First signs of a slight decline in secondhand bookshops in Britain
wormwoodiana.blogspot.com
wormwoodiana.blogspot.com
(He's still alive and kicking. I bought a secondhand book from a random eBay seller the other year and it turned out to be him. Quite a shock.)
That aside: I find it hard to believe the assertion that "the number of second-hand bookshops in the UK had increased by about 25% over a thirty year period". All the areas with which I'm particularly familiar saw a notable decline in this period (some almost precipitous, such as Oxford or Uppingham). My gut feeling is that Driff's 80s guides were not as comprehensive as the poster believes, and that the advent of the internet has made it much easier to compile complete, crowdsourced directories such as thebookguide.info.
In my local experience in the US Barnes and Noble and Borders killed all the non-second-hand bookstores, and then Amazon mostly killed those, but some of the second hand bookstores have survived.
Also, do you count Goodwill as a "second hand bookstore"? They have usually two or three aisles of books, after all.
Companies House has a publicly searchable list of incorporated companies:
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/
The Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code for "retail sale of books in specialised stores" is 47610:
https://resources.companieshouse.gov.uk/sic/
You can search the list by "nature of business" (i.e. SIC code):
https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/a...
It returned 3,437 results for me, but this will include inactive companies and chains, and exclude unincorporated shops. Tax records might be more thorough, if there are a lot of unincorporated companies or sole traders that file tax returns, but I don't think those records are public.
The revenue brought in by a second hand book store may be sustainable in a much smaller city with static/non rising commercial rents, but when a commercial landlord looks at lease renewal and decides they can get a whole lot more money if somebody converts the place into a small restaurant, coffee shop or (other) retail...
Charing Cross Road in London is a prime example - used to have a whole bunch of small book (and other) shops. Now it has a whole bunch of pastry, coffee[1], sweet etc. shops and a couple of small bookshops (who probably don't have long to go, really.)
(Also has a huge bookshop, Foyles, but that's a soulless corporate monstrosity.)
[1] I am particularly aggrieved about the nicer of the two Any Amount Of Books being turned into a squashed coffee shop.
The expensive building changes to the Chinatown side didn’t help the smaller shops and it’s clear as their leases end the shops are closing and it’ll be like everywhere else with a generic mash of forgettable places.
Married a bookseller who worked at skoob, Sicilian avenue. The owner had worked next door to 84 charing cross road. We avoid second hand bookshops now, you can grow out of them.
Everyone raves about hay. The QT is on petersfield and the honour box system.
It sounds like you and I have very similar tastes. I've been amusing myself recently by asking AIs to draw Gormenghast. None of them get the scale.
Moved to a smaller space a few yards from where it was. Lost its charm in the process, for me, much like Foyles.
The building may also be have problems that prevents the owner renting it out to a "full price" tenant.
If you can avoid rent/mortgage, many businesses suddenly become viable. If you have to compete with other rent payers, many businesses die, and the street becomes nothing but bank offices, lawyer offices, and maybe a Starbucks.
Instead of subordinating the commons to whatever the biggest amount of nameless faceless money happens to be in the area.
It is very obvious when this is not done, because you end up with cities like Toronto where there's a plethora of streets with nothing but a chain coffee shop, a chain pharmacy, a dry cleaner, and a dentist; but absolutely nothing that would be of interest or unique.
I thought the problem was people were not coming back to the office? Why is commercial rent rising? (Do you mean retail rent?)
Try Hay on Wye in the United Kingdom. 20 second-hand bookshops for a population of 2000.
Surprising nth order effects of city planning, the more car-centric your culture is, the less time the average person has for books
Hence audiobooks (and more generally, podcasts)
Perhaps this could be a selling point here in the UK. Yes your very late train has once again been cancelled and you now have to get a place on the replacement bus service, but at least you've had some time to read!
The stance I'd have is the less travel-centric your life is, the more time you have for reading (or anything else). Big tech making more remote work feasible has opened this up a lot more than city planning can.
But one really important structural factor is that books must be sold at the same price, by law, everywhere (+/- 5%, price fixed by the publisher. So you may pay -5% on Amazon or a retail chain like FNAC compared to a local book shop). This law dates back from the 80s, when book shop retail chain FNAC started to get very successful.
Add to that a very efficient book logistics system, and it’s often as fast and nearly as cheap to order a book and get it at a book shop than with Amazon.
