, Amazon generally made it easy for sellers and buyers to connect, complete simple transactions, and quickly move both books and the funds paid for them (less a percentage for Amazon, of course) to their intended destinations. Initially Amazon’s percentage, even with credit card fees included, amounted to an average total of only 7 to 10 percent, and as participation in this “zShop” program gradually increased the natural question began to arise: why would Amazon cannibalize its own revenues by inviting competitors, however tiny they might be, to waltz right onto the Amazon website, undercut Amazon’s prices, and take away sales that Amazon would otherwise surely make? There were myriad speculations as to the answer, and certainly there was no small amount of understandable fear among zShop sellers and other new and used independent booksellers that Amazon had set in motion a truly sinister monopolistic strategy aimed at bringing its competitors under its big tent only to make them so dependent on Amazon’s customer base and brokering role that they would be the proverbial bugs on the windshield when, ultimately, Amazon pulled the plug on its third-party seller programs.
Amazon’s Business Model
In November 1999 other possible answers began to become clear. Responding in part to the very specific and direct competition embodied in eBay’s newly acquired and fast-growing fixed-price Half.com venture, Amazon began to expand and standardize its third-party seller programs dramatically through the development of a Marketplace program that allows sellers to link books (as well as movie, music, and other products) with extremely high “above-the-fold”, first-screen visibility right next to Amazon’s own listings. The number of Marketplace sellers began to grow very quickly and within a few months there were numerous individual titles where “glut” conditions forced prices down to ridiculously low levels, a problem that was also in evidence at Half.com.
But for every mass-market John Grisham novel selling for a penny there were plenty of other used books selling for $5, $10, $20, $40, and more. And Amazon, by increasing its per-transaction percentage to 15 percent, raising its monthly Marketplace “Pro Merchant” participation fee to $39.99, and quietly slicing off for itself a significant percentage of the amount charged customers for “shipping and handling”, was suddenly operating with a gross margin in the 25 to 30 percent range on its Marketplace transactions – the same profit range it achieves on its own in-house book sales!
While it is true that Amazon must be realizing a much lower dollars-per-transaction yield on these third-party used book sales than on new books from its own warehouses, this is where a better understanding of the true Amazon business model comes in handy. The company that Bezos started in his garage in 1994 has consistently placed its primary faith in the notion that its ability to create positive customer experiences is what drives its business. From a customer experience point of view, the Amazon Marketplace venture means lower prices, a huge increase in available inventory both of newer products and out-of-print titles, the opportunity to search for something hard to find without leaving Amazon’s friendly confines, and a chance to significantly reduce the ultimate net cost of purchasing any item by turning around and reselling it when one is finished with it. All of this means more customers and more repeat customers, and Amazon may just be the most successful merchant on- or off-line, since the decline of the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, at winning repeat customer business. Because of the relatively high fixed costs of maintaining its remarkable multi-channel infrastructure, every profitable transaction Amazon can wring out of its Marketplace business improves the company’s profitability, its long-term chance for success, and the base of customers who might buy bigger-ticket items down the road while relieving its need to pay the considerable costs of purchasing, warehousing and fulfilling its own in-house inventory.
Amazon’s commitment to the “customer-experience” model as the driving principle in its business model and the litmus test for strategic decision-making was proven once again early in 2002 when it opened the door wide to its competitors’ new book products. Until late in 2001, any seller wanting to post a new book on Amazon’s Marketplace had to list it as a used book in “Like new” condition and price it at least 20 percent below Amazon’s often already discounted price, which of course meant a razor-thin or possibly negative gross margin after also accounting for Amazon’s 15% transaction fee. Late in 2001 Amazon cracked the door open slightly for new products, allowing sellers to opt for a “New” listing with a price-point only 10% below Amazon’s price, but with the rather limiting restriction of being visible to Amazon customers only when Amazon’s inventory on a particular title went out-of-stock. Not too inviting.
