The demise of the second-hand bookshop | Hacker News Reader

The demise of the second-hand bookshop

thecritic.co.uk

167 pointspseudolus153 comments

Used bookstores are a lot like gardens -- they must be tended daily and grown in 100 ways, year after year. The city I grew up in was legendary for used bookstores, and they sit all but empty now, decades later. The 'modern' people chiming in about how to "search faster" are missing an aspect of the experience that is literal and measureable, as well as partially undefineable simply because the portion of the mind and senses that is exercised is non-linear -- file that under "non-linear thinking"

I have a Powells bookstore bookbag, and know others that do, too. Bookstores were a destination across counties or states. The loss of these local bookstores has 1000 unintended consequences. People see the absence the same way they see the absence of a blooming meadow where there is now only pavement and some litter -- in other words, not at all.

I am literally disheartened by the loss of local bookstores, in any size town.

I'm curious what percentage are sales from merch for "destination" bookstores like Powell's and Strand these days.

Less than you would expect for Powell's, since they have an excellent online store for their books.

For me, the most magical thing about the small local bookstores is the people working there.

Just getting into one, chatting with people genuinely and deeply passionate about what it is that they are selling. Having a coffee, talking about a book I read, what aspects I liked, philosophizing about the topic in general and getting recommendations what to read next based on that has beaten at least 10x any 'modern' and automatized approach I have ever seen.

But I think that is a situation where a lot of small shops, whether they sell books, music instruments, clothes, food, etc. are in. If they grow too big, the immense value of personal advice and interaction gets lost and if they are too small the people might not be able to make a living.

Yep. My little town still has a bookstore downtown that’s been there for years. Run by a retired English teacher who seems to know everything about every book in the store.

I believe they ended up working a supplier deal with some of the local schools that helps with consistent revenue.

Ever since the pandemic started I’ve gone there so much that we’re on a first name basis. :)

Isn't that what we get out of aggregating here tho at HN or slashdot? Some banter and the browsing of random subjects.

I'd like the coffee though if someone cld please figure that part out.

Are you suggesting online posting is the same as an in-person conversation in a somewhat intimate environment? I get that it might be the same for you but surely you can appreciate that for most people online discussions are about as personal as a trip to the dmv.

If anything it's better since, in general, one party isn't there just to sell something to the other.

Growing up, my hometown wasn't big enough for a dedicated bookstore (~1400 residents), but there was a small gift shop on Main Street. It had lots of little knicknacks and other things associated with giving gifts. Past the cards and stationary, the boxes of chocolate, the little porcelain figurines, the bags of potpourri and scented candles, all the way at the back, were a couple small bookshelves. Mostly books for young children, or large format books you'd set on your coffee table with nice pictures in them.

What I remember most fondly was that even though the in-store selection was meager, if you were looking for a particular title, the owner was happy to look it up and order from her wholesale catalog. And she'd take 10% off the MSRP! Me and my other teenage nerd friends became some of her most regular customers, coming in to order sci-fi books.

This aspect still exits in some areas. Local bike stores are still running and have the same community feel. They are perhaps only around today because people who ride bikes a lot tend to not be the people who want to drive 20km to the nearest mega store.

Why are people creating a community at the local bike shop? I ride my bike to work everyday (or did). But I only went to the local bike shop to purchase a new bike about every five years and went in for parts a few times a year. What in the world are people doing that they are going there so frequently that a community can be built up?

Its probably not quite as good as what is being described with the book shop but if you ride frequently and especially on rough mtb trails then you will probably end up going to the store once a month for replacement parts / services / clothes / new gadgets. And while you are there its common to have a chat about whats going on / new developments in public trails / etc.

Unless the person working there is Bernard Black.

Perhaps that is somewhat of a romanticised view or may have been different in your country. I usually found that 2nd hand bookstore staff are usually the cheapest labour they could find, and hardly knew the real worth of most of the stuff they were selling.

I romanticised by implying that all the stores are like that.

My experience is mostly from Switzerland where I grew up and Colombia where I have been living the last 5 years.

In Switzerland pure 2nd hand, non antique shops in general are somewhat rare. It is usually sold directly online or in places run by charities. I think 2nd hand had a bit of a resurgence with the raise of the hipster subculture, but don't know the current state. The ones I went to had a mix between used and new or only new.

In Colombia you get a bigger range from the big, cheap labor second hand book stores as you describe, to the small super personal ones. Here is also where for the first time I have seen coffee service and a few tables/sofas within a bookstore. Never back home.

So yes, true, not every small bookshop you walk into will be like that, but so far in every city I have stayed a couple weeks in in Europe and LatAm, I found at least one.

Like all the things I cared about, it is going.

I'm starting to lose interest in the world.

Don't worry - it's fine.

You do realize that time will eventually grind down even the memory of every last thing you have ever known or loved, right?

Not necessarily... this rests on the assumption that God does not exist. And not everyone believes that assumption is true.

It relies on more assumptions than just that. It relies on the assumption that naturalism and materialism are true, and hence an afterlife is very unlikely (if not impossible).

You can reject naturalism and materialism without agreeing that God exists. Consider the late 19th / early 20th century British idealist philosopher John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (who at Cambridge acted as the mentor of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore) – McTaggart insisted that God did not exist, that he knew God did not exist, that God's existence was impossible – but he also claimed that time and matter are illusions, and the true reality is timeless immortal souls and their eternal love for one another.

Conversely, it is possible to believe in God without an afterlife. The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus denied an afterlife, but he did not deny the Gods of ancient Greek polytheism. (Probably, if he had lived in a more monotheistic culture, he would have dropped the plural.)

The ancient Jewish Sadducees, who controlled the office of High Priest up until the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, they rejected the Pharisees' belief in resurrection of the dead. (The Pharisees are the historical progenitors of contemporary Judaism; and, while Christianity conflicted with the Pharisees a lot, witness how much they are criticised in the Gospels, one can't deny that Christianity took a lot from them, including the belief in a future resurrection of the dead). It isn't entirely clear what exactly the Sadducees believed about the afterlife, but certainly by some accounts they believed that death was extinction. (Part of it depends on whether they understood "Sheol", the grave, to simply be a symbol for extinction, or an actual place where the dead are conscious.)

It relies on the assumption that time exists; see the posts on LessWrong about Timeless Physics:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/rrW7yf42vQYDf8AcH/timeless-p...

How a discussion about "second-hand bookstores are closing" become a "god doesn't exist" discussion?!? I love HN comments :))

This is needlessly reductionist and pessimistic. It is wholly reasonable to pine for the simple joys of life and their passing.

It's also reasonable to point out that this is perhaps a trap lots of people growing old fall into, and also perhaps not the most healthy thing to do.

It might be better to adapt rather than pine, if that's possible.

I could pine for the days of my favorite rock bands not being considered 'classic rock'. I could also try and enjoy new music that isn't strictly 'classic rock'.

That's what growing old looks like, friend. The world we knew is going away, to be replaced by a new world for new people who care about different things.

