Bookselling in the 21st Century by Craig Stark 25 January 2010

Now that I've reached Part X of this series, I think this might be a good time to pause and perhaps throw a sort of a scare into those of you who are doing the same thing you were doing two or five or more years ago.

Ten years ago selling books online was, in a word, easy. Thrift shops in my area and likely yours provided a steady supply of $30 and up books - well, keeping this in perspective, what were then $30 and up books - and FOL sales were similarly productive largely because they weren't pre-shopped by dealers and were attended overwhelmingly by book lovers, not dealers. Estate sales? Better too, and better more often.

On the selling side, you could sell just about anything on eBay, and if you had even a rudimentary sense of picking warm or warmer spots, you could sell stuff for prices very, very much worth bothering with. The buyer-to-seller ratio was much higher then, and the shaking out process whereby "scarce" books evolved into common books was just beginning.

I could get into much more detail about this, but I think most of you get the idea: You could sell books without knowing squat about them because you could.

Today, those of you getting into the bookselling are faced with a far more daunting task. Not only is the competition exponentially more intense and to some extent more knowledgeable but also, this entire print biz that has been so good to us for so long is now getting crowded out of the marketplace.

Want to see some numbers? Recently, the Kaiser Family Foundation released a report on what our kids are up to, "Generation M2: Media in the Lives of 8- to 18-Year-Olds." This is a compilation of three studies completed in, respectively, 1999, 2004 and 2009 that chronicle what for us is the bloody truth. Take a look at this chart.