Then, suddenly and without fanfare, in January 2002 the door was opened wide. A seller can now list an item as new and it will be listed right next to Amazon’s copies for the customer’s choice, and the only price restriction is that it cannot be priced higher than Amazon’s listed price. This freedom to compete with Amazon for new book sales on its own site is sure to appeal to the full universe of booksellers including used booksellers with as-new items, new-book sellers who have heretofore steered clear of Amazon, wholesalers and jobbers such as Baker & Taylor, Koen Book Distributors, and Ingram, and large and small publishers alike. Interestingly enough, the result is that we are now very close to coming full circle from the point at which Amazon was seen by many independent “new book” booksellers as the bogeyman to a new day wherein Amazon could well play the role of savior for many independent stores that have the challenging combination of great selection and weak traffic or poor location.
Once again, the charge will go forth from Amazon’s detractors, stock shorters, and others who are slow to understand the company’s business model, that the company is cannibalizing its own revenues. But is that what’s happening here? Not for a moment. Amazon will continue to make a nice 25 to 30 percent slice from all the transactions of all the aforementioned potential Marketplace sellers, without having to warehouse a single book. To be sure, many of Amazon’s customers will want to buy only from Amazon’s in-house inventory out of fear that the Marketplace experience will feature substandard fulfillment or customer service, credit card security, or email or identity security. But Amazon has committed itself to this model and has already been quite successful in making these transactions seamless and user-friendly for both sides, and one can be sure that it will continue to pay close attention to these issues.
A Marketplace in the Classic Sense
Indeed, the “Marketplace” name says it all. Amazon’s goal is to create a multi-channel, multi-product marketplace, almost in the classic sense of the Greek agora, that will meet virtually all of its millions of customers’ online shopping needs, and to allow market forces to dictate as much of the customer experience as possible, even if it means driving prices on some mass market paperbacks down to a penny a pound.
One result of all of this, of course, is that Amazon continues to capture a greater and greater share of the growing number of internet-connected consumers in the world, and that more than any other group of visitors to any other website, Amazon’s customers come to the site with their credit cards handy (or already on file), ready and usually eager to buy books and/or other products.
One increasingly clear result for booksellers is that practically everyone is selling on Amazon, including a growing number of independent booksellers who are stalwart members of the American Booksellers Association, and even some former online competitors such as aLibris.com. If you want to sell books online, ignoring Amazon or refusing to sell there because you feel it is the independent booksellers’ bogeyman is like wanting to open a brick-and-mortar bookstore and ignoring the old maxim that the three most important factors in determining a retailer’s success are “Location, location, and location.” You can turn your back on Amazon’s customer base, but why would you want to do that? Ideology? Please.
(Don’t get me wrong; I am an ideologue, but I fail to see a real ideology here).
While Amazon controls a huge share of the online book market, it is not alone by any means. The eBay auction site, which bills itself as the world’s largest marketplace, continues to thrive, turn a tidy and consistent profit, and provides the channel for plenty of book transactions. Indeed, when a Lyme, New Hampshire woman achieved instant notoriety in March 2002 by appearing in Parade magazine’s annual feature on “What Americans Earn” with the listing “Isabelle McMillen, Online bookselling, $45,000, ” a little sleuth work by her colleagues on the Bookfinder Insider online message board turned up the news that she sells almost exclusively on eBay. She and her husband sell rare and antiquarian books and ephemera through their www.Bookbaker.com site, with occasional listings at Christie’s in New York, and they are obviously finding plenty of eBay customers for items that they couldn’t possibly list on Amazon and have chosen not to list at sites such as aLibris.com and Advanced Book Exchange.
A Backlash by Authors and Publishers
One of the more predictable responses to the increasing, and increasingly inexpensive, availability of used books on the Internet has been the opposition of publishers and some authors. The Authors Guild, a trade group for writers, sought to bring this issue to a head in April 2002 with an email calling on its members to boycott Amazon by ceasing to link to Amazon from their own Web sites, citing Amazon's "notorious used-book service."
"Amazon's practice does damage to the publishing industry, decreasing royalty payments to authors and profits to publishers," the guild wrote in its message. "There's no good reason for authors to be complicit in undermining their own sales."
On April 10, 2002, a copyrighted New York Times article by reporter David D. Kirkpatrick said that in December 2000 “the top executives of the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers protested in a conference call with Jeffrey P. Bezos, chief executive of Amazon. The executives were particularly upset that Amazon was offering used books for sale at the same time as the books' original publication.
