My experience has been that the second-hand bookshops have had thin times but nonetheless survive because of the internet. They tend to have a better selection compared to charity shops, i.e. not just cast-offs of holiday novels and celeb bios. Shout out to https://www.tillsbookshop.co.uk/ and https://www.armchairbooks.co.uk/
There has also been a growth in first-hand bookshops, especially specialists/curators (e.g. only selling sci-fi, only selling books by women, etc.) to distinguish themselves from the Waterstones and Blackwells of this world.
I've noticed a few book stores which intermingle new and used stock and they're great. (it's obvious when something isn't new stock but it's all pretty good condition regardless)
> But bricks-and-mortar booksellers can sell via the internet too, and booksellers can migrate to lower rent areas. Indeed, there is some evidence of this: there are fewer city centre bookshops and more in smaller, less expensive towns.
There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.
Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.
Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.
> [...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.
Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?
Anecdotal but I haven't seen a 2nd-hand bookshop in years however those little "tiny libraries" where people just donate their books are in abundance. What I've seen other used-item shops are doing these days is checking online what things are worth and selling them for very slightly less and it seems like this has to be a death-knell for secondhand stores in general.
And I know they have to do this, everything donated has to be checked to ensure safety and cleanliness, it costs them money to keep the shop open and staffed. But if you can't actually save money by buying secondhand goods there then why would anyone shop there?! It's a 10 - 20 percent discount on goods that may be years old when Amazon rotates these discounts through new goods 24/7.
We have two second hand bookstores in my area. One of them has changed hands a couple of times over the years, so I don't think they make a ton of money, although they are in a large, albeit older, retail space so they must do ok. The other keeps expanding in adjacent spaces, but seems to make a lot of their money selling book adjacent stuff (socks, bookmarks, pins, candles) instead of actual books. In fact the owner regularly stocks several of those free libraries around town and always has free books outside of her store.
One benefit could be curation and discovery. Sometimes a bookstore's displays will show me a book that I might have not otherwise thought to read, selected by their readers, and I'm happy to pay a modest premium for that service.
For years I joked that it was a law that every Goodwill store had to have a copy of a Twilight or Hunger Games book on the shelves at all times. Every time I go to one I check and nearly every time they still do all these years later.
Hey, the Hunger Games are actually really good. I derided it for years until one time I was in the hospital for a few weeks, I got immensely bored and decided to try it out. I was hooked.
Also, even if it had run out of readers, how is it the story's fault? That's what happens to most long-running series. Not every story has to be among the legends to be considered good.
Ah, then clearly I misinterpreted your comment. Apologies, I thought you were saying that it can be considered low-quality in the same vein as the Twilight series books.
There's a neighborhood in Tokyo called Jinbōchō, which built an entire town out of different specialist second-hand book shops.
If you ever need a specific book on a specific thing, you bet you can find it there.
It's pretty sweet.
And to ride on Jimbocho/international reference, they have the same in Manila, Philippines in Recto, which is a university area, tons of english university text books, around 100-200 pesos, "international editions."
Jimbocho has limited English text.
Now Hong Kong, Quarry Bay Street has a few but they're all on south island I see and accessible via the metro.
I'm fortunate enough to have that experience. I also thought there were many specialized districts. The few towns I visited all had a very sophisticated electronics district that included ancient machines, simple home A/V switching boxes and cutting edge parts.
There's a subtext to this post that may not be obvious to non British people: UK High Streets (Main Streets) have in the last 20 years experienced an incredible explosion of charity shops (thrift stores) including many locations specific to books.
Quite why this has occurred is a subject of occasional argument, but I've never heard a definitive theory on it, and it partly overlaps with the general decline motivated by ecommerce. They do compete on some level with existing businesses, as debated here, but the more curious impact is they completely alter the character of an area.
Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties.
For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vacancy, but not if there's a tenant.
Charity shops get an 80% relief on business rates, pay nothing for their stock and get some or all of their staff for free; obviously this allows them to operate profitably in circumstances where no normal business could.
As I understand it, the landlords are holding on mostly in the hope that their properties will either be compulsorily purchased as part of a regeneration scheme, or granted planning permission for redevelopment as housing.
Where I am in the US, it seems like there are two endgames for the "anchor" of a strip mall.
Typically this starts as a grocery store, but sometimes it will be some other larger retailer that collapsed (see Bed, Bath and Beyond or now Jo-Ann Fabrics)
They either become a Goodwill or they become a gym.
It's interesting that they are almost never subdivided-- they'd rather have a single 2000 square metre shop, presumably paying a concession "better than leaving it empty" rent, than to modify the layout of the building to open it up as two or four smaller shops.
Nah, the other big tenant of dying shopping streets is the phone repair/resale shop, which never seem to have remotely enough customers to justify their quantity.
Not so much Check-cashing (although they do exist in some parts of larger cities) and I haven't seen a pawn-shop outside of London in ... forever.
We do have Vapeshops (before that 'Legal High' shops) but apart from those Charity Shops you get a lot of 'Gambling' (aka 'High Street Bookies') chains in those areas where the footfall has gone away to the out of town supermarkets or where the landlords are sitting on what they hope will get turned into flats so they can make a profit.
What I would say regarding Oxfam, at least in the area I live is that the book selection is suprisingly good, both in Oxford and Chipping Norton's where the second hand book selection has given me some great reads and I have seen them refuse the 'Celeb/Sports star' biogs and bundles of Harry Potter cast offs from people while waiting to be served.
Wait, why do you need a shop to cash a cheque? Isnt that one of the last few things you go to a bank for?
Also, how do you cash a cheque without validating signature (from whichever bank)?
Here in India atleast, cheques are cashed only at banks, and often are a/c payee only (no cash disbursed, only account transfer). They get truncated at the bank (basically scanned), and cleared overnight as a part of the CTS (a NPCI product).
However DDs (Demand Drafts) are your equivalent of cashiers cheques, and can be redeemed at par instantly, anywhere (or paid into an account).
You go to the bank to deposit a cheque into your account. But you need to have an account. Cheque cashing services will essentially buy the cheque from you for a bit less than the value written on it. It's mainly for people without bank accounts.
>Wait, why do you need a shop to cash a cheque? Isnt that one of the last few things you go to a bank for?
In the US, a lot of poor people (and illegal immigrants) are unbanked. But also check cashing places also tend to do title loans (turn over your car title for a temporary loan) and other sorts of "fast cash" loans with usurious rates. They and pawn shops are they type of businesses that show up in areas of town where the cost of retail spaces drop.
Yeah the bookmakers (gambling shops) are a huge industry in the UK.
A surprising amount of the UK tech industry has history connected to the gambling sector one way or another, be it sports tv, online related, making parts for pub slot machines etc.