It’s not all rosy as the system is very concentrated and vertically integrated on the publishers and distributors (wholesale) parts. These publishers+distributors combos get the major part of the revenues, and it’s in their interest to push a crazy number of new books every year (with something like 30% of the stock getting destroyed every year. Book shops can send back books easily and get refunded)
Authors and book shops, at the two ends, get a very small percentage of the revenues. French authors are totally dependent on their publishers for every step, from editing to publicity, and usually license all rights from the get go. Book shop have very small margins (I read around 2%!) and even just loosing thrillers or another popular segment to ebooks might make hundreds of book shop collapse ‘suddenly and unexpectedly’…
This is only for German books, though, foreign languages are not affected by the fixed prices.
This isn't surprising - larger chains can get economies of scale and spend that money on hiring the best staff / more marketing / more locations / lower delivery costs / faster delivery / nicer shops.
Smaller shops not being able to charge more for their books sounds detrimental to their survival.
We have had some kind of fixed book price regulation since 1888 (yes, that’s an 1800, not 1900).
That's probably true in many (most) European countries? Certainly true in ones I know - UK and Poland. It stems from leftist/socialist politics on the continent - the authorities sees their role not only as a policeman/arbiter of people's affairs, but also as a force of enlightenment, promoting education, higher culture etc. Hence, things like literary awards, classical music etc. get a lot of state funding. I'm not entirely convinced it's that great, because for example my taxes are, year after year, funding the local opera in my city (requires large subsidies as ticket revenues are nowhere near enough to cover the costs), of which I will never have any use, as I'm not interested in opera.
I highlight that for our republican readers of the Americas
Wherever you are, wealth and power accrue and are inherited.
1. No it doesn't
2. You've picked two of the least socialist places in Europe to demonstrate
Thanks for clearing it up...
I don't know details about UK, but Polish labor laws are quite strong (in terms of protecting the workers), which is no suprise, given that they were created in 1974, i.e. under the Communist regime (similar for public housing, education, tenant protection etc. BTW - all written by communists and not changed much since). I wouldn't be surprised if they were stronger than in Denmark or Sweden, where the policies (from what I've read) focus on helping the unemployed/laid off, but don't meddle into the employee-employer relationship as much.
Poland had a much stronger local union structure, along socialist lines outside party control, which is why Solidarity union activism was possible. My knowledge of that time in Poland is pretty limited though.
Any facts to back this claim? I'd say the US Democratic party is more left wing than Europe's major parties now.
Just like public transport, opera and theatre can't possibly fund itself just from tickets - the price would need to be very high to do so.
At the same time donations from rich people are few, far between and wouldn't even cover 1% of the expenses - it's not the XX century anymore and even then I suppose instances of rich people funding entire such organisations were rare.
Most musicians (and I've met quite a few during my time in a choir), especially singers already have a day job.
In general it boils down to whether you believe a nation has culture worth preserving or should they all just shut up and produce GDP.
Most things can't fund themselves with tickets. That's why most things that could theoretically exist (if we had infinite resources), don't exist in practice. Why should we make exceptions for things like professional opera and professional theatre? I for one am a big fan of Magic: the Gathering, and would love more MtG events in my city - but I'm not expecting the government to fund them.
> At the same time donations from rich people are few, far between and wouldn't even cover 1% of the expenses - it's not the XX century anymore and even then I suppose instances of rich people funding entire such organisations were rare.
Perhaps it's a sign that opera or theatre are really a thing of the past and hardly anyone cares about them anymore? Well-known polish actor (Jerzy Sztuhr) mentioned once that what he liked about Italy is that going to the opera was part of upper middle-class snobbery there. It was just expected of you, if you wanted to believe to a certain social strata. He liked it, because it meant more funding for his profession - but is it good for society? Shouldn't people do the things they like and not the things that they expect will make impressions on others? Sounds like a miserable way to live to me.
> In general it boils down to whether you believe a nation has culture worth preserving or should they all just shut up and produce GDP.
At least in my city, most of what is played in my local opera house are foreign operas (https://opera-slaska.pl/spektakle)... So, large part of the money goes to preserving the culture of other nations.
Also, a country having culture does not mean that money must be spent on it. Plenty of culture can be made without any monetary exchange. In fact, that's how culture was made through the majority of human history - people playing music at their houses, or doing amateur theatre in their village or town etc. In fact, that tradition died very recently, with wide dissemination of commercial music via radio (1920s in the US, little later in Europe). Since then, people preffered to sit and passively listen to a broadcast of a recording of some professionals doing music, instead of doing it themselves. Before that, up to the beginning of XX century though, town were full of music made by people themselves.