“That suggested that free copies sent to potential reviewers were turning up for sale as used books at Amazon.com, usually for a small fraction of the retail price. (Selling review copies as used books was previously limited to stores in New York and other media centers),” wrote Kirkpatrick, without revealing how he’d reached this remarkable conclusion.
“The Authors Guild asked its members to ‘delink’ from Amazon.com yesterday because of its latest innovation for selling used books among consumers. Amazon added a new Web page reminding returning shoppers what their previous purchases were and advising them how much they might earn by reselling them through Amazon,” wrote Kirkpatrick in the Times. Kirkpatrick shied away from the logical questions of how many Author’s Guild members have websites or what kind of economic power might be invested in these sites.
“The memo from the Authors Guild suggested that its members link their Web sites with Booksense.com, which is operated by a network of independent bookstores, or BarnesandNoble.com, which sells used books only from a separate part of its Web site,” wrote Kirkpatrick in the Times.
“Marie Toulantis, chief executive of BarnesandNoble.com, said it had decided that linking its sales of used and out-of-print books to new books ‘would cannibalize new-book sales and be a disservice to authors and publishers’,” wrote Kirkpatrick in the Times.
“Total online book sales account for less than 10 percent of all book sales, according to the Ipsos-NPD Group, a market research company, so online sales of used books are not soon likely to bankrupt the industry. But even a few percentage points of lost sales are important to a slow-growing industry like book publishing,” wrote Kirkpatrick in the Times.
“Still, Thomas H. Cook, an author who won an Edgar, the award for mystery writing, said that for individual authors the dispute was about principle and the long-term future of the industry. And there were emotional wounds as well, he said.
“‘I checked on The Chatham School Affair — my book that won the Edgar — I think used copies were going for 25 cents,’ he said, ‘It doesn't feel great. Part of it is sheer vanity, that you think your book would be worth more than that under any circumstances,’” wrote Kirkpatrick in the Times.
Food for thought, but I suspect most booksellers and many authors understand that this "protest" is silly, wrongheaded, and ineffectual.
One point that the protesters seem to miss is that many members of the book buying public are increasingly willing to lay out folding money for new books, whether on Amazon or at the local brick-and-mortar shop, if they believe that they can recoup a significant portion of their original price by reselling the book. That's been true as long as there have been used shops willing to take books for cash or trade, but it is obviously truer than ever now with the easy reselling available on Amazon and Half.com.
At least at this writing, it is also still true that the vast majority of books sold on Amazon’s site are being sold by Amazon at Amazon's prices, even when there are much cheaper copies available on the same screen. Yes, we subversives here are trying to drive that percentage down, but as of the first quarter of 2002, it was still 77%.
By the way, having failed to grow up in a small Cape Cod town, I read Thomas Cook's The Chatham School Affair with great pleasure. It's a well-written book with complex, almost literary structure. But it's just plain goofy to complain that a mass market version of the breakthrough mystery novel Cook published six years ago is selling for a quarter in a secondary market. He's already made very good money on it. Next he will be complaining that there are public libraries allowing borrowers to read it for free!
And the real point that he is missing if he has any confidence in his writing, which he should, is that for every reader who happens to pick up The Chatham School Affair at any price and enjoy it, there is one more likely buyer for Cook's newest book, The Interrogation, on the streets two weeks ago at this writing and weighing in at 1,188 on Amazon's best-seller list. It's called free marketing, Tom!
As for the BarnesandNoble.com claim that linking used books to new books on its site "would cannibalize new-book sales and be a disservice to authors and publishers," one has to wonder what priority BarnesandNoble.com gives to its own customers’ experience in its calculus of competing claims, which may help to explain why BarnesandNoble.com is losing market share to Amazon.
While it has always been possible for readers and reviewers to resell their once-read books or unread review copies to used bookstores for dimes to dollars and thus add to their budgets for buying more new books (or groceries), Amazon resellers ordinarily get far more return for their books than sellers at brick-and-mortar shops or at Half.com, so the Amazon argument that its used-book sales actually strengthen its new-book sales is an especially strong one, and is further strengthened by the ease with which an Amazon customer can simply click on an author’s name to pursue an interest in that writer’s work. As A Beautiful Mind author (and Authors Guild board member) Sylvia Nasar wrote in an April 17, 2002 New York Times opinion piece challenging the Authors Guild position, the situation is reminiscent of the one in which “car companies often brag about the resale value of their models.”
