Dept. of Schadenfreude

Amazon.com totally kaput as of 12:33PDT

"At an annual revenue of nearly $27 billion, Amazon faces a potential loss of an average of $51,400 a minute when its site is offline."

Going Out For Business

The bailiff's locks are on the doors of Sophia and This Ain't The Rosedale Library, and everybody wants to know, Are you guys next? Should I come up and cash in my trade slips?

Well, don't run. Six months in, 2010 looks like it will be quite a bit busier than 2009, which in turn was busier than 2008, & etc. Both shops are packed to the gills with interesting stuff. Most stores in town aren't doing much cash buying and sending everyone who wants cash for their books on over. Yesterday at Main Street we added 500 or 600 new books to the shelves, and there was nothing unusual about that Wednesday, just a steady stream of people with interesting stock for sale, and more of the same going back out the door.

Lots of online commentators think that Amazon's gonna kill everybody, or that it's all Costco's fault, or that indie bookstores are full of snarky assholes and don't provide coffee, couches, free wireless, and tables where you can play World of Warcraft for hours (My first thought: a teenage boy's bedroom is not a viable business model). And my hunch is that rabid Amazon.ca and iPad fans aren't my customers and probably aren't any other independent bookstore's, either. So, no loss there.

If you want to look at the root causes of the recent contraction of the North American bookselling industry, you might examine:

1. Publishers who were more than willing to extend far-too-generous discounts and return terms to Amazon, Chapters, Costco & etc., who now find those terms onerous, but can't get out of them, because those same huge retailers now make up too much of the publishers' business.

2. Too many bad books; that is to say, books no one will give a shit about 12 months from now; books that we and every other surviving used bookstore will refuse to purchase for cash or credit when offered for sale. Sarah Palin's autobiography; teen vampire books; NASCAR cookbooks, etc. This stuff has a shorter shelf life than a jug of milk in the hot back seat of a car.

3. Useless Canadian book distributors who routinely back order major titles (Girl With the Dragon Tattoo? How can Raincoast Books and Penguin Canada both be out of this book simultaneously?); continue to charge an absurdly high US-vs.-CDN$ markup; and have enjoyed a culturally protected monopoly for years at the expense of Canadian consumers and retail booksellers.

4. Bookstore managers and employees who've never heard of teh intardnets, and can't accept that their customers often know more about what they're looking for than they do. Running a used or new bookstore without a computer in the shop -- hell, without several computers in the shop -- seems to me to be about as productive as performing brain surgery by candlelight.

Anyway, we're still here; both stores are full of great stuff; and we are always happy to obtain any currently in-print book for you, always at 20% off, sometimes at even more. It was our 10th anniversary on June 12th. No special fanfare, just another day of buying, selling and trading books. (Though we are planning a big public celebration in September; stay tuned!) Hopefully we'll be around for a long time to come.

New Pricing System Now In Effect

(Courtesy Lisa Helps, with thanks)

"What Are You Looking For?"

Not a day goes by that someone doesn't phone or email wondering what kind of books we buy and trade. The short answer: books we can sell quickly that we don't already have fifty million copies of. Thus: recent fiction, recent higher-end nonfiction, recent murder mysteries, recent science fiction and fantasy, and enduring literary classics (Huxley; Orwell; Hemingway; Hesse; Vonnegut & etc.). Plus anything that we are currently ordering in new copies of (Steig Larsson; Malcolm Gladwell; Thomas Bernhard; Zadie Smith; Hunter S. Thompson, etc.). The new book wall in the front room is a convenient Cole's Notes of the kind of books we'd like to see every day, and we always try to add a little extra when new books originally purchased from us are returned for credit or cash.

That said, certain kinds of books are never good candidates for trade or resale: worn or damaged books; most debut novels; stuff widely available on the bargain tables at Chapters and Book Warehouse; books that everybody's book club read 3-5 years ago (Camilla Gibb; Miriam Toews; recent Michael Ondaatje; Sue Monk Kidd); books on topics that our customers don't care about (sports biographies; travel picture books; manky mass-produced kids' series (Animorphs; Goosebumps), spiral-bound cookbooks; diet books; textbooks, etc. Plus most bestsellers that you can buy in an airport bookstore or at Costco (Dan Brown; John Grisham; Danielle Steel; Stuart Woods).

In general, we only buy and trade books that we know we can resell. That way, the shops are always full of recent and interesting titles, and you don't have to wade through thousands of mediocre or badly dated books to find the good stuff.

Our trading policy is largely identical to our buying policy, except that you receive a higher rate for trade credit, based on how quickly we think your books are going to sell. Unlike most other book stores, our trade credit doesn't expire, can be used at either one of our stores, and doesn't have to be combined with cash. That said, trade credit can't be used to purchase new books (everyone, even the staff, pays cash for them), and material that is being offered for trade has to meet a basic common sense test. (Eg., a box of John Grisham and Stuart Woods pocket books never equals a bag of used Bukowskis, Murakamis, Fantes and recent graphic novels).

New Arrivals, New Shelves, New Cookbooks & Kids' Books

We just spent the last week and a half building new shelves up at Main Street to accommodate a recent influx of cookbooks and kids' books, including out-of-print back issues of Art Culinaire magazine, a recent Cordon Bleu guide, and specialty titles by Rob Feenie, John Bishop, Charlie Trotter, Michelin three-star Pierre Gagnaire & etc. About 200 books in all.

New Classics Collection in @ Main Street

One of our best scouts just returned from a sale in the Pacific Northwest with a car full of classic paperbacks, including a stack of old orange Penguins, and lots of inexpensive popular favorites (Orwell, Huxley, Hemingway, & etc.). Almost 1000 books in all, which will be hitting the shelves over the next few days.

The Future of Print

Via the New Yorker, a thorough and detailed look at Kindle v. iPad, Amazon v. everybody, print v. digital, & etc. Worth reading.

On a related note, I just spent two and a half weeks on the road in the USA, where I noticed several things:

1. Almost a third of the bookstores that were open when PFB first opened in June 2000 have now closed. Of the used bookstores that remain, most are no longer buying books at all. Sales at those stores, based on my first-hand, limited, and admittedly anecdotal observation, are awful. The few stores that still regularly buy for cash are, like us, seeing more good books than they ever have before, and almost all of their owners told me that they expect 2010 to be their "best year ever."

2. Books @ PFB, new and used, are by and large cheaper than those at stores located in major US metropolitan markets (Seattle; Portland; San Francisco; Las Vegas).

3. Paperback exchanges that only carry mass market paperbacks -- a concept that's always struck me as an incredibly flaky business model -- are done, a victim of rising rents and their owners' reluctance/inability to buy for cash. The survivors' stock, which ranged from great to middling ten years ago, is now uniformly terrible.

4. Thrift stores in the States are now charging as much for recent books as we are. This doesn't make much difference to me, but it should to any bookstore owner whose business model is predicated on heading to the local thrift store first thing in the morning and loading up.