I think a lot of people get the causal relationship the wrong way around when it comes to charity shops and the decline of the high street. It's not (IMO) that charity shops move into otherwise thriving areas and lead to a decline in local business by competing, but rather that they move into spaces that would otherwise lie empty, and therefore are more likely to be found on high streets that were already dying. Where I live we have a few charity shops but it's mainly chicken shops, vape shops and the occasional barber that are cannibalising the local high street.
> Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
Not sure about UK, but in the USA, people have discovered that there's profit in mining thrift stores for quality products and reselling them. Usually online, but also in antique malls*. There are a quite a few apps that make it easy to look up something by picture and see what it's worth.
* not sure what Brits would call this - it's like brick and mortar ebay. Merchants rent out cubicles that they fill with random stuff, and customers check out at a common till when they are done.
In the UK, charity shops got savvy to this and now do their own 'mining'. Valuable items go to HQ to list on eBay for a lucrative price, the remaining dross goes onto the shop shelves.
There are some exceptions to this such as specialist charity bookshops which keep the stock locally, but do make sure to price match with the going rate online.
Genuine non-Duplo, non-Megablocks real honest LEGO? Wow.
I've not seen it except by accident (wedged in something) in over a decade, the Goodwills I know all send it to the central area to be auctioned: https://shopgoodwill.com/
It’s not that complicated. Business rates (commercial property tax) are very high for shops in the UK, and Charity shops are exempt. The rates really are high — about 50% on top of the rent. Plus a lot of the staff work for free. Their cost base is just vastly lower.
In small towns or villages once you have a couple of them the general pace of everything around them tanks, partly because they can get away with far less revenue per sq metre due to the difference in taxation and reliance on volunteers. As others have mentioned the alternative might well be nothing there at all, which would be worse, but it has converted the central section of whole villages into feeling like they are in fact the outer buildings of nearby old people's homes.
Aesthetically they are, at best, a sort of British twist on the cheapest Ikea stylings which can be OK in small quantities but when they become everything it is depressing.
It can of course vary considerably by store, and I’ll happily spend time in both but, generally:
Second hand bookshops are curated actively - like, they’ll only stock desirable books. They’re owned and run, usually, by people who love books. The staff tend to be knowledgeable.
Charity book shops are much less curated - to the extent that some just stock whatever is donated (which, of course, is largely made up of books people don’t want), so they tend to have a large collection of random books of not as high quality. They’re run by volunteers - which generally means enthusiastic staff, but it does not mean knowledge about books.
1000% yes, at least with the help of book scouts that cull #2 and sell what they find to #1 for ~40% of retail.
If you want a fun fictional take on this, John Dunning's Booked to Die is a biblio-mystery about a Denver detective / book-lover investigating the murder of a book scout within the 1980's Denver used bookstore scene.
If you’re in the uk, I think you’d understand the question.
Charity shops have sprung up all over on high streets, even while businesses around them fall. It’s not hard to imagine that the economics are different and that non-charity shops can’t compete due to lack of special tax treatment.
Interesting analysis. I'm somewhat confused by why anyone would think charity bookshops replacing secondhand bookshops would be a bad thing (if that were to actually be happening as the article suggests there isn't much evidence of this). Surely, to the shopper, they are exactly the same except one helps a charitable cause as a bonus.
I have found that second hand shops tend to have a more diverse and rich selection and charity shops can have very rare gems.
Support both, and I wouldn't want to give up one for the other.
Also a bit of an aside, but charity shops are also more often part of national or international orgs so a lot of the "gain" isn't localized as the article discusses. Good or bad on a case by case basis. Not sure how it edges out.
“Charity” shops in my area are for profit businesses. Sure someone is getting a small donation, but their board members pull large salaries. Never mind their free inventory and usually underpaid labor.
The directors getting paid doesn't make a charity for-profit - that's dependent on what they do with the remaining money after paying salaries. For-profit businesses distribute surplus (i.e. profit) to shareholders.
It's a common complaint that donations should not be used to pay salaries, but the important question should be how much leverage those paid staff can extract out your donation. Skilled people usually don't want to work for free, but they can magnify a donation by reaching more potential donors via advertising, more appealing shops, etc.
Legally you are of course right, but there are certainly charity shops out there which are exploitative and even designed to enrich their owners. One well-known example is Humana People to People which is run by something probably best characterised as a person-worshipping political cult (Tvind).
Possibly, but gosh would it be hard for me to care.
In unrelated news, access to a pure, unfiltered spring drives out local bottled-water sellers.
We are in an era where even manufacturing physical copies of books is incredibly cheap. I'm not going to stress about charity bookshops disrupting scarcity in that ecosystem any more than I'm going to worry about libraries or the Internet doing so.
Interesting. I'm in Australia where I would also say that the number of second hand bookshops has greatly decreased in the last 20 years. New bookshops too for that matter. But I'm curious whether I'd also be wrong.
We don't, afaik, have charity run bookshops, though. Lots of op shops, and they all sell books, but not exclusively.
Books in Australia are really expensive. This is because Australian publishers have managed to extract their own big cut from Australian consumers. Part of this is because they publish memoirs from any politician and partly because the printing industry is concentrated in some swinging electorates.
I get almost all of my books from charity thrift stores and Friends of the Library shelves. If you read widely you generally can find something interesting for a dollar or so. I almost never go to a bookstore looking for something specific, though.
Not in my experience. I have a few feet of books that I bought at Carpe Librum in Washington, DC. But the odds one one finding something there are lower than at Second Story Books or Lost City Books, the two nearest used book stores.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc.
> the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furniture at a used furniture store than I would from a general dumping ground of miscellaneous used items.
For that matter, since you're asking about all brick-and-mortar book shops, I'd also expect better new furniture from a brick-and-mortar furniture shop than from a thrift shop. And while books may not require seeing them in person as much to know what they are, the act of discovering them for fun based on what happens to be there is (possibly) easier to understand than discovering a particular piece of furniture.
Okay, well, the article in the OP describes a situation in Great Britain, and I'm unsure how accurately it describes the bookshop industry in the United States.
Here's what I've seen: Amazon.com came online as a bookseller, chiefly, and began to eat the lunch of every brick-and-mortar. Then in turn, independent sellers began shopping in those stores in order to snap up inventory and sell it in their cottage-industry online shops. My cousin noted, back around 2010, that many antique, thrifts, and secondhand stores were clogged not with consumers, but shoppers and arbitrators and pickers, just scavenging for anything they could sell.
Between 2016-2019 I was in ministry with a small "lending library" at church. We had two bookshelves full of books that parishioners might enjoy reading. We had just lost our entire inventory when I started, and so it was up to me to sift through donations, especially estates of the deceased, to build up the collection again. I destroyed a lot of bad titles in those days. I noticed that there wasn't a lot of demand to borrow, nor theft, except for the non-book media such as DVDs. There was someone interested in messing up all my organizational work, though. I began to realize there was no good way to recycle or donate the unwanted titles, and eventually I was sort of forced out when a deluge of Spanish-language books came in, and I couldn't keep up with the evaluations and the shelves were full anyway.
