The Uncertain Future of the World’s Largest Secondhand Book Market | Hacker News Reader

The Uncertain Future of the World’s Largest Secondhand Book Market

atlasobscura.com

66 pointslermontov34 comments

I wonder if this will turn out to be the kind of mistake discussed in Scott's "Seeing Like a State". Planners and architects see something bustling and chaotic and enforce a new system made of straight lines, and in doing so eliminate something essential.

Maybe not; maybe it'll be a great success.

Besides all the capitalist and efficiency debate, I grew up buying and reading books from here. I used to know many of the shop owners personally. It happened several times that they kept a particular book on the side for me to see it first. As they happen to know my liking and reading habit. I could even bargain, in those days when money was scarce. I have fond memories of walking down those streets in hit summer afternoon browsing through thousands of books and pondering what to buy. Thanks to those stalls I got introduced and could read world literature, philosophy, science ... I will be extremely sad to see it gone! Please, if anyone is listening, please stop this.

I'm a huge packrat and have quite a few old books (especially tech titles. I'm never ready to admit I won't be coding Visual Basic again one day....) But I can see the future. I've been accumulating titles on my Kindle, and I really like using it.

I think paper book sales are doomed for long-term decline.

I think paper book sales are doomed for long-term decline.

On what grounds, may I ask? There currently doesn't seem to be a long-term declining trend in paper book sales, so are you expecting a significant change in technology or society that will cause a long-term decline? Or (possibly) did you conclude this (quite reasonably) when there was such a trend and haven't checked recently?

I think we'll see the decline happen once there's a generation that grew up with ebooks as an option. All the reasons people give for preferring paper books seem to amount to habit and nostalgia; people who've grown up taking Kindles on holiday will see no reason not to use them all the time.

I mostly agree, despite having nostalgia for dead trees myself. One area that I think paper books are still actually superior in is their data consistency; a paper book is still mostly readable after hitting it with a sledge hammer or spilling coffee on it. I will never replace my collection of survival and repair manuals with a Kindle, even though I use a Kindle more often than dead trees in day to day life.

All the reasons people give for preferring paper books seem to amount to habit and nostalgia

I disagree. Here are some reasons for prefering paper books that are not habit or nostalgia:

Longevity.

Reliability.

Isolation and permanence of content - nobody is going to come into my house and edit my physical books. Some eReader eco-systems are robust in this regard; others remain under the control of a thrid party.

Ease of mark-up, and the range of mark-up available is an order of magnitude superior to those of eBooks.

Phenomenally intuitive bookmarking interface. So easy to bookmark different places and so fast and easy to use those bookmarks.

High-quality images and colours.

Screen size; I have many books that present a large, very high resolution view. For books that benefit from it - art books in particular - this is a real advantage. The best eBook reader can't compare, and small kindles and the like are just terrible in comparison for this. Large eBook reader systems such as a desktop PC with a huge, high resolution monitor is better, but this is something of a high-cost option.

Multi-screen - I can open a lot of physical books at once, and they simply expand into available space (really fast, too - the loading time is so short that I barely notice). Having five or six ebooks open at once and flitting between them quickly is either impossible or much less satisfactory than the physical book version. I habitually have three or more physical books open at once, and five or six is not uncommon. I suppose you could call this one "habit", in that I am in the habit of being able to look at five or six books at once, easily flitting between them at speed.

Realtive self-contained operation; they rely only on a light-source being available to operate for decades or even longer. eBooks require much more support in terms of software, power and hardware.

Random-access interface; the speed with which I can change pages (not just consecutive pages, but large numbers of pages at once) using a physical book is an order of magnitude better than an eBook, and I will often find part of a book I seek using this random access method. Even when I am familiar with an eBook's layout, quickly finding a particular section is just much more clumsy. The reading experience is damaged by this inferior aspect of the interface.

> I think paper book sales are doomed for long-term decline.

I'm not sure that's true. I own a Kindle but I find it's less expensive to purchase new paper books just about every time. Sure there's the occasional time when a book is on offer in the Kindle store, but it's pretty rare. I haven't re-charged my Kindle for more than a couple of years.

