In my last entry I addressed the rise of internet bookselling and its effect on brick and mortar used bookstores. This week I would like to look at the nature of the growing online used book marketplace.

What books are selling there? Certainly the same titles that are selling everywhere else. The paperbacks that were piled up at Cosco last month flood the internet today. These books will sell quickly and profitably online for a brief period, then their prices will rapidly drop to pennies a piece as the public finishes them, discards them, and moves on to the next new thing. Over 1,000 copies of "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" are now available on Amazon.com, most at a price of under one dollar. Yet why would anyone want to pay even that when a call to one's aunt or a tour around the block is likely to yield a copy for free?  
      
The intelligent used bookseller soon learns to avoid yesterday's fads and focus instead on obscure and overlooked titles of the past. The surest sellers are books that never appealed to the masses, but remain persistently interesting to a few. Those few have often been searching and will happily purchase when they find.

I can look through my records and find a week last year when the following titles sold:

Alaska's Mushrooms
Forensic Entomology
Sex Toy Tricks
Weaving Contemporary Rag Rugs
Radical Street Performance
Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology
Stick Fighting: Techniques of Self-Defense
The Healthy Bird Cookbook

Some are out-of-print, some are otherwise difficult to acquire. (One, at least, might cause embarrassment at the register.) All are not what one would expect to find at the local Borders, and many were shipped to places where there is no local Borders. I often ship books to soldiers and prisoners, to rural areas and developing nations. These people and places make up a part of the growing market in used books--a market that previously had limited access to any extensive and affordable selection.

Interesting connections can now be made between books and readers that could rarely have happened before.  I recently sold a book on the history of Kentucky place names, acquired in Chicago, to a woman in northern California, and also a book on Chinese cinema, published in France, to a professor in Brazil. I believe that I have sold obscure biographies to the children of their subjects (although I didn't ask), and I know that I have sold signed copies of books to their authors, many years after the fact. Last week I found an interesting book in a basement: a hefty commemoration of the destruction of the Jewish population of the Polish town of Ostrowiec during WWII, that was written by the survivors and their descendants in the 1960s. I look forward to seeing where it will go. Most likely it will cross an ocean.

We cannot see these new connections being made, they are not framed by quaint bookshops, but they represent a change in access to material that affects many lives. Fifteen years ago, the transactions that I have described above would have been lengthy and costly for the customer, in many cases prohibitively so, and perhaps impossible. The customer may not have even known that the titles existed, but can now become aware of them through the many excellent online book databases with subject descriptions and reader reviews.

The future of this industry can, I think, only become more interesting. New online used-book marketplaces continue to develop in all parts of the world and are becoming increasingly interconnected. Every year more books surface on the internet as booksellers continue to list their inventories and as basements and closets are dredged by book scouts around the world. This brings the prices of books down (causing us dealers to grumble), but it also brings in new customers and new readers. It is difficult to predict what long term effects these changes will have on readership, as the advent of e-books and other digital information sources will likely overshadow most developments in used bookselling, but a globally accessible book marketplace is something the world has not yet seen, and is nothing to get depressed about.

Posted by: Adrienne Eaton