I'm sure people who genuinely loved tending to mules and horses "lost interest" when regular folks started using trains and cars to travel. It's just how it is - humanity goes forth, as it will.

But that is only partially true. People socialize a lot less than they used to, things changed in a fundamental way. If you look around in NYC 50% of storefronts are empty and unoccupied. There are multiple reasons for the latter but it still is a fundamental change. Maybe the virtual world is thriving in some hot pockets but the analog world is becoming less welcoming to many of us.

> People socialize a lot less than they used to,

I don't know if people socialize less, but they socialize differently. I see plenty of people riding buses, trains, or walking around and endlessly messaging someone on their phones. It's easy to find complaints mocking these people as being drones and slaves to their phones, but they're actively socializing everywhere they go. They're just doing it with someone you can't see.

Most people 30 years ago weren't chatting up everyone on the bus during their daily commute. They were merely tolerating people. People today are silently talking the whole ride these days.

Yeah, it's harder to sit down and have dinner with friends and family every week than it used to be, but it's easier than ever to talk to them all day if you want to.

I know my grandparents would have people over for dinner almost daily, but they never left their small town. They knew those people their whole life and never lived more than 20 minutes away. Seeing them was easy, but if those people couldn't visit for dinner, that was it. There was no talking to anyone else for days if nobody randomly dropped by. Now people often move hundreds or thousands of miles from home, yet it's possible to have a conversation all hours of the day if you want to.

> People socialize a lot less than they used to

You live in a small rural community. Industrial revolution happens, and slowly most people move to cities. If you stay in the little town, you feel lonely, "people don't visit anymore". If you move to the city and try to live by the old rules of rural community, you'll be upset: "people on the street don't say hello and good morning anymore, they don't socialize!". But they do - just by different rules, across different groups from before.

We are going through an industrial change on a level last seen 100 years ago at best (electricity, cars, factories). Life is changing accordingly.

It used to take about three generations before everything you love fades from public memory. Now it's less than one.

Soon Warhol's adage will be proven right: 15 minutes will be the lifespan of not just fame, but of all shared memory. Soon thereafter, all individual memories will last just 15 minutes. Then long term memory will no longer exist.

7 +/-2 will be the maxim of all existence.

On the other hand, I can get any book I want, including long out-of-print books. I remember years looking for a copy of Clarke's "The Deep Range". Now getting a copy is as trivial as pushing a button.

And I have indulged myself, acquiring a small mountain of books :-)

I also browse the books at thrift stores. It's how I've obtained a ton of strange books I never would have discovered otherwise. For example, I found an encyclopedia of electronic circuits I never knew existed. Goodwill is a book gold mine, I wound up getting a nearly complete set of the Star Trek novels (and cheap as dirt, too!).

I think Goodwill's selection depends on it's area. Their book selection at the stores where I live aren't that good. The prices of books vary between stores. But you can count on one thing: Each store will always have at least one complete set of Twilight novels.

I bet most of Goodwill's stock comes from heirs dumping the estates of their parents. It's a little sad, and I feel like I'm rescuing the books :-)

I too get any book I want and don’t have to store it in my house, And it’s all free—just saying. :)

If it's obscure, it's certainly not readily available on torrents (or in local libraries) if that's what you're suggesting.

If you're talking about piracy, do you only read books from dead authors? Or do you pay them via alternate channels? Or are you just fine with enjoying their content without paying them back a cent?

If we're talking about used bookstores, the author makes just as much on a pirated book as a book purchased at a used bookstore.

...we’re talking about public libraries.

If we were, we would also be talking about a way to read books that the author doesn't make a dime on.

The cost of lending and reselling a book is explicitly part of the initial remuneration.

Books deteriorate, and a normal book can only be lent or resold so often. A paperback read by one reader is usually in a good condition (but obviously 'read'), a paperback read by twenty readers (who took it along on travels, dropped it, put it on dirty surfaces, etc.) will be near the end of its life. Hard-cover library books can take more of a beating, but are read by more people and get damaged nonetheless. The average lifespan of a popular library book is short.

If books didn't deteriorate authors and publishers wouldn't make any money from second-hand or library books, but as it is, they do. Any time you read a book, it gets closer to being taken out of circulation. Any time you purchase a book and keep it, you take it out of circulation for years, decades even. That all drives the need for new editions of that book. This is no different from second-hand cars or bicycles.

Getting a book like that is possible, but for me a huge chunk of the value of my collection is the journey to getting it. Finding it randomly in a tiny bookshop while on a trip is way more memorable than buying it on amazon. It’s the same with buying records for me. Sure I could buy most of the long out of print records I’d want to own... but the search is most of the fun.

Amazon has indeed made collecting music and books rather pointless.

I think part of OPs point is that you think you can get a copy of any book. I don't mean to sound snarky at all; it's just that you know what you see online now, which is not all that is offline. You don't miss what you don't know.

My experience is of numerous out of print books that might have had small publishers in small editions. Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.

One year the university I was at was in danger of flooding. The priority was moving books that as far as they could determine were the only remaining copies of. You wouldn't believe the numbers of them that were moved. Many used bookstores I've visited were similar, with books selected because they were unusual.

It's hard to know what you don't know.

> You don't miss what you don't know.

True, but I often find books by looking at cites to them in other books I have.

I found one really cool book that was simply pages and pages of schematics for vacuum tube radios and TVs. It was intended for repair shops. I ran across it as it was a prop used as part of staging a house that was for sale. I didn't buy the house :-) but I did note down the title/author, went online, and found/bought my own copy. The real estate agent showing the house thought I was very weird.

To add to your point, I recently tried to pick up some of my favorite movies from when I was younger, only to find that they were “out of print”. Some of these may not be lost to people searching around online because the directors are well known, but you’d likely have to search first.

Inland Empire - David Lynch / The Dreamers - Bernardo Bertolucci / Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - Sam Peckinpaw / La Luna - Bernardo Bertolucci / (I’m sure there are many more, these are just a few that I’ve hunt down on eBay this year)

The last two on this list, I watched because I made friends with a video rental store manager, who loved to recommend movies for me. The store itself often did not have things he thought I should watch so he would bring them from home and lone them to me personally. I really miss that sort of thing.

I do have a good used bookstore nearby though, and the last personal recommendation I received led to me reading every George Saunders book.

Every one of those titles showed up on torrent sites via the in-browser search feature, and a total of two clicks (magnet link, confirmation in torrent app) would've had the movie viewable on my laptop within, at most, a few minutes of downloading.

Ethics of torrenting aside, I can't think of a faster way to get the results you want.

For books, again, ethics aside, usually Library Genesis is equally fast.