I've also hung out in libraries for a long time. Now if you have visited libraries over the last 5 decades, you've noticed dwindling shelf-space for physical books, as computer labs and other tech takes over. It's plain to see in action: nobody really wants to check out books on such a scale as in the 1980s. eBooks are hot properties, along with CDs, DVDs and video games, oh man the shelf space given over to electronic media now! Ask any librarian and they will tell you about the proportionate need for space in this regard.
Furthermore, there's this quiet revolution in "libraries" known as "Little Free Library". My municipality and many others sponsor and encourage them. They're essentially little residential kiosks where any passerby can take a book or leave a book. Essentially many become dumping grounds for unwanted titles and real junk, I suppose, but perhaps have some utility for bookworm types who stroll through neighborhoods, walking dogs, jogging, and hob-nobbing with suburban neighbors. Many cafés also have such library shelves for customer sharing. Books are often useful for very small children to have and pass down.
Going to college in 2017-2023, I noticed a lot of classes where students carried no books, no notebook, and not even a backpack! They'd bring in their phone to class! The eBook could easily be accessed online from an app, so why carry those hella-heavy books around? Many students in I.T., coding, and other tech subjects would have negative use for dead-trees and we regarded them as pure anathema, because it was all about the online access to edu materials. Books and the bookstore did exist, and there were mandatory titles in many disciplines, but always had eBook counterparts. (And yes, I saw The Half-Blood Prince and I understand the value of a well-loved secondhand text!)
Lastly I managed to divest my home of every single book I own, save for a few personal titles and a Bible or two. I found that I never sit down and read a book except in power-outages or trying to drift-off to sleep. Books are too heavy to carry on the bus, and impractical to store on a shelf when I'm not home. Every resource is vastly more useful when loaded into cloud storage for me. I've been unsuccessful in eliminating paper, and I still use a printer, and I still receive paper email in the USPS, but as for books, they're history.
So all this above stuff makes me shake my head at this OP. When I hung out in the libraries I read some classic fiction and got some good learning, but the library situation itself is pointing to a book-free future IMHO. I've known some great bookshops in my day, and cats to go with them, and they were anchors in the community for people to just chill and sit around, but I still regard them as Apatosaurs in this digital age.
Ok? I'm in the United States too, and my girlfriend actively uses several of those "Little Free Library" stands around where we live (in addition to our actual local library). I personally haven't gone out of my way to "divest my home of every single book I own" as you "managed" to do.
It just seems like you're writing off an entire industry because you personally don't like paper books anymore (and have made that part of your identity). There's nothing wrong with you living like that, but it's not quite enough evidence to make statements like "no reason to waste real estate." The market will decide that (and in the case of Britain, it sounds like it's deciding more space is warranted rather than less, with different types of business models being the main question).
(By the way, your quirky use of the phrase "paper email" doesn't make much sense, either. I know you're trying to give off the air that you think paper mail is obsolete, but you might as well just call it "paper mail" and shorten your preferred medium of email to just "mail" if you want to do that. Otherwise, you're making the names of things unnecessarily long in perpetuity-- not so practical.)
The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing. It's rather amazing how they tooled up for this, and adapted to all the crazy ways that humans can send paper through the mail. But just about everybody that works for the Post Office is a space-alien:
It's not simply me disliking books. It's the entire world and the industries that are drying up. Look around you! Newspapers going out of business, or transitioning to online models. They simply can't distribute paper newspapers so widely anymore. Nobody likes to carry them around, the newsprint is wasteful, the logistics are byzantine, and so many people can just instantly visit websites (and print stuff if they want) why keep printing, printing, printing?
Amazon, as I mentioned, began as a bookseller, and now they're actually printing stuff on demand as a publisher. In fact, many publishers are printing titles on demand, rather than stockpiling them in a huge warehouse (wasting real estate and overhead costs.) Many, many customers have openly complained, bewailing the poor standards and shoddy print quality they receive from these POD services, because books used to be artistic masterpieces, an occasion for celebrating the pinnacle of design and artisan craftsmanship; feeling a book in my hand and smelling it, and looking upon the cover art: truly an emotional, spiritual experience. But it's in decline, and you can't deny that.
Yes, it's a very slow decline. Yes, there's still space for dead-tree books and big storefronts to cram them on shelves, because even those brick-and-mortar locations can sell online to eBay or Amazon customers halfway around the world. But it's in decline.
All of this same stuff happened to vinyl records. I grew up with Mom's 78RPM turntable and listened to Bing Crosby on it. We had fun playing 33.333 RPM and even 16RPM on the Heathkit stereo system that Dad assembled himself. I spent TONS of Grandma's money on vinyl records, imports, 12" singles, cassettes, audio CDs, boxed sets, coloured vinyl, picture discs, flexi discs stapled into magazines: you name it, I purchased it, I wore out the needle on it, it all got stolen and sold to the secondhand record dealers.
Now you can still find vinyl records in big cardboard sleeves with marvelous art and you can still purchase a direct-drive turntable with a diamond needle and you can play all those vinyls on your analog tube amplifier with Monster Cable oxygen-free leads and Cerwin-Vega 3-way speakers with a subwoofer and Dolby sound. But nobody who's really a music lover cares about vinyl; you're just a vinyl lover and a nostalgia freak and a misfit who pines for the bygone days. Nobody even buys or makes many CDs/DVDs anymore since we got legal digital distribution.
That's the same way that books will go. It'll be a long time, indeed, but eventually the market will squeeze out paper books and you simply won't find the titles you need on paper. Those college bookshops will reclaim their very valuable shelf-space for graphing calculators, ear-buds, and chocolate bars. The printing presses will be unrepairable; some will go to museums and most will go to the metal scrap-heap forever. Xerox and Canon will continue servicing office copiers but paper itself may become scarce. Who knows.
> The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing.
Yeah, that's electronic real mail, not paper email. It's irrelevant to the term you attempted to use. "Paper email" would be printing out an email and sending it on paper instead, which is not what you were referring to (which is why it didn't make sense as a term to use).
You said "I still receive paper email in the USPS." The USPS is not printing out emails and delivering them to you on paper. Therefore, that statement was incorrect (nonsensical).
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.
Powell's here in Portland seems to be doing pretty well with 68,000 square feet (6,300 square metres) sales floor space and millions of customers a year.
It’s a bit of a unicorn. It is of course a great book store - but it’s also a tourist destination. People travel to Portland just to see Powells. And it’s worth it!
This is true but I still can’t figure out why more stores don’t copy Powell’s used and new on the same shelves model. In retrospect it seems so obvious that this is a good idea. And Powell’s has been doing it for decades.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.
It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.
It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.
> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors
I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:
- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.
This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)
I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,
> someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
I wonder how this is offset by someone finding an item not worth enough to keep. But maybe I underestimate the generosity (or need for income) of the typical person visiting secondhand stores to offload their stuff.
