Much like the disappearing middle-class of American society the world of used books is being redefined as the market for mid-price books ($25-75) is slowly vanishing.
Within the last 10 years, the influx of technology, the advent of online bookselling and widespread internet connectivity, has brought into the market millions upon millions of books that were simply unaccounted for.
The book resale market has become a petri dish of supply and demand economics. Here the true free market is deciding price points.
This flood of available material has taken many of the books in the $25-75 price range and reduced them to $1-$15 books. Is this just a natural evolution of free market capitalism?
This is very different from the new book market where there is a ready supply that is supported by aggressive marketing and top shelf public relation campaigns. You hear about new books through newspapers, magazines and television, you know what is out there and you could readily obtain it. The publishers set the price (actually probably set a few different prices- small retail, big box retail and remainder) and that is that.
I would almost bet there are more non-new books available for sale today that are priced under the cost of shipping the book to the buyer than the total amount of books available to the public 10 years ago.
Countless titles that were deemed uncommon, hard to find, relatively scarce have become common.
On the other hand the better books are selling for record numbers. The top ten books sold at auction in 2006 went for a combined $25 million. Many auction houses reported record revenues for their book auctions and don’t forget the tens of millions (if not more) of books that were sold by antiquarian booksellers to both private and public clients. Then there are the expensive books that are sold through the online book aggregators like ABEbooks, where the top ten books sold for more than a combined $125,000.
The market for the high end material remains quite strong as does the market for bargain priced general used books, it is our friends in the middle who are being squeezed out.