The city of Oakland has implemented a new tax on sellers of used goods that, in effect, now places the used bookshop in the same realm as the pawn shop.The tax, which is based on the state's Secondhand Dealers' law; a 50-year-old law written to help police locate stolen goods, will cost bookshops at least $600 a year and force them to fingerprint employees and "keep meticulous, detailed notes of every item they buy and sell, including the private personal information of the persons involved in each transaction."Failure to comply with the law is considered a misdemeanor and carries a...
Amazon Tightening Its Grip on the Book World
Last month, in his post "The End of Indie," Richard Nash proclaimed: "Indie doesn’t mean anything anymore. It’s dead. Which is OK, because it won...So now the phase of indie is over, now that the monopoly on the production and distribution of knowledge, culture and opinion has been broken, what next, a new phase..."A week later Amazon released their updated terms of service which essentially, forces the hand of the many websites and companies that use their API to provide data to their users. The gist of the new terms is that if you use Amazon's data, then you must...
Online Bookselling Pollutes Another Innocent Mind
My inbox is on fire today. Here is another doozy, a perfect specimen of how the barrier-free selling of books online has become the number one threat to traditional sane bookselling practices.***********************************"Where the Wild Things Are- byM. SENDAK -HC, 1963, 1rst edition, rare, urgent quick sale only $2700- listed at $10,000 and rising currently- major profit opp!VERY RARE COPY OF 1963 WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE BY MAURICE SENDAK. ONE OF THE MOST COLLECTIBLE AND ELUSIVE CHILDREN'S BOOKS OF ALL TIME,IT WAS PUBLISHED IN NY BY HARPER AND ROW. THIS FIRST EDITION IS MISSING DUST JACKET, IS IN CLOTH BINDING...
Tom Bloom’s Illustrations for Between the Covers
In was sometime in the late 1980's when Tom Congalton, the proprietor of Between the Covers Rare Books, and cartoonist, book collector Tom Bloom struck a deal. They agreed to swap books for art. Now, some 20 years later, Tom Bloom's illustrations have graced the covers of over 100 catalogs for BTC. His work has also appeared on numerous lists issued by BTC and is a seminal element of their website.Bloom's work has also regularly appeared in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and The Village Voice. His cartoon illustrations have also appeared numerous times on the front page...
On the Closing of a Bookshop
Storefront of Valley Book's previous location ERRATA: Nat Herold, referred to below as an employee of Valley Books, is actually the co-owner of Amherst Books.****************After 34 years Valley Books of Amherst, MA, one of the oldest used and antiquarian bookshops in New England, is closing.Owner Larry Pruner says "Every good thing has to come to an end, and when it's no longer a good thing, it comes to an end sooner."He then shares this:"The used book business is like an ecosystem that's been thrown off balance by e-books, the Internet and the recession. It's hammering away at a world that...