Some (many?) book stores do a lot of their intake via estate sales, not just buying from walk-ins. That gets them access to lots of interesting and well-cared-for, if sometimes niche, collections at low prices.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
This is an odd take, to me.
When I was still in school, I’d seek out texts with as many handwritten notes in them as I could find! That was an added value for sure and one only available second-hand.
Now that eBooks are a thing I use them almost exclusively for schlock-type books: mass market paperbacks for well known SciFi franchises, for example, are all eBooks now. I wouldn’t buy these any other way now, but when I did buy paperbacks they went right to secondhand. The value for those was that they were cheaper.
But for any other type of book, if I am buying it, its a classic book. Maybe it won some awards, maybe it is even out of print!
None of this feels like a waste to me in any way, and I will admit I do not read a lot by the standards of folks here.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.
I don't want to just downvote and move on without an explanation. You're basically offering some of the arguments this article brings up and then dismisses, with evidence, so it seems like you didn't read the article and are offering your personal opinion as an argument.
shout out to haye on wye in wales where almost all the shops are second hand bookstores. that being said i bought no books there while i have bought a dozen or so from charity shops, the main reason being the price is so low they are basically being given away.
The article primarily draws on the fact that the number of bookshops hasn't driven other second-hand bookshops out of business because the number of bookshops has grown over the measured number of years.
The reasoning it follows and suggested is quite dubious.
A bookshop is a business. Any business naturally has a loss function in the form of constraints, after which point it necessarily must go out of business and close. That loss function also determines how many people can be served by that bookstore insofar as the revenue earned goes to capital reserves and operations.
The second-hand bookstores have remained almost constant over decades, while population growth and the number of people being served has grown dramatically.
The charity bookshops involved have special tax status, they receive free stock, they get to choose which stock they receive goes to the paper mill or gets resold, and they can continue as long as their charity can continue.
While they must keep accounting records, those records need not be public, and may involve donations that may further subsidize destructive behaviors without the public's knowledge. They need not make a profit, whereas all other non-charity bookstores must make sufficient profit.
No business that has natural constraints can compete with an unconstrained entity in the same market. The money printer without constraint will always win, suborn, and drive out other businesses that do not have the same constraints.
It is just a matter of time and economic circumstance, and by the time anyone notices its too late.
There is also the possibility that many of the secondhand shops may also be propped up through loans, despite the ever tightening dynamic of ponzi that must be paid back (as it works for all debt in general).
There is great harm that state propped apparatus can do to business and the market in general, as well as to society. Rather than being open about it, these things have been happening in the shadows and that's something that needs to be revisited. If there is not a comparable loss constraint, the accounting records should be public to safeguard cultural history, and hold to account malefactors.
When the state wants objectionable material out of the general population's hands it just silently removes it from a pipeline they created, having learned from history, more specifically Hitler that burning books in public isn't a good thing.
Goodwill follows this practice of removing objectionable material from its pipeline in the US, and library budgets in many places are dictated by how often the book is circulated. Low circulated classics that are objectionable according to some undisclosed person, may just disappear once the library donates the low circulation books to the charity, that then removes that content without fanfare before it ever hits a shelf.
Ever wonder why many books from the 80s or earlier are often quite uncommon? Yes they are old, but the circulation was massive for a lot of these, and what's available now doesn't account for the natural difference of time, especially considering many of the books received from libraries were rebound to library bindings.
My experience has been that the second-hand bookshops have had thin times but nonetheless survive because of the internet. They tend to have a better selection compared to charity shops, i.e. not just cast-offs of holiday novels and celeb bios. Shout out to https://www.tillsbookshop.co.uk/ and https://www.armchairbooks.co.uk/
There has also been a growth in first-hand bookshops, especially specialists/curators (e.g. only selling sci-fi, only selling books by women, etc.) to distinguish themselves from the Waterstones and Blackwells of this world.
I distinctly recall getting a towel signed by Douglas Adams during one of his signings, I may have met Ellison there once.
Been a long time.
I will give you literally all my money for that towel!!
You lucky, lucky man, you hoopy frood.
Please tell me you aren’t gonna say you don’t know where you towel is?
I've noticed a few book stores which intermingle new and used stock and they're great. (it's obvious when something isn't new stock but it's all pretty good condition regardless)
> But bricks-and-mortar booksellers can sell via the internet too, and booksellers can migrate to lower rent areas. Indeed, there is some evidence of this: there are fewer city centre bookshops and more in smaller, less expensive towns.
There was a hip university neighborhood used bookstore here, and even 20+ years ago they were also selling online.
Their online inventory included a large amount of stock in a warehouse nearby that wasn't accessible to brick&mortar shoppers.
Software automated the online listings and price adjusting.
> [...] contemporary book trade and book-collecting directories [...] there were 523 second-hand bookshops in the UK in 1955 [...] and 1,140 in 2014. There are 1,282 now, in April 2025.
Anyone know whether these all have a walk-in retail presence, appointment-only (like for rare books), or are a lot of those online-only sellers?
Anecdotal but I haven't seen a 2nd-hand bookshop in years however those little "tiny libraries" where people just donate their books are in abundance. What I've seen other used-item shops are doing these days is checking online what things are worth and selling them for very slightly less and it seems like this has to be a death-knell for secondhand stores in general.
And I know they have to do this, everything donated has to be checked to ensure safety and cleanliness, it costs them money to keep the shop open and staffed. But if you can't actually save money by buying secondhand goods there then why would anyone shop there?! It's a 10 - 20 percent discount on goods that may be years old when Amazon rotates these discounts through new goods 24/7.
We have two second hand bookstores in my area. One of them has changed hands a couple of times over the years, so I don't think they make a ton of money, although they are in a large, albeit older, retail space so they must do ok. The other keeps expanding in adjacent spaces, but seems to make a lot of their money selling book adjacent stuff (socks, bookmarks, pins, candles) instead of actual books. In fact the owner regularly stocks several of those free libraries around town and always has free books outside of her store.
One benefit could be curation and discovery. Sometimes a bookstore's displays will show me a book that I might have not otherwise thought to read, selected by their readers, and I'm happy to pay a modest premium for that service.
In my area, charity shops have terrible selections tons of fad diet books from the 80s and 90s and religious related texts.
You forget all the horrible fad investment books; Rich Dad’s Guide to Whole Life and Timeshares
For years I joked that it was a law that every Goodwill store had to have a copy of a Twilight or Hunger Games book on the shelves at all times. Every time I go to one I check and nearly every time they still do all these years later.
Or one of the Left Behind books.
Hey, the Hunger Games are actually really good. I derided it for years until one time I was in the hospital for a few weeks, I got immensely bored and decided to try it out. I was hooked.
The main issue is that pretty much everyone who wants to read it has already.
It's young adult focused which means there a new crop of readers every year.