Yes a friend of mine said exactly the same thing and sent me a torrented copy of The Dreamers. I looked awful. So bad I ordered the dvd. Which had some of its own issues with quality I’ll admit, but at least it wasn’t full of digital compression artifacts. I know not everything is like this but my experience with torrents has yielded a lot of varying quality problems. And these movies are not very esoteric they are made by much lauded directors. The fact that they are out of print means there is no higher quality rip to speak of. It’s why I’m particularly am a big fan of Criterion because they do do this work (such as a 4K restoration of Ran, beautiful!). That work requires money. It will take happen often we disregard these issues because we can get something close faster for free. With books of course this is mostly a non issue so I’ll give you that (aside from good and bad translations or edits. Dostoevsky is a good example. I believe Wallace once asked what does it mean “to fly at” and why would you translate the Russian to somethings so unreasonable.)

However the overall point was that I made a real flesh and blood friend in a physical place which is how I came to know these things to begin with. And otherwise have never heard certain movies ever mentioned and wouldn’t know about them at all.

> Even an unusual edition of an well known book can be unique in various valuable ways.

Absolutely! I had a paperback copy of Dune when I was younger, that disappeared after being loaned to someone. It was printed on very fine grained paper (think bible paper), maybe ~2cm thick, despite being 700+ pages long, and the fine grain of the paper made the text very crisp. Modern paperback copies are 4.9cm thick, and the text isn't as crisp. The only way I'll ever find a replacement for the higher quality paperback copy is to find an old one at a used bookstore sometime. This doesn't make it valuable in a monetary sense, but it still matters to me.

It’s not even just books that don’t exist online... it’s books that you never hear of because you don’t bump into them in a bookstore. The books you learn about online are selected by mechanisms very different to those that you learn about in a used bookstore.

A few times I've gone to Portland specifically for the food and for Powells. It's easy for me to lose a weekend browsing and skimming -- and when you need a little rest, there are plenty of areas to hang out and chat with whoever you went with.

It's unfortunate that this is such a rare feature for a city.

When I visited the Pacific North-West in 2015 (I herald from Italy), I made a point of visiting Powell’s Bookstore in Portland (OR) and even chose my hotel (which turned out to be the very hip Ace Hotel) based on proximity to it.

I pointedly decided to buy second-hand copies of several of my favourite books (The Computational Beauty of Nature by Gary William Flake and Surfaces & Essences by Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander) from them, despite the absurd logistical hassle of buying them and transcontinentally shipping them home because I wanted storied copies with no pristine air to them.

> The 'modern' people chiming in about how to "search faster" are missing an aspect of the experience that is literal and measureable, as well as partially undefineable simply because the portion of the mind and senses that is exercised is non-linear -- file that under "non-linear thinking"

I don't understand the luddite attitude towards ebooks: - you can carry them anywhere - you can search them (more important for technical books) - you can save important parts as screenshots in some other folder - they can be significantly more affordable - even those people in small cities can get them without searching in bookstores - Poor/middle-class students can easily get pirated copies - you can copy paste from them.

The resistance to ebooks instead of adaptation is weird.

In fact, because of ubiquity of smartphones, I wish there would be some sort of programming environments for these devices, that nicely reformat code to fit into the smartphone screens or even use some different representation, so that we can get something done on the go. These devices are not just for consuming Netflix content.

One thing I appreciate about second-hand bookshops and libraries is that they are not curated for me.

I read a lot of non-fiction, and I find that websites like Amazon and Goodreads do give decent suggestions, but they are books about topics I already know, sharing ideas I am already familiar with, in a style I like. I can feel the customer profit gradient descent maximization breathing down my neck. Looking at you, books with sans-serif titles, white backgrounds, and clever illustrations!

Algorithmic websites prioritize the new and the popular, whereas bookshops and libraries still feature the old and obscure (I realize that libraries have 30 copies of Harry Potter, but you get my point).

So, in my opinion, while these vicious market forces are currently destroying bookshops, I think it'll get to a steady state where bookshops serve a smaller, more loyal and niche audience.

I agree, but I can also see a future of smaller web-based bookshops with specialised algorithms based on more uncommon, specialized parameters. Think "books about philosophy that used to be popular in the '70s".

If we're not seeing that in the present, I don't anticipate seeing it in the future. I see a future of monopolistic rentseekers continuing to make the least possible effort.

We've not yet reached a level of digital literacy necessary for that sort of niche to survive. Ecommerce has reduced profit margins for brick & mortar to levels that are almost unsustainable (hence the well-reported closures), but b&m chains still exist and push a lot of volume, and a lot of people don't trust their internet skills enough to try non-brand shops.

Timing is important. Remember the "New Economy" boom? A lot of those businesses didn't survive just because there weren't enough customers online. I say we're now in a position where there are enough customers to keep large businesses afloat, but not enough to sustain niches big enough to leave them some surplus to invest in algo optimization. I think this will change sometime in the next 30 years. By the time everyone under 65 will have grown up with the internet as a given, I think we'll see the "final form" of the new market.

Also, the necessary algo tech is still not cheap.

My wife asks our teenage sons to send her Spotify links to music they like, so Spotify will start recommending songs she has already heard, or songs that sound a lot like all the songs she already listens to.

I absolutely agree with this. It's one reason why I love to browse libraries and bookshops, even big-box ones. I browse multiple sections and can just about always find something new that seems interesting that I wouldn't have found earlier. It's also part of what I miss about having access to a quality university library. The amount of high quality non-fiction, across a wide range of subjects, was just astounding and I used to spend hours there just browsing and skimming through books.

When I was traveling, I'd love me some second-hand bookstores. They were perfect for a few hours to kill. Each one was like a tattoo on a town, unique yet familiar.

Large cities, small hamlets, the used bookstore in each were all the same stacks of yellowing books haphazarded. The smell, oh the smell, exactly the same musky deep scent. The pacing feet or strolling dogs outside the door drop away, leaving an alike meander and comforting scootch past stacks.

But the books, the little things in the windows, the person behind the counter, the dog or cat, the hippie and the retiree, the fliers and aged comic strips, each of those things was utterly unique to the place. Those little bit of character just sing out the place they are in. The stacks of surf boards on Bondi Beach, the brownies in Newhaven, the beer glasses in Denver, it's those little things that made those used bookstores an absolute joy to wander into for an hour and slow down.

I'll miss them, I think we all will.

Unfortunately, I've found that even the remaining second-hand stores have lost a bit of this "uniqueness" from location to location. Now they all push the same anarchist, grunge aesthetic. I dont mind it, but its not novel to me anymore, and it'd be nice to experience something else.

The last few holidays I've had I make a point to look up whether the towns we're staying in have any second hand bookshops, and to damn well visit them - with the ever present chance of slight frustration due to some odd opening hours that seem unique to second hand bookstores in such a way as to appear to be saying "you must earn your visit by rescheduling your holiday around me".

It's possible to be correct in three guesses what the owner will look like just by knowing the opening hours.

This is one of the reason I like used bookstores and thriftshops. I like having a good surprise from time to time and find something totally unexpected. Buying used is also good for the environment

The big second-hand bookseller in my town has a huge collection and several locations in multiple metro areas. Yet they have no way to search for a specific title!