Also there's a bunch of authors I've followed and read over the last 40 years whose books I always buy in hardback whenever they publish something new.

When it comes to technical books paper wins every time, simply because it's far easier to jump about the pages. Also diagrams, graphs, code samples, that kinda thing are pretty awful in current e-book implementations.

And then for many of us there's nothing quite like the feel of a paper book and, if you have space, building a physical library of stuff read, and stuff to be read and being able to peruse it when looking for the next thing to read. Though this does make for a lot of boxes each time you move house.

> And then for many of us there's nothing quite like the feel of a paper book and, if you have space, building a physical library of stuff read, and stuff to be read and being able to peruse it when looking for the next thing to read.

A lot of people dismiss this, but I think it’s absolutely true. A hugely formative part of my childhood was just browsing the bookshelves at home and pulling down whatever looked interesting. If our books were on kindle, that experience doesn’t happen.

Also, in the immortal words of John Waters: “If you go home with somebody, and they don't have books, don't fuck 'em!”

> A hugely formative part of my childhood was just browsing the bookshelves at home and pulling down whatever looked interesting

This is precisely how I widened the scope of what I read as a youngster. I get very excited when I visit a new friend's or acquaintance's house and see they've got a bunch of heavily populated bookshelves, and there are books lying around everywhere.

Another thing I forgot to add as a reason for the continued existence of paper books is flicking through older read books and discovering a bus or train ticket, or a receipt, used as a makeshift bookmark which can evoke strong memories or feelings from the time and place you'd read that particular book. And getting your favourite authors to sign first editions at book readings.

That doesn't seem to be the case in the book business. Certainly not the case with us. We're selling more paper books than ever.

I'm curious as to whether or not the mall will be able to keep up. A student is quoted as saying "this place is outdated, the roads are dirty, the hygiene is poor, and in the summer it’s unbearably hot." I can see this being a side effect of the vendors focusing solely on a better selection at a lower price, because those are concrete metrics that they compete with others on. At the end of the day, it's all that really matters; if a place doesn't have the book I want at a price I can afford, any other conveniences mean nothing.

If I need the books, the uncomfortable location with a huge inventory that don't need to pad prices to deal with rent seems like the obvious first stop.

The vast majority of books printed up to the present day will never be available in digital format. Therefore, as long as there is interest to the older material, the secondhand book stores will thrive in one form or another.

It might be a shame for an old tradition to go away, but in a capitalist world, the usual reason something gets replaced is there is a more efficient way to do it.

In this case, it's ebooks and learning over the internet. The need for the paper book is diminished, and it is a waste of our human labour for thousands of people to be working book stalls for entire lifetimes when there is a more efficient way to disseminate knowledge.

> but in a capitalist world, the usual reason something gets replaced is there is a more efficient way to do it.

Increasingly it seems to me that things get replaced simply because a company can make more revenue.

* Subscription software - 'more efficient'? Not really - just a guaranteed revenue stream

* planned obsolescence in products - 'more efficient'? No.

* "Books" that you don't really own, that you can't easily lend to friends or resell? Clearly all about the efficiency.

eBook provides real advantages to readers, not just to companies. For example, it takes less space and you can carry more of them.

This only matters if your definition of efficient is along the axis of carring more books or minimizing space uptake. If your efficiency is based on the pleasure of holding pages, the visual aesthetic of multiple books, the maximum amount of time to go without a charge, collecting signed editions, etc. then eBooks are completely garbage.

They’re also superior in most ways as interfaces to works with more features than “main body text”, and to which you intend to refer again very often.

Pop fic and pop non-fic, then, for ebooks. Excellent for those. Paper or both for most everything else.

Aye. I've been reading on a long line of Sony Readers since 2005, and currently use a PRS-350 that I'm preserving as long as I can (I never liked Kindles). It's only a replacement for a stack of novels or other such books I intend to read cover to cover, probably once and once only. I've read over a thousand books on it, got a couple of dozen stacked up in there at any one time ready to go.