Also, even if it had run out of readers, how is it the story's fault? That's what happens to most long-running series. Not every story has to be among the legends to be considered good.
I'm not judging. I read them and enjoyed them. I'm just observing that they sold so many that they are very common.
Ah, then clearly I misinterpreted your comment. Apologies, I thought you were saying that it can be considered low-quality in the same vein as the Twilight series books.
My experience is that if one collects books they want as many stores as possible as close together as possible.
NYC in the 1990’s used to have a few neighborhoods full of bookstores. My favorite was just around 16th street in between 6th and Broadway.
There's a neighborhood in Tokyo called Jinbōchō, which built an entire town out of different specialist second-hand book shops. If you ever need a specific book on a specific thing, you bet you can find it there. It's pretty sweet.
And to ride on Jimbocho/international reference, they have the same in Manila, Philippines in Recto, which is a university area, tons of english university text books, around 100-200 pesos, "international editions."
Jimbocho has limited English text.
Now Hong Kong, Quarry Bay Street has a few but they're all on south island I see and accessible via the metro.
I'm fortunate enough to have that experience. I also thought there were many specialized districts. The few towns I visited all had a very sophisticated electronics district that included ancient machines, simple home A/V switching boxes and cutting edge parts.
There's a subtext to this post that may not be obvious to non British people: UK High Streets (Main Streets) have in the last 20 years experienced an incredible explosion of charity shops (thrift stores) including many locations specific to books.
Quite why this has occurred is a subject of occasional argument, but I've never heard a definitive theory on it, and it partly overlaps with the general decline motivated by ecommerce. They do compete on some level with existing businesses, as debated here, but the more curious impact is they completely alter the character of an area.
Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties.
For commercial landlords, a charity shop paying little or no rent is usually better than no tenant at all - the property is less likely to be smashed up by vandals, burned down by arsonists or occupied by squatters if it's occupied. The landlord would be liable for business rates after three months of vacancy, but not if there's a tenant.
Charity shops get an 80% relief on business rates, pay nothing for their stock and get some or all of their staff for free; obviously this allows them to operate profitably in circumstances where no normal business could.
As I understand it, the landlords are holding on mostly in the hope that their properties will either be compulsorily purchased as part of a regeneration scheme, or granted planning permission for redevelopment as housing.
Where I am in the US, it seems like there are two endgames for the "anchor" of a strip mall.
Typically this starts as a grocery store, but sometimes it will be some other larger retailer that collapsed (see Bed, Bath and Beyond or now Jo-Ann Fabrics)
They either become a Goodwill or they become a gym.
It's interesting that they are almost never subdivided-- they'd rather have a single 2000 square metre shop, presumably paying a concession "better than leaving it empty" rent, than to modify the layout of the building to open it up as two or four smaller shops.
>It's a symptom of the decline of high street retail and high long-term vacancy rates for many retail properties.
Do you guys not have pawn shops, smoke shops, and check cashing shops over there?
Nah, the other big tenant of dying shopping streets is the phone repair/resale shop, which never seem to have remotely enough customers to justify their quantity.
Not so much Check-cashing (although they do exist in some parts of larger cities) and I haven't seen a pawn-shop outside of London in ... forever.
We do have Vapeshops (before that 'Legal High' shops) but apart from those Charity Shops you get a lot of 'Gambling' (aka 'High Street Bookies') chains in those areas where the footfall has gone away to the out of town supermarkets or where the landlords are sitting on what they hope will get turned into flats so they can make a profit.
What I would say regarding Oxfam, at least in the area I live is that the book selection is suprisingly good, both in Oxford and Chipping Norton's where the second hand book selection has given me some great reads and I have seen them refuse the 'Celeb/Sports star' biogs and bundles of Harry Potter cast offs from people while waiting to be served.
Wait, why do you need a shop to cash a cheque? Isnt that one of the last few things you go to a bank for?
Also, how do you cash a cheque without validating signature (from whichever bank)?
Here in India atleast, cheques are cashed only at banks, and often are a/c payee only (no cash disbursed, only account transfer). They get truncated at the bank (basically scanned), and cleared overnight as a part of the CTS (a NPCI product).
However DDs (Demand Drafts) are your equivalent of cashiers cheques, and can be redeemed at par instantly, anywhere (or paid into an account).
You go to the bank to deposit a cheque into your account. But you need to have an account. Cheque cashing services will essentially buy the cheque from you for a bit less than the value written on it. It's mainly for people without bank accounts.
>Wait, why do you need a shop to cash a cheque? Isnt that one of the last few things you go to a bank for?
In the US, a lot of poor people (and illegal immigrants) are unbanked. But also check cashing places also tend to do title loans (turn over your car title for a temporary loan) and other sorts of "fast cash" loans with usurious rates. They and pawn shops are they type of businesses that show up in areas of town where the cost of retail spaces drop.
In my touristy experience, it's more gambling shops, payday loan shops (surpised UK had these) and real estate agents.
Yeah the bookmakers (gambling shops) are a huge industry in the UK.
A surprising amount of the UK tech industry has history connected to the gambling sector one way or another, be it sports tv, online related, making parts for pub slot machines etc.
I think a lot of people get the causal relationship the wrong way around when it comes to charity shops and the decline of the high street. It's not (IMO) that charity shops move into otherwise thriving areas and lead to a decline in local business by competing, but rather that they move into spaces that would otherwise lie empty, and therefore are more likely to be found on high streets that were already dying. Where I live we have a few charity shops but it's mainly chicken shops, vape shops and the occasional barber that are cannibalising the local high street.
Very much the case in New Zealand as well.
> Ten years ago they used to be fantastic for obscure finds because it seemed people had not caught on, but these days they tend to be subpar, which is probably a major edge the non charitable enterprises have exploited.
Not sure about UK, but in the USA, people have discovered that there's profit in mining thrift stores for quality products and reselling them. Usually online, but also in antique malls*. There are a quite a few apps that make it easy to look up something by picture and see what it's worth.
* not sure what Brits would call this - it's like brick and mortar ebay. Merchants rent out cubicles that they fill with random stuff, and customers check out at a common till when they are done.
In the UK, charity shops got savvy to this and now do their own 'mining'. Valuable items go to HQ to list on eBay for a lucrative price, the remaining dross goes onto the shop shelves.
There are some exceptions to this such as specialist charity bookshops which keep the stock locally, but do make sure to price match with the going rate online.
Few diamonds to be found in the rough nowadays.
US, too, though the US has tons of smaller “independent” (read tied to a single local food bank, etc) thrift stores that can still have finds.
But the era of LEGO at Goodwill is over; all that stuff goes to the auction sites.
I bought Lego on Tuesday at the Goodwill on Philadelphia Pike in Wilmington. So you just need to look on a regular cycle.
Genuine non-Duplo, non-Megablocks real honest LEGO? Wow.