I was shocked. If you have no idea of your current inventory and sales history, how do you know how much to pay for people's books? Their books are about $0.50 a title -- I would gladly pay that price for a book I would otherwise get from the library if I knew it was available. They would be able to do a serious business selling required titles to local college students. And they could have a robust online presence through 3rd party sellers like Amazon and Ebay.

Yes, some beloved used bookstores are falling victim to "market forces". But if those same market forces inject some modernity into these businesses that badly need it, I'd be very grateful.

There’s https://bookshop.org for injecting modernity into supporting independent bookstores. It doesn’t help specifically for used book stores however.

I find the bookshop.org model a bit weird. There's no real reason that independent bookshops need to be part of it, apart from a marketing angle to court people who want to "help local bookstores" over Amazon.com.

From a recent NYT article on the site:

"Orders are fulfilled through Ingram, a large book distributor, and mailed directly to customers, so stores don’t have to have the books in stock or process inventory. Bookstores get 30 percent of the list price — less than they would typically make from a direct sale — but don’t have to pay for inventory or shipping."

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/16/books/bookshop-bookstores...

Yea I don't fully understand it either, to be honest. Also it's interesting because in a recent HN discussion about Jeff Bezos courting early investors, the second employee of Amazon showed up in the comment section (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24245909) and he mentions Ingram:

> I remember that not long after we "opened the doors" to the public, we had a visit from some reps from either Ingram or Baker & Taylor, the US's two biggest book distributors (I forget which). Part of the reason Jeff had picked Seattle was that it was within the 1 day delivery radius for both companies. These guys came over to see what we were doing and they were completely flabbergasted. They could not believe that a few people in a small commercial building in Seattle had built what we had already done by that point. They had no idea of the technologies involved, they had no grasp of the vision. But we never had to convince companies like this - we just ordered books from them, as their customers, and then sold them to ours.

In some ways it's like Ingram is striking back at Amazon, and sharing part of the proceeds with independent bookstores. My current feeling is that it has its place. I don't want Amazon to accumulate even more control and kill the diversity of businesses that make up our society.

All books in the last ~50 years have a barcode already printed on them, and an ISBN printed inside. Any phone camera can read these. If you assume 15 seconds per book at pace, 40 books per shelf, 6 shelves per bookcase, and 30 bookcases in the average store, complete digitization of a collection should take only ...

Edit: Responding comment is quite right, original calculation mistaken. It's 4AM here. 40 × 6 × 30 = 7200 books × 15 seconds ÷ 60 ÷ 60 = 30 hours, so <4 days assuming 8 hour days. Or 1 day if you can speed up to 5 seconds per book.

I get 7200 books and 30 hours. Am I missing a factor somewhere?

Assuming ~600 man hours (your numbers) to digitize an entire used book store, at $15/hr cost for labor it would cost ~$900 to digitize a bookstore. I think you're shy a factor of 3 or 4 on the amount of labor it would take to digitize a book store, given my experience with running inventory at retail shops. Maybe it could be worth it if there was an inventory management system that could automatically post the books for sale on an internet platform, but if every used book store posted their entire inventory online the market for many titles would be flooded and it would be a race to the bottom.

Ultimately all physical retails spaces have the same common problem -- why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online. This problem is even bigger during covid-19. I personally think there are two answer, one is to move the core retail business online, and the other is to create experiences people will keep coming back for. If you're making unique products it might be best to pivot online. If you're into the classic buy wholesale sell retail business than the online market can be very competitive.

A used book store can be a great place to have experiences. Authors can come and talk, you can have children story time, book clubs can meet, coffee shops pair well with book stores. You have to clear inventory to make space for experiences, but you can use it as an opportunity to remove inventory that wasn't selling anyway.

You may want to run those numbers again, you're shy a factor of ten.

Edit: the parent comment's calcs are wrong too

I won't run the numbers again, because I think the meat of my comment is in paragraph 2 and 3.

I take issue with those sections too; you completely ignored that often customers won't know exactly what they want, importance of browsing, and the expert service provided that is the salesperson giving book suggestions and advice to customers.

Your points about alternative revenue streams by providing alternative services are directly covered in 20 year old tv show (black books) where a 'dysfunctional' bookstore either has them already implemented or trials them. For example, coffee is about keeping the customers in the store and browsing, people leave if they get hungry or thirsty. If you're actually deriving substantial profit from your hot drinks, then you're running a niche cafe, and you're in competition against legitimate baristas with fancier machines. It also takes up a large amount of space, and can cause volume issues otherwise.

Most secondhand bookstores are small, and items have a large volume-time footprint i.e. the turnover of any individual item is low. Get rid of all the low margin books for dining, and you ruin the browsing experience in multiple ways. You're just suggesting the secondhand bookstore should ditch it's secondhand books, and instead sell only high turnover popular stuff i.e. compete with modern normal bookstores, which are already doing beyond what you've suggested.

"Ultimately all physical retails spaces have the same common problem -- why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online. ...I personally think there are two answer, one is to move the core retail business online, and the other is to create experiences people will keep coming back for."

This is a great observation. I think that every business looking at option 1 would run away in terror, as that would mean competing directly with Amazon. My local bookstores have pursued this to some degree out of necessity in covid times, but it doesn't seem sustainable, and I never got the impression that they prioritized it.

The bookstores local to me that have thrived have pursued the latter strategy with events, but primarily by having an opinionated selection that is a joy to browse. Amazon cannot compete on this for two reasons:

First, they cannot have a uniquely opinionated selection. They can have an "Amazon" selection, which will by its nature be the lower common denominator, or they can have a "personalized" selection, which will by its nature play to the customer's pre-existing interests and the generic global recommendation insights from Amazon's ML models. People do have lists on Amazon, but this isn't a profitmaking endeavour worth a full time commitment. No single perspective will be rich enough to engross the consumer for more than a minute or two, or call them to return regularly.

Second is that Amazon does not provide the physical experience of browsing physical books.

As you said, this still leaves the problem: even given all the above, why wouldn't someone just browse the in person bookstore and buy the books online? Thankfully, the survival of these stores shows that there enough buyers are "non-rational" to financially support the experiences they enjoy.

> This is a great observation. I think that every business looking at option 1 would run away in terror, as that would mean competing directly with Amazon.

I don't think pivoting online is a suicidal move for many business, but it takes a different type of mindset to make it work. I'd like to highlight heatonist.com as an example of someone doing it right. It's a NYC based hot sauce boutique with a web presence. They create quality web content and use it as advertising (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAzrgbu8gEMIIK3r4Se1d...). Their inventory is a curated list of high quality products. Their web reviews are all from people in the same tribe of hot sauce fans. Their website and shipping practices are all _good enough_.

What makes it work? I see the web content, but driving web content to Amazon would make the site pointless. It seems like Amazon's prices are higher, though. Is it direct sales?

If you're looking for interesting, opinionated selections, Amazon isn't your competition.

There are many, many affiliate based places online to looks for book curation. It's really not that hard to discover interesting books.

> one is to move the core retail business online, and the other is to create experiences people will keep coming back for.