Because that is our cultural heritage and it at least preserves the know-how necessary to perform it.
It's notable that our most prestigious cultural event - the International Chopin Piano Competition - is largely publicly funded.
You can think of it as a form of branding - just applied to entire nations.
> Well-known polish actor (Jerzy Sztuhr) mentioned once that what he liked about Italy is that going to the opera was part of upper middle-class snobbery there.
I happened to have spent four years in Bologna - exactly where Stuhr went in the 80s - and have been in the opera there because my neighbour(old man) had an, ahem, monthly subscription of sorts, which awarded him discounts and he invited me along because his wife couldn't go that time.
Does that strike you as an upper-middle-class thing?
My experience is that especially in Italy people participate in culture much more than around here - it's what makes their national brand strong despite longstanding economic issues.
> At least in my city, most of what is played in my local opera house are foreign operas
Most of the artistic value in opera is the performance which, looking at the cast, is still firmly Polish. Singers often sing in languages that are entirely foreign to them - even if there's a sizeable amount of material written in their own.
That's not true.
Operas and theatres can fund themselves. But subject to 2 key points: They need to program a sufficient number of popular shows that will turn a profit (an experimental avant-gardist performance might not sell out, a popular comedian might, popular and famous shows/musicals in London's West End or NYC's Broadway are raking it in), and the number of venues must be commensurate with the actual demand.
It's harder to pull off than it looks because your reputation as a serious venue is at stake.
Theatre especially goes out of its way to avoid being labelled as a glorified low-tech cinema. Unfortunately that means less money.
Here in the UK venues have very popular pantomine shows ("pantos") for children/families at Xmas. They are not serious and often slapstick comedy but they sell tickets and fill the room.
They must be forced to program at least a sufficient number of popular and commercially successful shows to pay the bills and finance the more demanding ones (to continue on the opera example).
It's not necessarily about making money but the market does not lie: To be able to balance the books is the acid test when it comes to seeing if there is an actual, viable interest in something.
But culture can be on another level. It's an investment in the possibility that we can progressively do better than mere animals - that we can realize our human potential. That's why culture exists, it's a difficult and hardly profitable work in progress for our improvement as a species.
That's actually a big cause of their economic and social problems.
I live in Yokohama and used to go to Kanda-Jimbochō regularly, but I haven’t been there since COVID. The photos make me nostalgic.
[1] https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXZQOUF110700R11C22A0000000/
Most attributed this to an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" scenario. Amazon stomped Borders and Barnes & Noble into the ground, which meant that in many towns there was no longer a huge chain competitor in the bricks and mortar space. That opened up room for the small indy bookstores to come back.
Edit: this NPR piece claims that the number of indy bookstores in the United States increased 35% between 2009 and 2015.
https://www.npr.org/2018/03/29/598053563/why-the-number-of-i...
I feel like everyone in this thread is missing that these are second-hand bookshops. Amazon Prime isn’t a competitor, and e-books aren’t relevant.
Either way, Amazon pales in comparison to the used bookstore I used to live nearby: McKay's Used Books in Manassas, VA.
People aren't going to a second-hand bookshop to buy everyday reading that they could get new from Amazon.
Annecdotally here 2nd hand books cost around $2, for recent stuff, sometimes less than $1 for age or condition. New ones are $10 - $15.
So new and 2nd-hand are not really "competing" with each other, price wise.
Yes they compete, yes there are many other factors that affect the profitability of 2nd hand stores, but I don't think price-of-new is a major factor (in a decline sense.)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-...
I would be curious about Amazon thought, because there is certainly a thriving ecosystem of second-hand book stores listing their inventories there. USPS plays a huge part in making this possible through the Media Mail class of mail.
Many of the second-hand stores are also British, but you will find almost none of them are Canadian because Canada hates being competitive and as such, does not have a viable class of mail to ship books with, be it it domestically, or abroad.
Meanwhile actual second-hand bookstores often specialize in something (there was a really good one that specialized in science fiction) - they still have a normal selection of books like a small library, but most of the shelf space is whatever they specialize in.
Basically all my friends including myself consume audiobooks but rarely sit down to read a book.
Alas our prime minister seems determined to outdo the US when it comes to recession. "Hold my beer..."
I've seen some local businesses closing down because they see the writing on the wall and are unwilling to pass on price increases to locals.
But with what has happened over the last 2 years it is not surprised that the numbers have dropped in the last 12 months.