I've not seen it except by accident (wedged in something) in over a decade, the Goodwills I know all send it to the central area to be auctioned: https://shopgoodwill.com/
It’s not that complicated. Business rates (commercial property tax) are very high for shops in the UK, and Charity shops are exempt. The rates really are high — about 50% on top of the rent. Plus a lot of the staff work for free. Their cost base is just vastly lower.
> but the more curious impact is they completely alter the character of an area.
Could anyone elaborate on this?
In small towns or villages once you have a couple of them the general pace of everything around them tanks, partly because they can get away with far less revenue per sq metre due to the difference in taxation and reliance on volunteers. As others have mentioned the alternative might well be nothing there at all, which would be worse, but it has converted the central section of whole villages into feeling like they are in fact the outer buildings of nearby old people's homes.
Aesthetically they are, at best, a sort of British twist on the cheapest Ikea stylings which can be OK in small quantities but when they become everything it is depressing.
What's the fundamental difference? They're stores with old books; someone makes a few cents. I honestly don't understand the question.
It can of course vary considerably by store, and I’ll happily spend time in both but, generally:
Second hand bookshops are curated actively - like, they’ll only stock desirable books. They’re owned and run, usually, by people who love books. The staff tend to be knowledgeable.
Charity book shops are much less curated - to the extent that some just stock whatever is donated (which, of course, is largely made up of books people don’t want), so they tend to have a large collection of random books of not as high quality. They’re run by volunteers - which generally means enthusiastic staff, but it does not mean knowledge about books.
I wonder if #1 comes over and culls through #2
1000% yes, at least with the help of book scouts that cull #2 and sell what they find to #1 for ~40% of retail.
If you want a fun fictional take on this, John Dunning's Booked to Die is a biblio-mystery about a Denver detective / book-lover investigating the murder of a book scout within the 1980's Denver used bookstore scene.
If you’re in the uk, I think you’d understand the question.
Charity shops have sprung up all over on high streets, even while businesses around them fall. It’s not hard to imagine that the economics are different and that non-charity shops can’t compete due to lack of special tax treatment.
What's the fundamental difference between fast food and fine dining? They're restaurants with food; someone makes a few bucks.
Interesting analysis. I'm somewhat confused by why anyone would think charity bookshops replacing secondhand bookshops would be a bad thing (if that were to actually be happening as the article suggests there isn't much evidence of this). Surely, to the shopper, they are exactly the same except one helps a charitable cause as a bonus.
Charity bookshop workers in my experience know nothing about books and have no taste.
But charity bookshops have different motivations and appeal to different shoppers.
Essentially it’s only bad if you like reading good, hard to find books.
Or believe that others finding them when they might not particularly be looking for them is a common good.
I have found that second hand shops tend to have a more diverse and rich selection and charity shops can have very rare gems.
Support both, and I wouldn't want to give up one for the other.
Also a bit of an aside, but charity shops are also more often part of national or international orgs so a lot of the "gain" isn't localized as the article discusses. Good or bad on a case by case basis. Not sure how it edges out.
“Charity” shops in my area are for profit businesses. Sure someone is getting a small donation, but their board members pull large salaries. Never mind their free inventory and usually underpaid labor.
The directors getting paid doesn't make a charity for-profit - that's dependent on what they do with the remaining money after paying salaries. For-profit businesses distribute surplus (i.e. profit) to shareholders.
It's a common complaint that donations should not be used to pay salaries, but the important question should be how much leverage those paid staff can extract out your donation. Skilled people usually don't want to work for free, but they can magnify a donation by reaching more potential donors via advertising, more appealing shops, etc.
Legally you are of course right, but there are certainly charity shops out there which are exploitative and even designed to enrich their owners. One well-known example is Humana People to People which is run by something probably best characterised as a person-worshipping political cult (Tvind).
They shelve by author; we shelve by likelihood the book causes déjà vu.
Possibly, but gosh would it be hard for me to care.
In unrelated news, access to a pure, unfiltered spring drives out local bottled-water sellers.
We are in an era where even manufacturing physical copies of books is incredibly cheap. I'm not going to stress about charity bookshops disrupting scarcity in that ecosystem any more than I'm going to worry about libraries or the Internet doing so.
Interesting. I'm in Australia where I would also say that the number of second hand bookshops has greatly decreased in the last 20 years. New bookshops too for that matter. But I'm curious whether I'd also be wrong.
We don't, afaik, have charity run bookshops, though. Lots of op shops, and they all sell books, but not exclusively.
Sounds like the problem with book shops in Australia is just Amazon.
Books in Australia are really expensive. This is because Australian publishers have managed to extract their own big cut from Australian consumers. Part of this is because they publish memoirs from any politician and partly because the printing industry is concentrated in some swinging electorates.
https://www.abc.net.au/triplej/programs/hack/cheaper-books-b...
What Australians often do instead is get ebooks through other means. Libraries are also more attractive for cost reasons.
I get almost all of my books from charity thrift stores and Friends of the Library shelves. If you read widely you generally can find something interesting for a dollar or so. I almost never go to a bookstore looking for something specific, though.
Not in my experience. I have a few feet of books that I bought at Carpe Librum in Washington, DC. But the odds one one finding something there are lower than at Second Story Books or Lost City Books, the two nearest used book stores.
Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Lately if I really must put hands on dead trees, the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller. Goodness gracious.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
Fiction books don't really become "outdated" to the point of being useless. That's only an argument for encyclopedias/technical manuals/etc.
> the shelves of library sales, churches, and ordinary thrift stores are overflowing.
I'm sure the same could be said about furniture, but I'd expect more luck finding interesting/quality second-hand furniture at a used furniture store than I would from a general dumping ground of miscellaneous used items.
For that matter, since you're asking about all brick-and-mortar book shops, I'd also expect better new furniture from a brick-and-mortar furniture shop than from a thrift shop. And while books may not require seeing them in person as much to know what they are, the act of discovering them for fun based on what happens to be there is (possibly) easier to understand than discovering a particular piece of furniture.
Okay, well, the article in the OP describes a situation in Great Britain, and I'm unsure how accurately it describes the bookshop industry in the United States.
Here's what I've seen: Amazon.com came online as a bookseller, chiefly, and began to eat the lunch of every brick-and-mortar. Then in turn, independent sellers began shopping in those stores in order to snap up inventory and sell it in their cottage-industry online shops. My cousin noted, back around 2010, that many antique, thrifts, and secondhand stores were clogged not with consumers, but shoppers and arbitrators and pickers, just scavenging for anything they could sell.
Between 2016-2019 I was in ministry with a small "lending library" at church. We had two bookshelves full of books that parishioners might enjoy reading. We had just lost our entire inventory when I started, and so it was up to me to sift through donations, especially estates of the deceased, to build up the collection again. I destroyed a lot of bad titles in those days. I noticed that there wasn't a lot of demand to borrow, nor theft, except for the non-book media such as DVDs. There was someone interested in messing up all my organizational work, though. I began to realize there was no good way to recycle or donate the unwanted titles, and eventually I was sort of forced out when a deluge of Spanish-language books came in, and I couldn't keep up with the evaluations and the shelves were full anyway.