Agree

I think that's the reason why IKEA stores are so popular

You get the full experience of living in a house and can have a feeling of the different setups

The furniture per sé are not great, but the experience is way more satisfying than the average furniture store, at least in Italy

> Assuming ~600 man hours (your numbers) to digitize an entire used book store, at $15/hr cost for labor it would cost ~$900 to digitize a bookstore.

$9,000

And at $0.50 a book would take 18000 sales to just recoup assuming 100% profit. Starting to understand why they don’t.

> you can use it as an opportunity to remove inventory that wasn't selling anyway

If you don't have a database of your inventory, you don't know what's selling and what's not, apart from hazy memories of employees and the amount of dust on the shelf.

why should someone go into your store when they can get the same products online

Easy answer: because they'll walk out with the book they were going to buy and the book next to it. We used to have second-hand bookstores that would send you catalogs that you would peruse (by subscription, you'd actually pay for the catalog), and you could order from that. It was worth the money, no recommendation engine comes close to browsing a well-curated store.

When we do inventory of books, about 7000 of them, it takes a team of 3 or 4 people scanning labels on the back of books, about 5 hours to scan them all. Add 3 or 4 more people in to watch the computer(s) for errors as scans come in. Then add an hour or two to pur things back to normal.

For a used bookstore with no pre made labels and books stacked and crammed I’d double the time. Then add some more for books that don’t have a barcode on them...

This is with laser barcode scanners and dedicated machines per device. Phone scanners are much slower.. either way, give me a crew of people, scanners, etc and we could scan about 10K books a day.

For a used bookstore inventory could be done once a year like we do to avoid drift in our data.. but more realistically everything would be scanned as it comes in and out. Why that doesn’t already happen baffles me too!

It does. In the past, there were cards in the backs of books with date stamps.

> If you assume 15 seconds per book at pace, 40 books per shelf, 6 shelves per bookcase, and 30 bookcases in the average store,

Everyone else commenting on the math, but I take issue with the starting assumptions. A bookshelf fits approximately 10 books per foot. A used bookstore, in my experience, tends to have a huge amount of books - shelves to the ceiling (8 shelves high, 5 feet wide). Taking as an example some used bookstores near me, I would estimate a used book store at minimum would have 100 such shelves. 8x5x10=400 books per shelf, x100 = 40000 books. Using your scan time estimate, that gives us 40000x0.25min = 10000 minutes, or 166 hours to scan the isbn (21 days)

This is similar to the use case that OPDS is marketing itself with. It was featured on HN a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24178548

https://opds.io

Browsing a used bookstore (or any other bookstore) when I have some time to kill is still fun. [And my local library has a booksale every year.] But with the exception of maybe looking through cookbooks or art books or something like that, it's not really how I buy or even browse books any longer.

In the "bad old days" when new books were mostly sold at list price and there really wan't a whole lot of independent information about books out there, it often made a lot of sense to buy used books at half off based on serendipitous browsing of the shelves. But that's not really true any longer.

I used to go into Harvard Square on a Saturday afternoon every month or two in no small part to browse books and CDs at a variety of stores (many of which are long gone). I haven't done that in years.

I believe you’ve stopped doing that but the experience was more fun. Now you have search and recommendations and it’s definitely a better value, book reviews can give a good hint if a book is crap or not what you expect before you buy it.

What could well be the very last truly independent bookshop in London, will be gone soon. And I don’t mean Henry Pordes on Charing Cross Road, which I love, but Anthony Hall in Twickenham. He owns his entire building outright, and even though he is a specialist book dealer, has always maintained a small bookshop as a luxury addition to his main office, if you like. At one point, all nine rooms of the building were filled with books, but he’s in his 80s and is selling up. Most of his business is on the internet, as he says now. No need for the bookshop.

You reminded me of Fisher and Sperr in Highgate, gone but not forgotten, and illustrated a little by this article:

http://www.dalemcgowan.com/samples/bookcrawling.html

It is a grand theme of life that we fail to appreciate these things until it is too late. Thank you for the reminder.

Wow, what a place. I sadly never had the pleasure, being a West/South-West Londoner and only really making it as far as Camden in my teens. I used to live in Marylebone and there is still a fantabulous little bookshop - as far as I know - called Archive, which deals with a lot of sheet music and retains a piano. It's a marvel. Buried in the backstreets just south of Church Street market, and just thinking about it makes me want to bike into town and give them all my money.

From personal experience, what has made me rarely go to second-hand bookshops (or bookshops of any kind) is they typically have a really bad selection. The amount of trash printed is insane, and not only do people tend to keep the gems, but they also tend to suck them out of second hand bookshops, so only really useless books are left.

I've found that it's hard to find specific books you know you want, unless they were really popular, but it's easy to find something interesting you've never heard of before.

That, the chance to happen upon something you didn't know you wanted, is what adds to the charm of second-hand bookshops.

A few weeks ago I picked up Umberto Eco's Misreadings in the second-hand section of our local bookshop. It's a collection of short stories from the mid twentieth century translated in English in the nineties. I grabbed it for a closer look because the author was known to me (The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum), and because the back of the book introduced one of the stories therein as a pastiche of Nabokov's Lolita, wherein a certain Umberto Umberto (heh) pines for an elderly lady referred to as 'Granita' (incidentally, 'Nonita' in the Italian original).

That story was a delight to read and totally worth it.¹

I also would never have found, never mind purchased that book online. My biggest source of books is a yearly book-fair (in Deventer) where I will gladly spend hours trawling through banana boxes for cheap paperbacks and random chance finds. (Except this year due to bloody you-know-what.) So hurray for the serendipity of second-hand bookshops!

1: Anyone who has read and enjoyed Lolita ought to read this short Umberto Eco story: https://thefloatinglibrary.com/2008/08/24/granita/

I think this very much depends on where you are. In england, culture has always been a dirty word, so second hand bookshops have the kind of books english people read, which are dismal. In germany, I've had much better luck - packed shelves of reclam-edition books, for instance.

The problem with used books stores is they always have book two of a series, but never book one :)

Book publishers do the marketing all wrong. They publish the first in a series as a tease to buy the rest. They should start with the second book in the series, then people would be haplessly impelled to buy the first one!

I actually really appreciate second-hand books. It sounds weird, but it makes it feel like there's more life to a book knowing others have read that exact copy. I also find it interesting and often helpful reading notes or underlined/highlighted parts of the book.

I recently purchased a few books from thriftbooks.com and noticed they shipped from different locations....I'm not sure if they're run as a marketplace where individual sellers can post books, or if they have multiple warehouses.

I also enjoy buying used books where one can tell that the previous owner treasured the book over the years and made notes or highlights. However, the demise of the sewn binding – publishers have shifted to shoddy glued bindings even for prestige titles like the collected works of many poets – means that there will probably be less well-used and loved books around, since the binding is likely to give out already within the time that the first owner has the book.

Right up your alley: https://archive.vn/jMbcO

Binding is something you can do at home with minimal equipment. I have a fair sized library with lots of old books; got into bookbinding as a side effect to keep everything ticking over.