It's occasionally tough for Marketplace sellers to see how our interests are served by Amazon's "customer-experience" centered business model. Sometimes our short-term interests suffer. But it is just a chapter in a longer story. I'm sure I am not the only who recalls that Marketplace was an inevitable institutional response to the development and growth of Half.com. Amazon's move to position itself in that market was good business sense, and while hopefully one can identify self-serving motives in any good business decision, it was also motivated by the need to make sure the customer experience at Amazon was as good as that offered by its competitors. Before there was a "Marketplace", zShop listings were very prominent, but there were not many sellers because it was so new. What's changed, as it inevitably would have regardless of the platform used, is the flow of sellers into these venues in the used book business.
What Does the Future Hold?
The next phase in the annals of online bookselling is likely to include interesting regroupings, new databases, partnerships, consolidations, and collapses, and while it is impossible to predict exactly what shape these will take, it is nonetheless clear that for the most part they will be peripheral to the main action in the center of the ring, where Amazon, Half.com, and Half.com’s parent eBay strengthen their already strong roles and position themselves relative to each other, their millions of customers, and their tens of thousands of third-party sellers.
As these events unfold, it seems safe to make a few predictions about the effects that they will have on the third-party sellers for whom this book is intended:
Price competition. Online used booksellers will face constant price pressures, not from buyers but from their own ranks, with the natural and predictable result that the sellers who thrive will be those who operate their businesses most efficiently, anticipate and avoid online inventory gluts, and are able to constantly upgrade, diversify, and freshen their inventory while staying one step ahead of the price competition. The online bookselling markets have already reached the saturation point for over-exposed mass market paperback bestsellers, but – please pardon the tautology here -- that saturation point is a long way off for harder to find books.
“Corporate” third-party sellers. A growing portion of the “third-party” online booksellers on Amazon.com will consist of corporate entities including publishers, distributors, and bookstores, although some of the distributors who are currently buying publisher offerings at 55% off, with 90 to 120 day fully-returnable terms, may find that they are jeopardizing their wholesaler discount agreements with publishers by competing with retail sellers under misleading “handles” on Amazon.com’s Marketplace.
Bookseller or Broker? Amazon itself may well reach a point where half or more of its book transactions involve third-party sellers. If this happens it will be driven by two major forces: the continued strength and growth of the used book Marketplace initiatives and the decision by a critical mass of authors, publishers, and distributors to take the plunge into the direct retail channel offered by the Marketplace.
A “Universal” Catalog on Amazon’s Marketplace? Now that Amazon has revolutionized the world of selling new and recent used books online and has welcomed its competition under its big tent to participate in these enterprises, what would be the next logical expansion of its bookselling tent? Amazon could put out the welcome mat for all of the used and antiquarian booksellers who currently focus their efforts elsewhere by expanding its in-house and Marketplace book catalog to include or allow inclusion of … well, there’s not really a modest way to put this, so here goes … every book ever printed. The market implications of such an expansion are probably every bit as monumental as the programming and infrastructure challenges that would be involved in achieving it.
Lowballing. The relative handful of online used booksellers who participate in online bookselling message boards will continue to charge each other with price lowballing, but these charges will continue to have
no effect as the sellers who do best will be those who offer the best products and best service at fair prices.
Equilibrium. The increasingly universal availability of good used books at good prices will begin to create price pressures and reduced title availability for the book publishing industry, which may in turn intensify the demand for used books and help create greater supply and demand equilibrium in the used book market on Amazon, Half.com, and elsewhere.
Tightening Supply. The supply of used books available to would-be sellers will gradually tighten both because of the increased demand just noted and also because more of the usual sources will themselves become sellers, and this in turn will feed market equilibrium.
A Change in Publisher Behavior? The books that will suffer most, as a result of Amazon’s Marketplace and Half.com, are the hyper-common books that are mega-published by publishers. The major publishers have not had to serve the reading or writing public very well to make their profits in recent years: they just find a hoss like Grisham, Clancy, or King, ride it hard, and put it away wet. In time, it may well be that the market forces unleashed by Amazon and Half.com will force publishers to ratchet down those seven-figure print runs and bring a wider and more diverse array of titles into print and actually market them to the reading public. That would be good for writers, booksellers, and readers in the long run, and I am also convinced that Tom Clancy will survive. Unlikely as it is, one can even imagine a publisher’s decision to regulate the flow of copies of a new title so as to support its price in secondary markets.