I've also hung out in libraries for a long time. Now if you have visited libraries over the last 5 decades, you've noticed dwindling shelf-space for physical books, as computer labs and other tech takes over. It's plain to see in action: nobody really wants to check out books on such a scale as in the 1980s. eBooks are hot properties, along with CDs, DVDs and video games, oh man the shelf space given over to electronic media now! Ask any librarian and they will tell you about the proportionate need for space in this regard.
Furthermore, there's this quiet revolution in "libraries" known as "Little Free Library". My municipality and many others sponsor and encourage them. They're essentially little residential kiosks where any passerby can take a book or leave a book. Essentially many become dumping grounds for unwanted titles and real junk, I suppose, but perhaps have some utility for bookworm types who stroll through neighborhoods, walking dogs, jogging, and hob-nobbing with suburban neighbors. Many cafés also have such library shelves for customer sharing. Books are often useful for very small children to have and pass down.
Going to college in 2017-2023, I noticed a lot of classes where students carried no books, no notebook, and not even a backpack! They'd bring in their phone to class! The eBook could easily be accessed online from an app, so why carry those hella-heavy books around? Many students in I.T., coding, and other tech subjects would have negative use for dead-trees and we regarded them as pure anathema, because it was all about the online access to edu materials. Books and the bookstore did exist, and there were mandatory titles in many disciplines, but always had eBook counterparts. (And yes, I saw The Half-Blood Prince and I understand the value of a well-loved secondhand text!)
Lastly I managed to divest my home of every single book I own, save for a few personal titles and a Bible or two. I found that I never sit down and read a book except in power-outages or trying to drift-off to sleep. Books are too heavy to carry on the bus, and impractical to store on a shelf when I'm not home. Every resource is vastly more useful when loaded into cloud storage for me. I've been unsuccessful in eliminating paper, and I still use a printer, and I still receive paper email in the USPS, but as for books, they're history.
So all this above stuff makes me shake my head at this OP. When I hung out in the libraries I read some classic fiction and got some good learning, but the library situation itself is pointing to a book-free future IMHO. I've known some great bookshops in my day, and cats to go with them, and they were anchors in the community for people to just chill and sit around, but I still regard them as Apatosaurs in this digital age.
Ok? I'm in the United States too, and my girlfriend actively uses several of those "Little Free Library" stands around where we live (in addition to our actual local library). I personally haven't gone out of my way to "divest my home of every single book I own" as you "managed" to do.
It just seems like you're writing off an entire industry because you personally don't like paper books anymore (and have made that part of your identity). There's nothing wrong with you living like that, but it's not quite enough evidence to make statements like "no reason to waste real estate." The market will decide that (and in the case of Britain, it sounds like it's deciding more space is warranted rather than less, with different types of business models being the main question).
(By the way, your quirky use of the phrase "paper email" doesn't make much sense, either. I know you're trying to give off the air that you think paper mail is obsolete, but you might as well just call it "paper mail" and shorten your preferred medium of email to just "mail" if you want to do that. Otherwise, you're making the names of things unnecessarily long in perpetuity-- not so practical.)
> paper email
The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing. It's rather amazing how they tooled up for this, and adapted to all the crazy ways that humans can send paper through the mail. But just about everybody that works for the Post Office is a space-alien:
https://youtu.be/lr7pyggTmmY?si=g8PN_ajCo9I281-5
It's not simply me disliking books. It's the entire world and the industries that are drying up. Look around you! Newspapers going out of business, or transitioning to online models. They simply can't distribute paper newspapers so widely anymore. Nobody likes to carry them around, the newsprint is wasteful, the logistics are byzantine, and so many people can just instantly visit websites (and print stuff if they want) why keep printing, printing, printing?
Amazon, as I mentioned, began as a bookseller, and now they're actually printing stuff on demand as a publisher. In fact, many publishers are printing titles on demand, rather than stockpiling them in a huge warehouse (wasting real estate and overhead costs.) Many, many customers have openly complained, bewailing the poor standards and shoddy print quality they receive from these POD services, because books used to be artistic masterpieces, an occasion for celebrating the pinnacle of design and artisan craftsmanship; feeling a book in my hand and smelling it, and looking upon the cover art: truly an emotional, spiritual experience. But it's in decline, and you can't deny that.
Yes, it's a very slow decline. Yes, there's still space for dead-tree books and big storefronts to cram them on shelves, because even those brick-and-mortar locations can sell online to eBay or Amazon customers halfway around the world. But it's in decline.
All of this same stuff happened to vinyl records. I grew up with Mom's 78RPM turntable and listened to Bing Crosby on it. We had fun playing 33.333 RPM and even 16RPM on the Heathkit stereo system that Dad assembled himself. I spent TONS of Grandma's money on vinyl records, imports, 12" singles, cassettes, audio CDs, boxed sets, coloured vinyl, picture discs, flexi discs stapled into magazines: you name it, I purchased it, I wore out the needle on it, it all got stolen and sold to the secondhand record dealers.
Now you can still find vinyl records in big cardboard sleeves with marvelous art and you can still purchase a direct-drive turntable with a diamond needle and you can play all those vinyls on your analog tube amplifier with Monster Cable oxygen-free leads and Cerwin-Vega 3-way speakers with a subwoofer and Dolby sound. But nobody who's really a music lover cares about vinyl; you're just a vinyl lover and a nostalgia freak and a misfit who pines for the bygone days. Nobody even buys or makes many CDs/DVDs anymore since we got legal digital distribution.
That's the same way that books will go. It'll be a long time, indeed, but eventually the market will squeeze out paper books and you simply won't find the titles you need on paper. Those college bookshops will reclaim their very valuable shelf-space for graphing calculators, ear-buds, and chocolate bars. The printing presses will be unrepairable; some will go to museums and most will go to the metal scrap-heap forever. Xerox and Canon will continue servicing office copiers but paper itself may become scarce. Who knows.
> The USPS has this service called "Informed Delivery" where they scan the front-side of every mailpiece and send it to my email and a dashboard on their website. So every service day, they literally email me images of what my physical postal mailbox will receive later in the day. It's not farfetched. The USPS has been running electronic scanning for internal purposes for decades, and they have perfected OCR for address recognition and routing.
Yeah, that's electronic real mail, not paper email. It's irrelevant to the term you attempted to use. "Paper email" would be printing out an email and sending it on paper instead, which is not what you were referring to (which is why it didn't make sense as a term to use).
You said "I still receive paper email in the USPS." The USPS is not printing out emails and delivering them to you on paper. Therefore, that statement was incorrect (nonsensical).