Even acidic paper is something you can deal with, though it's more difficult than cutting off lousy glue bindings and replacing with something better.

This! Also books are like wine - they smell better when they're aged.

> I actually really appreciate second-hand books.

Do you think this is some kind of controversial or unusual opinion?

Almost everyone loves second-hand bookshops. They just don't buy many books in them. And when they do the profit for the shop is tiny. So it's hard for them to keep going.

I was once browsing Asimov titles in a used bookstore. I had read his nonfiction but none of his fiction. Out of curiosity I picked up a copy of The Gods Themselves, and tucked between the pages I found a folded-up copy of his obituary torn out of the New York Times. I bought the book for the obituary and as a bonus I loved the reading the book.

Nope. There are several reasons why individual secondhand bookshops are on the way out, but Oxfam is not a particularly significant one.

I am honestly puzzled by the author citing the Oxfam shop on St Giles as an exemplar, because it's a poor shop full of tat and tired old guidebooks to Greece in the 1960s. Even the Oxfam bookshop 15 miles up the road in little Chipping Norton has more interesting stock. But it's interesting that he cites an Oxford example, because independent retail in Oxford generally has been on the decline for 20+ years, and I suspect the woes of the secondhand bookshops in Oxford are the same as those of small retailers generally.

Abebooks and Amazon, eBay etc. are a more significant cause. You can now order the rare book you want from a dealer somewhere in the countryside without them needing to pay for retail premises. One of my favourite secondhand bookshops, Sedgeberrow Books in Pershore, has recently gone that way - the shop has closed but the operation lives on as an Abebooks dealer. Pershore still has a secondhand bookshop, which is a lovely relic that doesn't even take debit/credit cards. Many of the survivals seem to fit that mould: intentionally arcane dealers who've chosen not to move with the times.

fwiw, Abebooks has been a subsidiary of Amazon since 2008

I find it somewhat interesting that Amazon has kept Abebooks separate. The latter certainly seems to me to be a better source for relatively obscure titles.

Yes, that Oxfam shop is dire, even if you find the odd interesting book it will be priced accordingly. I've never found a bargain in there.

Setting aside the damage done by the advent on internet which helps with search and deliveries, i feel that there's a change in the attitude of people today. I used to walk into the bookshops near my home and university, walk around and browse, the people who worked there were passionate and would recommend titles to you. One of them even helped connect people to book-clubs, i miss those connections. It doesn't seem that people want to spend that kind of time. Browsing UBS, checking titles and finding those with notes marked in pencil and messages for the next reader across books is an experience i would like my children to have.

In my hometown I've seen about half of the used book stores disappear within the last 10 years. There are a few still hanging on, but with rising rents and fewer people reading it seems like their days are also numbered. Which is a shame because to me aimlessly perusing through old stacks of books is very enjoyable and somehow comforting. I love the rush you get when you come across some rare book you've spent years looking for, or when you find some new book you didn't know you wanted. Going on Amazon and ordering the exact book you want is easy and convenient, but I don't think it can replicate that feeling of discovery.

In the late-90's, early 2000's, my high school weekend job was doing computer work for a local bookstore starting to sell online. On the tech side, it was interesting to see online marketplaces taking off, how ordinary people use computers, the sorry state of single-purpose software meant for a small group of paying customers. I also got to learn a lot about books, which ones are more likely to be valuable, which ones have no values (I have no problems throwing books away), and where to find books online.

Now the book business... The best used book marketplace at the time was Abebooks. There's been some consolidation, and they got bought by--who else--Amazon, but I ordered something from them recently, and as far as I could tell, it wasn't just Amazon sellers. Amazon and Ebay looked like huge markets to tap, we we never had much luck on either. Ebay, especially around 2000, was more auction-oriented, and those work great for mid-price, in-demand products. For books, to hit the price range for making a good listing make sense, it would have to be rare, but how many people are in the market for a first edition of "The Jungle." The smaller marketplaces made more sense because that's where the buyers were. It was a hard business, even then. The bookstore closed its storefront and moved everything into a second home because the rent/mortgage was cheaper. The other thing that became clear is that "rare" books weren't as rare as people thought once they started surfacing online, so prices dropped. I have no idea how Amazon sellers selling copies of old, but popular books for $2 can turn a profit. The only reason the owner ran this store was she had a passion for books.

It is true, a lot or collectible items lost most of their uniqness derived value when vast amounts filled the inventory of digital stores and demand for them proved much lower than expected

If you like second-hand bookshops, visit Hay-on-Wye. I'd recommend crossing the Atlantic to see it even. It's in south Wales, and it's a whole village of second-hand bookshops. Many are huge, some are tiny and very specialist (horror, detective fiction, etc.) Every year I spend three or four days there browsing and reading, and doing some walking in the mountains as well.

I've had Hay-on-Wye on my radar for a while (I'm Dutch, so it is a doable holiday destination by train and bus). The surrounding area looks interesting as well, and the mountains certainly appeal to me. You make it sound worthwhile. How are the prices? London's second-hand bookshops seem to be notoriously overpriced (not surprisingly due to rent and costs).

For now the only things holding me back are the fallout of Brexit and Corona.

My wife and I visited London three years ago and popped into bookshops wherever we could find one (Word on the Water, the London book barge was nice), but the best haul we had was on a day trip to the Isle of Wight where we rode the train to the end of the line and hiked to Ventnor where a festival was going on. In a churchyard an old man had a vintage bus he brought to England from Paris for the sole reason that he fell in love with it (the bus, not Paris), so he bought it when it was too old for its public transport role and restored it. It was filled with second-hand books for the occasion (for a charity I think it was), and we came away with a dozen books and a lovely chat.

>How are the prices?

Overall good, surely better than London, but there is a spectrum: the cheapest shops there aren't good, and the best ones aren't the most cheap.

> How are the prices?

I don't think I've ever really considered the prices. They're always just 'a few pounds'. Doesn't seem necessary to worry over it given how good the experience is.

If you're buying genuinely valuable or rare older books over the £50 mark I might stop and think, but I'm usually not browsing for that kind of book - I'm already looking on AbeBooks etc.

Lots of second hand bookshops are combined with coffee shops. When consumers become comfortable going to coffee shops again, those places will likely return. Meanwhile, current owner/operators will lose.

Most new books are not that expensive compared to how much time people put into reading them and the value they derive, and libraries provide a free alternative. I think the middle is just getting squeezed.

In the UK, I've helped run some of the ninja bookshop crawls. There are usually guided routes that take you through independent bookshops - they are always interesting and great for discovering bookshops and the cities themselves.

Independent and second hand shops have really benefitted from these events and they usually offer discounts and gift bags for crawlers

https://www.ninjabookbox.com/london-bookshop-crawl

That's a wonderful initiative - I'm really intrigued by that, and might sign up for one of the subscriptions. Thank you for posting.