Whither the E-Book Revolution? The increasingly universal availability of good used books at good prices will tend to slow the growth of e-books and related concepts such as print-on-demand and diminish the likelihood of concomitant predictions of the demise of the mass-printed book.
Library and Charity Competition? An increasing number of public libraries and charitable organizations will establish their own online sales channels at Amazon, Half.com, eBay and elsewhere in order to take advantage of their free, donated sources of inventory and their volunteers’ capacity to provide free data entry and fulfillment services. The problem with this, of course, is that these libraries and charities are currently, quite often, the best and cheapest sources of books for used booksellers. If this trend were to advance too quickly, it could have a serious negative effect on used bookseller inventories and actually force some of the more isolated or less resourceful sellers out of business. We are a long way from that at this writing, but American used booksellers would be wise to be alert to the possibilities suggested by this March 2002 report from London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper on used bookselling across the pond: "Oxfam is now the largest second-hand book dealer in the UK, selling 6 million books a year, mainly at 40 specialist bookshops. It has even set up an online auction site (www.oxfam.org.uk/shop) and deals on abe.com…."
Prosperity and Happiness. Thousands of independent third-party booksellers will make a decent living selling used and antiquarian books, and a few will make a very, very good living. With any luck, a growing percentage will enjoy their work and the special freedoms and pleasures it offers.
These predictions themselves, let me be clear, are worthless, except inasmuch as they provoke booksellers to think for themselves about our enterprise, its future, and how we fit into it. It’s worthwhile before going forward for us all to take a step back and realize that the economic forces at play here will always mean that many will succeed at online bookselling and some will fail, because the transparency of the internet combined with the sheer number of sellers, buyers, and transactions allow classic market forces to operate in an extremely pure and uninhibited fashion.
By now it is probably clear that I think it is important for online used booksellers to keep up with, and think intelligently about, what is going on our business. There are a lot of ways to stay up to date, but some of them such as spending several hours a day reading and participating in seller message boards are very time-consuming, and some of them such as subscribing to Publishers’ Weekly are very expensive (although it is available to read in most public libraries). Here are two cheap and efficient suggestions. First, register online for a free online New York Times subscription and navigate your way to signing up for a daily e-mail alert for articles on the “book trade.” This will net you a handful of e-mails each week giving you a heads up about articles that are often germane to your business from a publication that does a pretty good, if occasionally slanted, job of keeping up with the book industry. Second, register as a visitor to AuctionBytes at www.auctionbytes.com and sign up for its email newsletter as well. Although it is obviously more associated with online auctioneering than with fixed-price or storefront enterprises, AuctionBytes does an excellent job of keeping up with what is important for online sellers.
For a long time many booksellers, including myself, have been concerned about the big eating the small, to use the unpleasant imagery of today’s business bestsellers. We got it wrong. Amazingly enough the big are enabling the small to make a good living, and the real and necessary cannibalism of this phase and the next will more likely involve the fast eating the slow. Price competition will certainly force some large and small online booksellers out of business, or into settling for a hobby where they had hoped for a thriving business. But the natural equilibrium of the market will mean that more sellers will figure out ways to adapt and to find and offer desirable titles and price points.
It’s Really Quite Simple
The world of online selling provides two huge advantages to its participants. First, it liberates us from paying expensive commercial rent, which I believe is in fact the biggest bogeyman that has been faced by brick-and-mortar booksellers during the past twenty years, perhaps longer. Second, it makes physical location irrelevant (from a selling point of view) while offering sellers direct access to tens of millions of customers.
Turning these advantages into the basis for a profitable enterprise, then, is just a matter of figuring out how to organize an efficient business wherein you can get desirable books as cheaply as possible, offer them to the largest possible customer base at prices that find a workable balance between the buyer’s hunger for a bargain and your hunger for a profit, and ship them safely and swiftly with a friendly and professional approach that builds good will.
It’s really quite simple, if you take it step by step and keep using your noggin to anticipate the market. So let’s begin.