My paper book library has increased every year; novels I want to own on paper (sometimes more than one copy), books received as gifts, technical books, art books, picture books, language books, reference books, mathematical text books, graphic novels (and indeed, some things that clearly are "comics"), a significant number of books that simply aren't available in electronic form (and I probably wouldn't want in electronic form anyway - if I'm buying a book from the 1800s I want the physical artifact!), more and more.

At the moment, the only benefit I see to the Sony Reader is that it's very lightweight and compact for a stack of 12 novels. That is a very serious benefit and it's a real lifesaver for travelling, but inside the house I'm paper all the way. The only problem I have with them is that I'm genuinely running out of space to put them. Every bookshelf is two (or even three deep) with books, and I've lost one desk entirely to books piled three to four feet deep. There is a real chance that I might end up finally giving up on renting purely to buy a house in which I can turn a couple of rooms into decent book storage.

Yeah, I've been forcing myself to make Hard Choices about my largish collection of books, and novels from the last 80-100 years are the easiest ones to ditch in favor of ebooks. Even short story collections, it's kinda nice to have those in dead-tree format for convenience, but ordinary (not, like, Infinite Jest), somewhat recent novels? Hard to justify keeping them around.

Yes, but again, these rely on different definitions of efficiency. I definitely don't consider multi-method interfacing to be useful to me at all in the books I read. I would much rather physically write notes if I want to commit something to reference or memory, since my brain has O(1) lookup where I wrote where something else is, but an O(n) lookup when I get to the note-bucket of my reference pools. Much easier to scan over a single page or a sticky note on the physical book surface than however long would be my library's notes as a totality.

A nit: subscription software solves the perennial "necessary maintenance" problem. Nobody will pay to fix problems, only for new features.

nit: these updates often break working software if you ask me. the productivity loss here is not negligible.

Physical books have their advantages. Specially when reading technical books you find yourself going back and forth way too often to read a digital copy. Also no need to worry about batteries, less eye strain, etc.

In this case it is the online second hand stores (abebooks, amazon, etc) the ones that are killinh the physical stores.

I wish I could like reading certain technical books in dead tree format, but I recently bought both the digital and dead tree versions of the Pragmatic Programmer, 20th anniversary edition; and I really couldn’t stand the lack of colour syntax highlighting and colour diagrams in the dead tree version. Mind you, I bought from InformIT, so it was definitely not counterfeit; it was just the printing quality that the authors/publisher chose.

Plus, with a digital version like epub, I could change font size and let it reflow, change the colour theme to sepia in Apple’s Books app or Calibre, and it would still be beautifully formatted.

>and it would still be beautifully formatted.

It all depends on the book publisher. They could have printed it in color. And they could have done a crappy job on the digital version. In fact, by far the worst book quality I’ve ever seen was a very expensive Kindle version.

> it is a waste of our human labour for thousands of people to be working book stalls for entire lifetimes when there is a more efficient way to disseminate knowledge.

Those who earn a living doing that might disagree about it being a waste of labour. A job that provides an income is useful to society even if you don't consider the thing being worked on to be worthwhile. (FWIW I prefer physical books to reading on a screen).

I agree with you, but isn't the very subject we're discussing that these jobs may no longer provide income?

Does it follow that a job that does not provide income is not useful to society even if you consider the thing being worked on to be worthwhile?

> Does it follow that a job that does not provide income is not useful to society even if you consider the thing being worked on to be worthwhile?

No, it does not follow. The most prominent example: parenting.

Even if people prefer paper books, that used book shop in the article is still doomed.

Their competition is not the internet. It's a better bookstore with lower prices in an air conditioned shopping mall.

Stores in air conditioned shopping malls have much higher overhead and typically much lower and less diverse stocks. The result is better in only a limited sense.

Except those "better bookstores" are also struggling. The internet might not be killing physical book sales, but online retailers are killing physical book retailers.

Having been to a similar market in Mumbai, I can tell you that any air conditioned store with overhead is never going to be able to compete with these roadside bazaars in range or pricing. I fondly remember buying huge bagfuls of relatively recent releases for maybe $5 dollars a bag.

Plus, you know, DRM makes ebooks more profitable to the original publishers.

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