(Could you have words with your site designer, though? I honestly haven't seen Safari struggle with a site like that for months, even including the worst excesses of UK local newspaper sites or the Independent.)

It's a SaaS WYSIWYG site builder, the page is 300 requests and 20MB with aggressive adblocking turned on, and over a thousand requests with adblock turned off.

Almost every element is hard-positioned with absolute onto the page, or misusing flexbox in weird, overlapping, z-indexed ways

A couple of years ago one of our local shops closed down, and in the end, they threw away tons of books - as in metric tons. They had a couple of weeks where people could basically just come in and take whatever they wanted, but still, tons of leftovers.

I have fond memories of those shops, but, they had their quirks. Inventory systems were typically non-existent, and some of those shops were a mess.

But you know, even those things had their charm. Reminds me of the older mom'n pop stores and shops that didn't have the 100% cleanliness or neatness of modern big-box stores, where everything has been designed and optimized to perfection, and just looks...sterile. The modern stuff is excellent when your only goal is to go in, find your stuff, and get out - as fast as possible. But it's not that great when you just want to exploring/treasure hunting.

The old and unorganized stuff was great for that - treasure hunting. You didn't get the flippers or re-sellers that would swoop in 9AM on a daily basis to get the most valuable stuff, because their inventory trackers had notified them that store XYZ just got in rare item ABC.

Well, for whatever it's worth, PaperbackSwap [0] has become my go-to place for getting rid of books and (often) finding ones I want to read.

Just cleaned out a bookcase and put up a bunch that people want... glad to get them to good homes (where they might actually be read, rather than collecting dust on my shelves).

[0] https://www.paperbackswap.com/

At the beginning of the year I spent about 10 days in 40 bookshops around Taiwan and one of the things I noticed is that a lot of bookshops (both first- and second-hand) are stepping up their game in a few ways to stay alive. Some of the things I noticed included:

- Well-curated collections to make people actually want to be there

- Some bookshops collect entrance fees since they don't necessarily expect to sell books. In return, you often get nice couches to read all you want, air conditioning, Wi-Fi, sometimes free tea, and sometimes you can discount your entrance fee against the cost of any books you buy.

- Some bookshops offer themed experiences in the shop itself. One I went to had the entire bookshop very dark except for the books and reading areas themselves, with the idea being that you only see yourself and the books, and not other people.

Of course, yet others seemed to be struggling, in the face of Eslite and other massive bookstores that have started to capture the young crowds.

The nearest thing I know of in the US to the Oxfam shops are the Carpe Librum pop-up stores in Washington, DC. They will operate for a few weeks--occasionally a few years--in a building that is awaiting redevelopment. All books/tapes/cds are donated, all staff is volunteer. Working near one is a standing temptation to purchase piles of books. I guess that the Friends of the Library shops one sees at Montgomery County libraries are comparable. Neither has much reduced my urge to shop in the remaining second-hand bookshops.

"[Graham Greene] and he remains one of the few serious literary figures who also understood the glamour and romance of the bookselling trade." Take that, Larry McMurtry! At least one other moderately known author had a used bookstore in Washington, DC, years ago. And Nancy Mitford worked for Heywood Hill in London for a while.

Yet the japanese second hand book/game/CD/DVD/hadware company Book Off is as successfull as ever, with stores pretty much everywhere in Japan and starting to expand overseas: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_Off

Its really an amazing rxperience there - clean orderly stores with bright illumination jam packed by books at lidiculously low prices & you can find total gems there if you look for a while - like the first artbook of Masamune Shirow in perfect state for abou 1500 yen (~13$ ?)! I dont even want to think how much that would have cost on Ebay...

I would be interested to know how much the Book Off model depends on the fact that manga is a huge market in Japan. Every time I've been into a Book Off, there's always been a huge manga section and it's always packed with people because (a) manga is really popular and (b) they don't shrinkwrap the manga to prevent people reading them in the shop the way a lot of places do. In a market like the UK or US where (comics being more niche than manga) there isn't that huge part of the store that's driving footfall and turnover, would the same model but working primarily with books do as well ?

Physical media of all kinds is much more sought after in Japan and book consumption is much higher than the US as well.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Japanese bookstores, used, specialty, and commercial. The range and quality of works is staggering. Even pre-Amazon, I’m not certain the US had such a robust market of booksellers. Could probably be only compared to somewhere like France.

Manga is certainly big part of it, but there was always a sizeable "text only" section as well - 20-30% maybe ? Manga 40-50% I would guess. And indeed, no shrinkwrapping (only exception - the 1000 yen series bundles, but thereit was for practical purposes :) ) and you can see a lot people reading at any time.

And its kinda necessary to find what your are lokking for, especially if you are a foreigner with shaky levels of reading Japanese. :) Also you can find interesting stuff you did not know existed just by picking a random book and looking inside. More so as each Book Off store seems to have different gems hidden inside - we visited quite a few (Kagoshima, Kawasaki, Akihabara) and each one had something special. :)

Oh, absolutely, as a foreigner in a Book Off I love the no-shrinkwrap policy and also the way it's a large and well-populated space that's much less intimidating to walk into than the kind of second hand bookshop that's practically empty and you feel like you're being observed by the old dude behind the counter... And they are indeed great too for buying "text-only" books -- I'm just not sure the business model would work anywhere near so well if the text-only section had to carry the whole thing without that 50% manga area.

Agreed about the regular local (in my case Czech Republic) used book shops - they are kinda like antiquities and totally different atmosphere. They also seems to buy & sell old and somehow interesting books - if you just want to sell a recently released novel or some text books good luck. As far as I can tell Book Off does not make such a distinctions.

Anyway, as a result there is really not a good place where to sell newer less interesting books to other people - there are some online Ebay like sites & I've heard people buy & sell used books over Facebook. Still far cry from basically going to a nearest Book Off with bags of books to sell (at least that's how I imagine it to work when you sell books to them ;-) ).

Maybe that could be something that would make it work here as well. It really seems like there is a complete "circle" for books in Japan but not here & Book Off seems to be a big part of that.

Brand-new book distribution system in Japan also heavily depends on manga magazines, especially for magazines. It's getting unsustainable on nationwide due to sales decreasing.

I love second-hand bookshops, but you can see the death spiral. The neighborhood in which I live used to have about 7 bookshops; they are down to about 3.5 and some of the remaining ones look none too healthy.

One problem with a lot of 2nd hand bookstores is that they have stuffed their shelves with remainders - these are not a interesting stock choice as they are really just "what was selling - or more likely not selling - on mainstream shelves a few months ago". They can't compete on price moving those remainders compared to "Downtown Book Barn" places, and it crowds out genuine used stock (which will provide more surprises).

The Original Book Barn in Connecticut (I think they’ve since opened many “satellite” locations) is one of my favorite places in the world. Carefully curated for quality but just messy enough to make it fun to hunt around for treasure.

