Much like the disappearing middle-class of American society the world of used books is being redefined as the market for mid-price books ($25-75) is slowly vanishing.
Within the last 10 years, the influx of technology, the advent of online bookselling and widespread internet connectivity, has brought into the market millions upon millions of books that were simply unaccounted for.
The book resale market has become a petri dish of supply and demand economics. Here the true free market is deciding price points.
This flood of available material has taken many of the books in the $25-75 price range and reduced them to $1-$15 books. Is this just a natural evolution of free market capitalism?
This is very different from the new book market where there is a ready supply that is supported by aggressive marketing and top shelf public relation campaigns. You hear about new books through newspapers, magazines and television, you know what is out there and you could readily obtain it. The publishers set the price (actually probably set a few different prices- small retail, big box retail and remainder) and that is that.
I would almost bet there are more non-new books available for sale today that are priced under the cost of shipping the book to the buyer than the total amount of books available to the public 10 years ago.
Countless titles that were deemed uncommon, hard to find, relatively scarce have become common.
On the other hand the better books are selling for record numbers. The top ten books sold at auction in 2006 went for a combined $25 million. Many auction houses reported record revenues for their book auctions and don't forget the tens of millions (if not more) of books that were sold by antiquarian booksellers to both private and public clients. Then there are the expensive books that are sold through the online book aggregators like ABEbooks, where the top ten books sold for more than a combined $125,000.
The market for the high end material remains quite strong as does the market for bargain priced general used books, it is our friends in the middle who are being squeezed out.
Monday, January 22, 2007
The Disappearing Book Middle -Class
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3 comments:
sweetie this is not exactly news, some of us came to this conclusion 3 years ago. Basically when my entire stock of 25-75 dollar books became devaluated i found myself with an awful lot of latrine paper.
Of course this is not new news and I hope it is not coming across as a "news flash" kind of story but there wasn't much blogging going on in my world when this deterioration began and I thought it was a decent tie-in to the good news coming out of the auction and high end of the market.
We do still sell an acceptable amount of books in our shop in that price range. There is just no online market for them. Perhaps I could have been clearer about that.
Michael - That was a valuable and interesting post. Obviously many booksellers were caught in the middle of a squeeze when mid-priced book title fell in price.
I know the timing of first a rush for on-line buying of more, more . . made every boat rise a bit. So that looks like Adam Smith's notion of supply-demand. But what you are saying is that supply is VERY much higher with e-commerce in books now firmly established everywhere and that demand is stable or a little higher.
Problem is: Who has the numbers? What are the measures?
Because incomes are so skewed with the rich richer and the middle poorer (Don't even ask about the working poor or unemployed!) the skyrocketing of sales prices for truly rare books is a no-brainer. Luxury and tax-write-off buying.Also the Internet generated release of pent-up demand for specific and rare titles which were suddenly 'found' in abundance as Joe Blow realised there was a market for the treasures in the attic.
What I'm getting at is that your excellent survey of the recent past in book selling does not convince me that the public is still out purchasing 'dead tree' reading material like they did over the last half century.
Seems to me that the only tangible one can practically reach out and touch is that more people are selling or giving away their 'old' books. And the big book dealers aggragated (somehow - but how? - by starting meta vendor sites? - maybe, it's plausible) . . they began selling much of this glut at below the shipping and handling price because they could ship at lower than retail postal rates anyway. They skimmed smaller margins off larger volumes than the old-line brick 'n' mortar bookstore owners.
But the question of which way the trend is running in terms of a thirst for good books is so important that I want to underscore the notion that we cannot judge the trend by what has happened with meta vendor sites like ABE, Alibris, Powell's or e-Bay and half.com or with the 10 major dealers on-line at these places until we know what the numbers of books sold and the demographics of who is buying them. We don't have solid numbers we can trust that I know of. Anecdotal 'evidence' I've heard is that the market for printed trade books is falling off. Sounds like you know something that points in the more optimistic direction. Could you be more specific?
Every time I hit your blog it is a real delight. Thanks
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