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Not really. Plenty of people still read, and they still read hard copies of books. I don't think you will get argument that business isn't as good as it used to be, but that's a long way away from not being viable at all.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
You haven't spent much time around secondhand book stores, I'm guessing? Yes, there are absolutely diamonds out there. And even outside of that, there are lots of perfectly good used books. Books don't go bad over time, so unless they're damaged (which isn't most of them) they are still perfectly saleable.
Powell's here in Portland seems to be doing pretty well with 68,000 square feet (6,300 square metres) sales floor space and millions of customers a year.
https://powells.com
It’s a bit of a unicorn. It is of course a great book store - but it’s also a tourist destination. People travel to Portland just to see Powells. And it’s worth it!
This is true but I still can’t figure out why more stores don’t copy Powell’s used and new on the same shelves model. In retrospect it seems so obvious that this is a good idea. And Powell’s has been doing it for decades.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
This is true if you take any book whatsoever that someone wants to give or sell to you.
It is not true of any book store I've ever seen. They reject or recycle the crap.
It's sometimes true of shelves of books in flea markets. Rows of forgotten once-popular authors from the 1910s or whatever, that likely (for those particular copies, anyway) no human will ever read again, you do sometimes see.
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
Not at all. Many of them are doing very well and have rebounded from the hit they took when Amazon entered the scene. Not as many of them as there used to be but they're far from dead. In many cities they're thriving.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Yes they do, but your premise is incorrect. Many secondhand books are undesirable, sure. Most are. But that doesn't mean there aren't millions of books out there that are valuable either for a collector or to individual buyers.
> No reason to waste real estate on any sort of dedicated seller.
Ugh.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors
I buy up to 10 (mostly non-fiction) books on paper a month, always secondhand if available, via bookfinder. You typically get a very accurate description of their state beforehand; I don't mind most levels of use, I actually like it when they have history to them. Markings, notes of previous owners, etc, are all fine for me. Even if one prefers "clean" books there are usually plenty of copies available. I like how it is both much cheaper than new, and even more the reuse aspect.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Secondhand stores offer in general "better" products because of the double curation:
- someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
- the store found it good enough to buy it again from the first owner (2nd curation)
> Aren't brick-and-mortar bookshops, generally speaking, as viable as Apatosaurus today?
No, it's even better because of the limited space they have to display the goods they want to sell: while online stores can show their full inventory, brick-and-mortar need to select what's most likely to sell.
This adds yet another level of curation: the store found the good valuable enough to be exposed to buyers, instead of keeping it in the back (3rd curation)
I find great music by randomly buying second-hand CDs from brick-and-mortar secondhand stores, thanks to this triple-curation,
> someone found the good interesting enough to buy it in the first place (1st curation)
I wonder how this is offset by someone finding an item not worth enough to keep. But maybe I underestimate the generosity (or need for income) of the typical person visiting secondhand stores to offload their stuff.
Some (many?) book stores do a lot of their intake via estate sales, not just buying from walk-ins. That gets them access to lots of interesting and well-cared-for, if sometimes niche, collections at low prices.
> secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged
This is an odd take, to me.
When I was still in school, I’d seek out texts with as many handwritten notes in them as I could find! That was an added value for sure and one only available second-hand.
Now that eBooks are a thing I use them almost exclusively for schlock-type books: mass market paperbacks for well known SciFi franchises, for example, are all eBooks now. I wouldn’t buy these any other way now, but when I did buy paperbacks they went right to secondhand. The value for those was that they were cheaper.
But for any other type of book, if I am buying it, its a classic book. Maybe it won some awards, maybe it is even out of print!
None of this feels like a waste to me in any way, and I will admit I do not read a lot by the standards of folks here.
> Also — secondhand books are generally outdated, undesirable, and/or damaged — do collectors still find diamonds in the rough?
Growing up poor, second hand book stores were how I found some of the best math books that I wouldn't have been able to afford. And they were often quite good or better (at least in offering diverse perspectives and angles) than the books I could have bought at the time.
I often liked the notes people left.
I don't want to just downvote and move on without an explanation. You're basically offering some of the arguments this article brings up and then dismisses, with evidence, so it seems like you didn't read the article and are offering your personal opinion as an argument.
im not sure this is at all accurate. the book stores around here that carry a good selection are always packed.
shout out to haye on wye in wales where almost all the shops are second hand bookstores. that being said i bought no books there while i have bought a dozen or so from charity shops, the main reason being the price is so low they are basically being given away.
Just checked, I like to visit "Elizabeths" when I go to sydney, they have a nice cosy store and a great selection.
They apparently have a website, and 2 other stores. I had no idea.
Certainly doesn't appear to be a business in decline.
And considering that being a bookshop in Sydney they compete with some absolute giants I am quite impressed tbh.
The article primarily draws on the fact that the number of bookshops hasn't driven other second-hand bookshops out of business because the number of bookshops has grown over the measured number of years.
The reasoning it follows and suggested is quite dubious.
A bookshop is a business. Any business naturally has a loss function in the form of constraints, after which point it necessarily must go out of business and close. That loss function also determines how many people can be served by that bookstore insofar as the revenue earned goes to capital reserves and operations.
The second-hand bookstores have remained almost constant over decades, while population growth and the number of people being served has grown dramatically.
The charity bookshops involved have special tax status, they receive free stock, they get to choose which stock they receive goes to the paper mill or gets resold, and they can continue as long as their charity can continue.
While they must keep accounting records, those records need not be public, and may involve donations that may further subsidize destructive behaviors without the public's knowledge. They need not make a profit, whereas all other non-charity bookstores must make sufficient profit.
No business that has natural constraints can compete with an unconstrained entity in the same market. The money printer without constraint will always win, suborn, and drive out other businesses that do not have the same constraints.
It is just a matter of time and economic circumstance, and by the time anyone notices its too late.
There is also the possibility that many of the secondhand shops may also be propped up through loans, despite the ever tightening dynamic of ponzi that must be paid back (as it works for all debt in general).
There is great harm that state propped apparatus can do to business and the market in general, as well as to society. Rather than being open about it, these things have been happening in the shadows and that's something that needs to be revisited. If there is not a comparable loss constraint, the accounting records should be public to safeguard cultural history, and hold to account malefactors.
When the state wants objectionable material out of the general population's hands it just silently removes it from a pipeline they created, having learned from history, more specifically Hitler that burning books in public isn't a good thing.
Goodwill follows this practice of removing objectionable material from its pipeline in the US, and library budgets in many places are dictated by how often the book is circulated. Low circulated classics that are objectionable according to some undisclosed person, may just disappear once the library donates the low circulation books to the charity, that then removes that content without fanfare before it ever hits a shelf.
Ever wonder why many books from the 80s or earlier are often quite uncommon? Yes they are old, but the circulation was massive for a lot of these, and what's available now doesn't account for the natural difference of time, especially considering many of the books received from libraries were rebound to library bindings.
Food for thought.