Here is my piece that runs in the latest issue of Amphora, the magazine of the Alcuin Society. I have been waiting on posting this in hopes that they would be putting the new issue online but with things changing so fast in the online bookselling world I thought it was time to get it out there.
I wrote the piece back in August and since then both AbeBooks and Alibris have lost their Chief Executives. A telling sign that things are 1) not what they used to be and 2) significant changes are on the horizon. One of the first significant changes, and one that has gone under the radar screen, is that AbeBooks has begun buying used books! They are buying “US and International Edition textbooks, trade books, best sellers, cookbooks, coffee table books, as well as out-of-print books.” Their press release makes no mention that they are in the market for books other than textbooks. I will have more to say on this shortly.
The Internet and the Traditional Bookseller: A Failing Relationship
He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator. Francis Bacon
We couldn’t expect it to last forever.
It’s been a little over 10 years now since online bookselling began. At the time it was a welcomed addition to us brick and mortar types. It opened up a new revenue stream and gave our shops and our inventory worldwide exposure that was previously unobtainable. The possibilities seemed endless.
It started out innocent enough, if we did not have what our customers were looking for we proudly directed them to ABE (Advanced Book Exchange) so that they may find their long sort after books. We were delighted that there was a service available to us that was comprised of booksellers from around the world. We were not only providing ABE and the similar sites with our inventory we were also their marketing department. Their business was built on our backs.
Remember, there were no online booksellers when this all started, there was no Ebay. There were booksellers who were selling online.
It wasn’t too long before people realized that not only did everyone have access to these online listings but that anyone could now sell books online; the only barrier to entry being the need to have a valid credit card and to come up with a name for your endeavor that was not already being used. Bookselling has always had a low barrier to entry with the only requirements being a love of books, a little inventory, and a space to sell them but now those barriers were mostly eliminated. An online bookselling gold rush ensued and the trade has never recovered. Then the third party aggregators opened their gates to allow factory booksellers (or mega-listers) to set up shop online. These are ‘sellers’ (I dare not call them booksellers) who list books numbering in the hundreds of thousands, in many cases in the millions, and for the most part do not own the books they sell. In the history of bookselling one could count on one hand the number of bookstores who had an inventory over 100,000 book now, overnight, they were a dime a dozen and most had no physical shop.
50% of all bookstores have since disappeared. Books that were once hard to find became commonplace resulting in tremendous downward price pressure on most books. The price of most books has plummeted, as fellow bookseller James Jaffe puts it “adding another copy of the book to the virtual pile at a still further reduced price seems to me irresponsible, even suicidal, from a bookselling perspective.”
Many of the traditional bookselling standards like proper descriptions and exemplary customer service disappeared from the radar screen. It was now a free for all. The wild west of bookselling had arrived. The book business was changing at warp speed. A trade that was pretty much stable for hundreds of years was now turned upside down and Abe and the other aggregators were right in the middle of this maelstrom.
And somewhere in the middle of these online bookselling sites, the companies we all whole-heartedly supported, the ones we all wanted to succeed and compete with the Amazon’s of the world, turned their back on us.
It is hard to pinpoint the exact point of when things started going south but I suspect it began when ABE and Alibris decided to go big and expand their reach. For ABE it was being bought out by a bigger company, for Alibris it was their decision to try and take their company public (which failed, they have since been bought out by a private equity firm). It was no longer independent businesses supporting independent businesses. They also changed their business models and began shifting their emphasis toward the new book world. For ABE in addition to the shift in focus they changed their fee structure for vendors; raising commissions and bringing all credit card processing in-house. Vendors were now charged over 5% for all credit card transactions (we were paying less than 2.5% to process them on our own).
As in many relationships that no longer function effectively someone usually feels trapped. The revenues generated from these sites are now necessary in many ways for the survival of many booksellers yet these online venues have become increasingly unfriendly and at times downright embarrassing to the traditional bookseller. They have become strictly commerce engines with little regard to integrity or appreciation for the books and booksellers that keep the engine running. It is now a painful existence.
The future for the traditional bookseller will be in building their own web presence. Companies like Bibliopolis offer basic to advanced solutions for the bookseller at a reasonable cost and as Google continues its quest to compile a search engine based on all the world’s information these bookselling portal sites will become less important. Having a website indexed by Google will do the trick for the most part. The other hope is that that websites of the trade organizations like the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA) and the Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) will be able to step up their online efforts to provide a viable alternative to the existing online venues.