
Used bookstores are making an unlikely comeback - petethomas
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/in-the-age-of-amazon-used-bookstores-are-making-an-unlikely-comeback/2015/12/26/06b20e48-abea-11e5-bff5-905b92f5f94b_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
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cafard
The guy who used to run Georgetown Books, Andy Moursund, posted on his web
site that he was tired of gambling his retirement money on losing bets. I wish
these folks luck, but I remember quite a few used bookstores that have closed
here over the last 30 years. Second Story Books does, by the way, sell on
Amazon. But it has closed a location in Bethesda, and is down to its Dupont
Circle store and the warehouse in Rockville.

[Edit: just remembered (I hope) Andy Moursund's last name.]

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keithpeter
Authors make money on new books. Second-hand is great and keeps a shop with
books on the shelves in a neihbourhood but it won't build a distro chain for
_new_ work. Perhaps some of these new outlets will order new for customers.

UK: many second hand bookshops sell through Amazon and through Exlibris/ABE

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cafard
I don't think that it is generally a zero-sum competition, in the sense that
every book purchased used means one not purchased new. Were I pinched for
money, I might buy at friends of the library sales, I guess. But most of the
books I buy used are either out of print or not easily ordered, and generally
I wasn't thinking of buying them until I noticed them on the shelf.

And a fair bit of what is on the shelves of the regular bookstore is not by
living authors, is it? Just about chest level of the rightmost shelf of
fiction at Kramerbooks you will see about a foot of the works of Evelyn Waugh,
who died about fifty years ago.

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keithpeter
I'd certainly accept that there isn't a zero-sum game between living and dead
authors or between new and second hand books. A quick scan of my own bookcases
would make it impossible to argue otherwise.

I'm hoping that the increase in the number of bookshops of any kind will
increase the number of people who _do_ buy new books by living authors as that
is the way we keep authoring as a _somewhat_ viable mode of making a living.

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xbmcuser
Ebook sales growth is not stagnating its only the big 5 publishers that are
seeing ebook sales decline as they have jacked up the prices. And self
publishing is taking over many of which don't use ISBN numbers so are not
counted.

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abdulhaq
As they say, be warned - secondhand bookshops are the best way to "spend" your
retirement.