Yes! We love the Book Barn! Looking up from my desk now I see at least four books from there. They are great for getting rid of your old books too, just make sure to get the store credit so you can fill that empty place on your shelf back up :). They recently (last year I think) moved the computer related books from the back of the downtown store to the back of the first floor of the store next to East Coast Taco (I think it's called Chapter Three). (Final note: when you go there, East Coast Taco is a must if you are into that kind of food)

EDIT: also the cats are friendly

The biggest joy of a second hand bookstore for me is much the same as my local library.

No attention-grabbing adverts. No video walls.

It is refreshingly relaxing to be able to drop the cognitive load of "anti-advert filtering" and simply look...

Just want to shout out my two favorite used bookshops in Boston. Commonwealth books and Brookline Booksmith.

Both still seem to be thriving but with COVID they were my #1 concern about closing, followed shortly by the long-established neighborhood pubs.

Vibrant neighborhoods need what have been called 3rd spaces (I.e. neither home nor work) where people can hang out without necessarily spending much/any money. Bookstores fit that bill.

Though, to be honest, a good library offers much, though not all, of the same benefits.

Ebay, Amazon and all the other online retail platforms are the second hand book shop of the world and their reach is amazing. I'm sitting in front of reams of obscure service literature I wouldn't be able to access if the used book sellers weren't all online now. I'm not gonna shed any tears over the stores and their shelves being replaced with storage lockers and online product listings.

Anyone else find used books gross?

I wonder if it’s just a quirk/phobia of mine? Library books gross me out too.

How many page turns between butt wipes?! How many picked noses leaving through?

I never used to be bothered as a kid but this feeling has grown over the years culminating in a general ickiness.

The number one benefit of ebooks to me was that I could get old/cheap books that hadn’t, indeed, couldn't be handled by people.

it ain’t easy being weird!

It depends on each item. The yellowing or dusty ones I avoid. Also I disinfect the books when I get home. A lot of books are still very ‘virgin’

Many used bookshops are managed by people who could never run a successful business. They love what they do but are not particularly good at it. These shops probably deserve to fade away. I purchase used books frequently. I almost always find what I want on Amazon, usually from multiple booksellers, and I have the book within a week. It's hard to compete with that level of service.

This phenomenon is pre-Internet. There were many great used bookstores in New York in the 70' and 80's. I went back twenty years later and most had disappeared. I think it's a function of a certain kind of person that wants to be independent, doing something they love. Those mavericks are gone.

In the early 2000s there were still a lot of great used bookstores in New York. Being younger I could not compare to the 70s or 80s but could see the shocking transformation in the last 20 years. Too many shops closed only to remain empty storefronts

In my small town, we have a game store that sales used sci-fi books, a tiny used books store with a small selection, and two thrift stores with decent selection of books. Nevertheless, I do not feel any of these constitute a real used-book store with any real breadth or depth. I'd love to visit one.

I think at least in London used bookstores are doing better than normal ones. The books are cheaper and the selection is more unique — Waterstones etc., have a harder time beating Kindles selection.

Same thing is happening in Montreal. There are at least two bookshops closed because the owner was too aged to take care of the business and no one wanted to do it. Wish I could do it but I don't have the expertise.

Several used bookstores by us have had business pick up during the pandemic with subscription services. As long as the USPS media rate survives, anyway.

Nobody here is talking about EBay but I am able to get the books I want on EBay after the local bookstore closed in my town.

I'm torn when I read articles like this. On the one hand, I've spent many happy hours browsing round second-hand bookshops (a particular favourite memory was discovering the unabridged Gulag Archipelago while on a trip to NYC). On the other, the democratising effect of publishing leads to things like this - https://www.theguardian.com/focus/2020/aug/16/literary-world... - which, while potentially problematic on the surface, means that a much larger number of people can be published, no matter what their social status or connections. I've recently been reading Bruno Schulz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Schulz - and if it wasn't for the intercession of someone powerful in the Polish literary world we would never have read his work (and, thanks to the Nazis, unfortunately we had even less than we might have had). What gems by marginalised authors might we not have read without this "excess" of publishing? Personally, I think this abundance of new published writing (including really interesting examples of self-publishing like Your Name Here by Helen Dewitt) is part of what makes second-hand bookshops less attractive. There is simply so much great stuff being written now by people who would never previously have had an audience, as well as unjustly-neglected authors being rediscovered. I used to feel like I knew most fiction authors' names in second-hand bookshops, even if only by reputation, but I'm not sure that would be the case any more. On balance I think I'd rather have a broader set of voices than a limited selection of second-hand books. And when you also have access to older titles that you might be interested in on abebooks, you can follow your own literary path rather than be guided by someone else's opinions about what's "important".

Edit: Thinking about this more, maybe it's because I'm in my late 40s now, but I get a lot of good recommendations from friends who have been reading all their lives, so I don't feel the need for anyone else to recommend things. My "to read" pile is huge as it is! I guess one thing second-hand shops were good for was suggesting things to me that I might not have read otherwise. But personally I think the internet, particularly Wikipedia and niche blogs, gives me a really good route to the next thing I want to read. After reading Bruno Schulz I've started delving into Polish fiction, and it feels like I've struck yet another goldmine.

Another problem is that retiring boomers are keen on downsizing, and are flooding the market with used books, for which there is little demand.

Second Hand books get recycled or donated to thrift stores or bought out in bulk and sold on Amazon for pennies with $5 shipping. In the age of the ebook there is no need of a second hand book store.

At the heart of this is the indisputable fact:- People save books!!. This led to many millions of tiny isolated and undocumented collections of assorted books. People who wanted a particular book had one option - a Used Book Seller(UBS). These UBS's would open a retail spot and gather books from estates or the public or library disposals of un-demanded books etc. As time passed, they would create a viable business. Time passed and most cities had UBS shops. Then the internet happened, craigslist EBAY, etc., which enabled anyone +dog to list all they had as line items, author, date, condition etc - often with photos. This enabled the collector to select what he wanted at very low prices compared to the UBS stores, as there was a huge overhanging mass of books that people wanted small $$ for - competition soon drove the prices down. True rare books maintained a higher value - but the mass of pulpable junk swamped the market. USB could not easily bulk buy from these Ebayers or Craigslisters because their business model required them to offer lowball offers. One by one these UBS died off. Killed by rents/taxes etc. A few who owned their own stores had a degree of immunity to these market forces, but their income fell as well, and after a while they could make more $$ by going online from a cheaper warehoused list and they rented their high street shops to a Starbucks or ??, and never looked back. I travelled in Northern Ontario (Canada) and there was a huge rambling UBS in Cobalt Ontario, with zero rent on owned land - even they eventually ceased = http://www.highwaybooks.ca/ they still operate online in some manner. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highway_Book_Shop

Rings true to me. I have a lovely used bookstore in my area which has a variety of extremely eclectic stuff, and even he lists his whole inventory online now, as well as maintaining the in-person shop:

https://www.abebooks.com/old-goat-books-waterloo-on-canada/1...

Sounds like he has the blessing of owning his own store, so he has no rent burden - the real killer as gentification ruins many places via rent increases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com